Good morning, VC enthusiasts. The Super Bowl may have been the loudest AI growth hack of 2026. Claude jumped from No. 41 to No. 7 on the App Store in days.

But this week is not just about ad spend. It is about how AI is translating into measurable distribution gains, changing how product teams ship, and shaping capital allocation decisions, from Spotify’s AI orchestrated engineering model to India’s $1.1B deep tech fund of funds.

In today’s Inside/VC edition:

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The Inside: Anthropic’s Super Bowl campaign appears to have materially moved the needle. Claude climbed from No. 41 to No. 7 on the U.S. App Store within days of the ads airing, marking its highest rank to date and signaling that its positioning around a “no ads” AI experience resonated with users.

The details:

Why it matters: Consumer AI is becoming a brand war as much as a model war. Anthropic’s jump suggests that distribution and positioning, especially around privacy and monetization tradeoffs, can shift market share quickly in a space where switching costs remain low and user loyalty is still being formed.

The Inside: Longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is offering a new ultra-premium program called “Immortals,” charging $1M per year for direct access to his anti-aging protocol, personal team, and an AI-powered version of himself.

The details:

Why it matters: Longevity is increasingly becoming a luxury vertical, where bio-optimization blends with branding and exclusivity. For a small segment of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, the next frontier of status signaling is not faster cars or private space flights, but biological age reduction and lifespan extension.

Stanford grad student Henry Weng built Date Drop, a weekly matchmaking service that pairs students based on detailed questionnaires and real-world compatibility data, with 5,000+ students trying it since launch and a rollout now underway at 10 additional schools including MIT and Princeton in three weeks.

Weng has raised “a few million” from angels including Zynga founder Mark Pincus and Elad Gil, is structuring the venture as a public benefit corporation called The Relationship Company, and claims matches convert to actual dates at roughly 10x Tinder’s rate by focusing on one curated pairing per week instead of endless swiping.

Spotify revealed on its Q4 earnings call that its best developers “have not written a single line of code since December,” instead orchestrating AI systems like its internal tool “Honk,” powered by generative models including Claude Code.

The company says AI now enables engineers to deploy fixes and ship features directly from Slack, contributing to 50+ product updates in 2025, while leadership frames proprietary user-behavior data as a long-term moat in the age of commoditized LLMs.

Entire launched with a record $60M seed round at a $300M valuation led by Felicis, as former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke bets on a new AI-native developer platform for human-agent collaboration, starting with an open-source tool that captures full AI context on every Git commit and rethinks version control for the agent era.

India approved a $1.1B state-backed fund of funds to channel capital into deep-tech and advanced manufacturing startups, doubling down on high-risk sectors as private startup funding in the country fell 17% to $10.5B in 2025 and deal count dropped nearly 39%.

Ever raised a $31M Series A led by Eclipse to scale its AI-native, full-stack EV marketplace, betting that a unified orchestration layer can replace fragmented dealership workflows and boost sales productivity 2–3x as it expands both online and through physical locations.

See you soon,

Jannis & Felix — the humans behind Inside/VC