🚀 HR tech is heating up, platforms are fighting spam with limits, and Apple just bought its way into racing. See what moved the needle this week.
Industry moves
Deel raises $300M at $17.3B valuation as HR tech funding surges
HR and payroll platform Deel closed a $300M round at a $17.3B valuation, led by Ribbit Capital with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, General Catalyst, and Green Bay Ventures. The New York-based company's raise comes amid broader momentum in HR tech — startups globally have pulled in $1.9B through mid-September 2025, nearly matching all of 2024's $2B total. U.S. HR software startups alone raised $1.2B, up from $1.1B last year.
Why it matters: HR tech is no longer boring back-office software. As remote and global workforces become standard, platforms like Deel are critical infrastructure.
Kyrylo Lazariev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "HR platforms are notorious for terrible UX because they prioritize compliance over usability. The winners in this space will be the ones who realize that a good employee experience starts with intuitive design. Deel has the capital — now they need to invest in making their product genuinely easy to use."
Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, AI digital twin for unavailable colleagues
Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, the duo behind AI recruiting unicorn Eightfold ($2.1B valuation), launched Viven — a startup building AI digital twins that let employees access crucial information from teammates even when those colleagues are unavailable. The concept: stop waiting for someone in a different time zone or on vacation to respond when an LLM-powered version of them can answer instead.
Why it matters: This is either productivity gold or a dystopian nightmare, depending on how it's executed. The idea of querying a digital twin sounds efficient until you realize it requires constant data capture, perfect context understanding, and ironclad privacy guarantees. The UX challenge here is enormous, how do you make this feel helpful?
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Digital twins for workplace communication could eliminate so many bottlenecks or they could create a creepy surveillance culture. The design needs to make it crystal clear what's being tracked, how it's being used, and give users full control. Get that wrong and adoption will tank immediately."
Product reality check
Kayak launches "AI Mode" for travel questions, search, and bookings
Travel search engine Kayak rolled out an "AI Mode" feature that lets users ask travel-related questions and compare and book flights, hotels, and cars through an AI chatbot integrated on its website. The feature, available on desktop and mobile web, uses Kayak's ChatGPT integration to deliver contextual results.
Why it matters: Every travel platform is racing to add AI chat. Kayak's advantage is its existing data infrastructure. If the AI can genuinely surface better deals faster than manual search, this wins. If it's just a chatbot wrapper on the same old search, users will ignore it.
Reddit expands AI-powered search to five new languages
Reddit announced its AI-powered search experience is now available in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Users in Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and Italy who've set one of these languages as their default can now chat with the AI in Q&A format. The feature uses a Google AI model.
Why it matters: Reddit's search has been notoriously bad for years. AI-powered search is less of a cool new feature and more of a necessary fix. Expanding to five languages shows Reddit is serious about international growth, but the real test is whether the AI can surface relevant threads better than Google searches with "site:reddit.com" appended.
WhatsApp curbs messages sent without a response to fight spam
WhatsApp is putting a per-month limit on how many messages individual users and businesses can send to unknown people without getting a response. All outbound messages to new contacts count against this limit unless the recipient replies. For example, if you meet someone at a conference and send three unanswered messages, that counts toward your cap.
Why it matters: This is WhatsApp choosing long-term user experience over short-term business messaging growth. Spam has been eroding the platform's core value: fast, reliable communication with people you actually know. The limit will frustrate some legitimate users and businesses, but it's a necessary trade-off to prevent WhatsApp from becoming another cluttered marketing channel.
Kyrylo Lazariev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Platforms that don't control spam eventually lose their core users. WhatsApp is making the right call. The challenge now is designing the limit system so it blocks spammers without punishing real conversations. That's a moderation UX problem that requires thoughtful implementation."
Apple and Formula 1 ink five-year US streaming deal
Apple secured exclusive U.S. broadcasting rights to Formula 1 starting in the 2026 season. The five-year deal makes Apple TV the exclusive streaming home for all Formula 1 races, taking over from ESPN. All practice, qualifying, Sprint sessions, and Grands Prix will be available to Apple TV subscribers, with select races and all practice sessions free in the Apple TV app.
Why it matters: Apple is building a sports empire one exclusive deal at a time. This follows their MLS deal and signals a broader strategy to lock premium live content behind Apple TV+. For F1 fans in the U.S., this means another subscription. For Apple, it's a play to make Apple TV+ indispensable for sports audiences.
Design wins
Lazarev.agency transformed AdMetrics for modern e-commerce needs
AdMetrics started as a niche market-tracking tool, but its complexity limited broader adoption among medium and large Shopify businesses. Lazarev.agency identified these issues and reimagined the platform, streamlining interactions, simplifying the user experience, and enhancing core features to deliver deeper insights. The transformation revitalized the platform, making it powerful, accessible, and impactful for a wider audience.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "AdMetrics had solid functionality buried under layers of complexity. Our job was to strip away the noise and surface the insights e-commerce teams actually need. When you simplify without dumbing down, adoption takes care of itself."
George Wu and Malika Favre launch «I Can't Afford This But Maybe She Can»
What began as a fun side project on Instagram exploded into something much bigger. Creative friends George Wu and Malika Favre turned it into an online directory and a business.
Why it matters: Community-driven commerce is having a moment. The concept – "I can't afford this, but maybe someone in my network can" is brilliant because it's honest, relatable, and taps into the social graph as a discovery engine. It's proof that not every business needs venture backing to work.
This week's reality check
Mobile design that creates experiences
Mobile design has been around long enough that no one should be getting it wrong. And yet, most apps and websites still feel like they were built for desktop users and awkwardly squeezed onto smaller screens. As a result, mobile users are frustrated, bouncing, and telling themselves they'll "finish later on a laptop." Spoiler: they won't.
Mobile design isn't a smaller version of web design. It's a discipline of its own, built around the way users interact with touchscreen devices, how they behave on the go, and what they need from mobile interfaces in limited space. It's about mobile UX design, responsive web design, and tailoring every key element from button styles to interaction patterns for mobile devices first.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI Designer at Lazarev.agency: "If your mobile experience still feels like a shrunk-down desktop site, you've already lost. Mobile-first is the baseline. Users expect native-feeling interactions, fast load times, and interfaces designed for thumbs, not cursors."
25 Denver web design companies that deliver on UX, strategy, and results
Choosing from the many Denver web design companies can feel like a high-stakes gamble, especially when you've got growth targets to hit and no time to waste on underperforming vendors. Too often, digital partners wow you in the pitch, then miss the mark on execution. This leaves you with a business website that looks fine but doesn't convert, doesn't scale, and doesn't reflect your brand identity.
This article offers an expert lineup of Denver's top-performing web developers. Whether you're building an MVP or reshaping your brand's digital presence, this guide helps you find website design partners with a relentless commitment to performance optimization and positive user experience.
What's coming next week
More platform regulation, more AI feature launches, and more proof that good design isn't optional anymore. We'll be watching.
🔥 Stay sharp. Stay with Lazarev.agency.
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