Welcome to Homebase AI - A weekly newsletter where we share our interviews with founders & leaders building next-gen AI companies and curate interesting news, insights & trends in the AI space for our community members.

What’s on tap today:

• Podcast

• Our interview with Speaker

• Weekly Headline Recap

• What's trending in AI this week

• Community Update

• How Homebase Helps You

🗓️ Coming Soon: Interviews You Can Shape

We’re speaking with these AI leaders soon:

• 🎙️Tyler Postle – CEO at Voker AI, building no-code AI tools that let product teams ship intelligent features without engineering resources.

• 🎙️Sam Bhagwat – Founder and CEO at Mastra AI, creating the TypeScript framework that makes building AI agents as simple as writing modern web apps.

• 🎙️Barak Ben – CTO and Co-founder at Anvil, helping brands win the new search game by monitoring and optimizing their visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI platforms.

🧠 Got a question you'd like us to ask? Product-specific or strategy-related – we want your input.

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🎙️ This Week’s Interview

AI Founder Story

How Anubhav Pradhan Is Reimagining Growth for Community Banks — With AI Co-Pilots, Not More Tools

Quick Background

Across the U.S., more than 4,000 community banks hold over $3.2 trillion in deposits—but many are stuck with outdated, fragmented software that makes growth feel impossible. Anubhav Pradhan saw this firsthand after five years building in the space. Now he’s co-founder of ShiftMate, an AI-native growth platform that helps smaller financial institutions grow without needing enterprise-level infrastructure.

🧠 Growth Isn’t Just Marketing—It’s a System-Wide Challenge

Most legacy banking tools treat growth like a siloed marketing problem. ShiftMate reframes the entire problem. To Anubhav and his co-founders, growth is a full-stack opportunity—rooted in everything from operational efficiency to customer empathy.

At the heart of their product is an AI copilot that works across roles: helping frontline employees surface unmet customer needs, guiding strategic decisions with real-time data, and enabling smarter outreach that feels less like selling and more like serving.

⚙️ Built with AI from the Ground Up—Not Bolted On Later

Instead of stitching together CRMs, CDPs, marketing tools, and dashboards, ShiftMate replaces them with one unified platform—purpose-built for how community banks operate.

By going AI-first at every layer—data ingestion, integration, insight generation, and user action—they’ve created something that’s only now technically possible, thanks to generative AI. Legacy tools react. ShiftMate anticipates. It learns, adapts, and acts in real-time.

Even better? Some of their first customers are also investors, backing ShiftMate as a CUSO (Credit Union Service Organization).

What they’ve figured out—with just four co-founders and an AI-native mindset:

• Built an AI-native growth stack tailored for banking—not retrofitted from SaaS

• Unified multiple systems into one co-pilot platform: data, offers, insights

• Shifted focus from “offers” to financial wellness conversations

• Uses Gemini Ultra, ChatGPT Pro, Gamma, and Notebooks to build with speed

• Navigated highly fragmented and regulated banking data

• Partnered closely with customers to co-create product + advisory insights

• Scaling small by hiring for curiosity and fast learning, not just AI resumes

Watch the full interview below! 👇

See how Anubhav and his co-founders are reimagining community banking in real time. (You’ll never look at CDPs the same way again.)

The Ultimate Lesson

You don’t need 100 engineers to disrupt legacy software—you need clarity, co-creation, and timing. ShiftMate shows what’s possible when AI isn’t an afterthought but the foundation. In an industry where trust, timing, and nuance define success, this shift could change how thousands of local banks grow—and survive—the decade ahead.

🔍 Want the full playbook?

Read the in-depth case study →

HEADLINE ROUNDUP
Headline recap

• Genesis AI Raises $105M (Link) Backed by $105M in fresh funding, Genesis AI is building smarter robots using synthetic data. The robotics arms race just got a new contender.

• Elon Musk’s xAI Bags $10B, Now Valued at $75B (Link) DxAI just exploded with a $10B raise — funding its mission to build massive data centers and next-gen AI. Musk isn’t playing small.

• Amazon Deploys 1 Million Robots + Launches New AI Model (Link) Amazon hits a mind-blowing milestone: 1 million robots now working alongside humans — plus a new foundation AI model entering the chat.

• OpenRouter Secures $40M to Power Enterprise AI Inference (Link) With $40M in the bank, OpenRouter is doubling down on making multi-model inference seamless for enterprise AI.

• Google Drops Gemini CLI — Free AI Tool for Devs (1K Runs/Day!) (Link) Terminal users rejoice! Google’s new Gemini CLI is open-source, free, and lets you run 1,000 AI tasks a day straight from your terminal.

TRENDS
What's trending in AI

Retell AI

• Key Player: Retell AI is making waves with its AI-powered voice agents designed to streamline customer service operations.

• Market Value: Backed by $4.55M in seed funding, the company is drawing strong investor confidence for its focus on AI-first voice automation.

• Adoption: Gaining fast traction among fast-growing e-commerce and SaaS companies handling high volumes of support calls.

• Recent Developments: The platform has introduced real-time call coaching and seamless CRM integrations to support live agents and reduce churn.

Growth: In just over a year since its launch, Retell AI has seen a staggering 99x+ growth in usage volume. Its rise from near-zero activity in early 2024 to over 27K volume in mid-2025 underscores the increasing demand for AI voice agents that can reliably replace or augment traditional support roles.

Why It Matters: Businesses are racing to cut support costs without sacrificing customer experience. Retell AI offers a middle ground—AI agents that sound human, handle complex queries, and reduce response times. This isn’t just automation—it’s augmentation with nuance.

The Big Picture: As AI voice agents become more context-aware, companies like Retell AI aren’t just building call bots—they’re redefining how brands communicate at scale. The surge in adoption signals a shift where AI voices are no longer novelties—they’re frontline representatives.

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