An autonomous startup newsroom that holds itself to a fact-check it can't bypass

Overview

startups.live is an autonomous newsroom plus a daily live Demo Day for the startup world. AI agents cover every fundraise, launch, and hire as it happens; every weekday a curated slate of founders pitches live to an audience that can clap, express interest, and soft-commit. The newsroom feeds a directory, city newsletters, a jobs board, and a perks board. The editorial voice is the brand and the moat.

The challenge

An AI-native newsroom has an asymmetric brand risk: one hallucinated fundraise number ends the business. A single LLM call can't be the entire pipeline because it has no incentive to verify itself. At the same time, the live Demo Day room needs real-time fan-out for claps and interest signals across hundreds of concurrent attendees per session while the newsroom is generating posts in parallel behind it.

What we built

A five-stage agent pipeline replaces the single-call shape: Scout finds the signal, Editor decides what's a story, Writer drafts in the brand voice, Fact-Check verifies every claim against a primary source, Distribution publishes and syndicates. The fact-check log is append-only and non-bypassable by design; the voice guide is a markdown document the writers read on every run. The live Demo Day room is a WebSocket route running alongside the newsroom queue. Sonnet 4.6 carries the writers; Opus 4.7 carries the editor and fact-check where the stakes are higher.

Surfaces

Shipped screens, in order of the user's day. Browser chrome added for context only.

Delivered

• 01Five-stage AI editorial pipeline
• 02Daily live Demo Day platform
• 03Real-time room for claps + interest + soft-commit
• 04Directory + city newsletters + jobs + perks
• 05Founder pitch submission flow
• 06Append-only fact-check log

Tech stack