Telosis AI: Kitsune’s first heartbreak 💔😢

In partnership with

(5 minutes)

Hey 👋, this is the Kitsune VC Newsletter: A subset of Today in AI, where we vest a $10 million early-stage fund over the next 2 years 🦊. 

We make “investments” every week into early-stage startups we think will make it big in hopes to beat the returns of big funds like Sequoia and a16z 💸. 

The Problem: Productivity

In a world full of social media and video games 🎮, it is very easy to lose yourself to distractions.

The average person spends 2 hours and 24 minutes daily on social media 📊, and this becomes a constant problem when it eats into time working.

Only two clicks to get to a YouTube video, one to Instagram 📸, and you have lost a few hours of hard work.

We have all felt it and had those days. 😩You can turn off your phone, block all apps, or even put it in another room -- but how do you turn off your laptop??

You rely on your laptop for work, but it's full of distractions like YouTube. BUT just as much of a distraction YouTube is -- it can be your greatest tool. 🛠️

How do you differentiate between learning on YouTube and endlessly watching MrBeast videos? 🤔

Solution: Telosis AI 🤖 

Telosis solves this problem by using their computer vision models to notify you when you are veering off topic and losing focus. 👀

The prompting helps remind you that you set time aside for deep work and snaps you back into focused work. 💦

Not only this, it tracks how long you spent in deep work and how much was unproductive, giving a summary after you finish working 📊. 

Telosis enables users to increase productivity and track improvements over time - a new efficiency buddy 🤖. 

Keep this a secret but they are also working on: 🤫

- An eye-tracking feature to make sure that deep work stays deep 👁️

- Custom VPN (maybe a different method, not settled entirely) to kill wifi on your other devices (phone etc.) while you work.

Get your news where Silicon Valley gets its news 📰

The best investors need the information that matters, fast.

That’s why a lot of them (including investors from a16z, Bessemer, Founders Fund, and Sequoia) trust this free newsletter.

It’s a five minute-read every morning, and it gives readers the information they need ASAP so they can spend less time scrolling and more time doing.

Subscribe for free

The Founders 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 

One medic 🩺, one mathematician ➗, and one A-level student 📚 make for an unlikely young founding team, but Telosis are certain they have a winning team 🏆. 

Despite the youth of the team, they come with years of experience. Az-Zubair got into computers at age 6, assembling his first PC and pirating games. 

He and his brother (Albaraa Mahmoud) began coding at 13 & 12 . They always had a business mindset, launching a successful retail arbitrage business at 14.

They taught themselves to repair bikes and sold them at up to 8x profit! 💸

The third co-founder, Zubeyr, met Az-Zubair in the gym in 2024 and from an unlikely encounter, the founding team was complete. 💪

It turned out that Zubeyr was super technical, with a lot to show for it. In fact, he had built a neural network that interprets EEG signals 🧠 with electrodes planted at your prefrontal cortex to detect when you are distracted. 🤯 (I wonder if the next Telosis product is going to be a brain chip).

Currently, Az-Zubair Mahmoud studies as a medical student at UCL, Zubeyr Barre is in Mathematics at Imperial, and Albaraa Mahmoud is still doing his A-levels. 🏫

Being the nerds they are, they’ve tried all sorts of productivity hacks including productivity apps. 🤓

One problem persisted: the lack of a dynamic application when it comes to multi-use platforms like YouTube, where you can waste time and be productive. This needed to change 🔄. 

So they decided to solve this using AI, launching their MVP in Jan 2025. 📅

Investment Rationale 💸

Alongside the passion emitted by the founders, they also have achieved a public launch with incredible feedback at an early stage.

Just from 50 users they have supported over 80,000 hours of deep work in the last 3 weeks. Insane metrics highlighting that the users love their product. 🤩

I can see this team iterating insanely fast — bouncing off their customers and growing the product further. 🚀

I think they will be able to achieve an incredible but early-stage acquisition of around £15 million. 💷

Why? 🤔

There are so many productivity apps and tools that it could be used for. A no-brainer for a company like Motion that helps you allocate time for productivity. 🧑‍💻

Now they can watch you work and give feedback to you if you were able to meet your scheduled work plans.

The Global Productivity Software market is worth around $76.1 billion. 

Telosis works with your existing web interface to work with you to maximize productivity, but it won’t stop here. 🚀

Over time the team will add new features like a full block on apps that can only be distracting and a mobile version of their software 📱. 

Deal Structure 💰

Heartbreak hits Kitsune VC, as we are turned down by the founding team. 😢They have no interest in our money, rather choosing to bootstrap for the time being. 

We had made an offer for £100,000 at a £1 million post-money valuation, but to them, this didn’t meet their long-term ambitions and their incredible ability to bootstrap (until a better offer comes along). 💼 

They told us, “For our first three days of service, it only cost us $5 in credits — why do we need money?”. An incredible achievement from a young team to get their costs down.

With them still at university, the question arises — Will they be able to grow the company all the way? 🤔

This is NOT financial advice.

Wail’s View 🥊

Great first investment thesis by Preet, love what Telosis is doing and it's unfortunate we couldn’t make the investment. 😢

The founders having been technical and building projects from a very young age is definitely a bull signal. 📈

Entrepreneurship at childhood is usually associated with long-term success, so even if these guys don’t do well with Telosis, they will definitely go on to do big things! 🚀

Productivity is genuinely a big problem I see with a lot of my friends, and Telosis being a tool that forces you to focus would definitely help out. ☺️

One thing I’d recommend Telosis to do is gamify the system: Make it competitive so that friends can see who’s been the most productive that day/week based on the number of “deep work hours”. 🎮

It reminds me of this app I saw on Twitter recently: Night Club 9, an app to see how hard you’re working versus how hard your friends are. It launched 2 days ago and has already hit #8 on the App Store’s Top Charts. 🧑‍💻

Would definitely use Telosis myself, the only downside I see is that bootstrapping might not be the best choice to grow.

Especially for consumer apps, blitzscaling is definitely the better choice for growth. Kitsune VC is looking for outlier founders AND distribution. 💎 Slow distribution could lead to the slow and imminent death of Telosis. 💀

Before You Go 👋 

Get your news where Silicon Valley gets its news 📰

The best investors need the information that matters, fast.

That’s why a lot of them (including investors from a16z, Bessemer, Founders Fund, and Sequoia) trust this free newsletter.

It’s a five minute-read every morning, and it gives readers the information they need ASAP so they can spend less time scrolling and more time doing.

Subscribe for free

Thank you for reading.

Know someone who'd love this newsletter? Share the love.🌟