(N10) Prelaunch Industry Board Newsletter: Monthly Innovation & Insights

Dear Industry Board Members,

June was the month a lot of things quietly told on themselves. Sony admitted the disc was never really yours to keep. Meta shipped an AI model and got called out for it within a day. A three-year-old startup bet against cameras and is already worth a billion. And three consumer giants started fighting over the same supplement brand.

A few things I couldn't stop thinking about this month:

Key Trends in Consumer Tech

The anti-Meta smart glasses just became a billion-dollar bet 🕶️

Even Realities just raised $150M at a $1B valuation. Its glasses have no camera. On purpose.

Meta and Snap keep racing to put cameras and AI assistants on your face. This three-year-old startup out of Shenzhen bet the opposite direction: strip the camera, keep the heads-up display, and sell privacy as the feature. Tencent and Meituan are in. So is Sequoia China.

Real-time translation transcribes audio instead of recording it. Frames start at $599, average orders closer to $1,000. And unlike most of this category, Even says it's already profitable.

Meanwhile, this was Snap, which I tried in Cannes... very uncomfortable, but to be fair, it was not the final product that was sold.

Sony just killed the game disc. You're still paying $70.

Sony is ending physical disc production for new PlayStation games starting January 2028.

Not surprising... 85% of sales were already digital, and GameStop has shuttered 1,300+ stores in two years. What's interesting is the timing: this landed days after GTA 6 fans found out the "physical" edition was just a download code in a box. Sony just made it official.

Players still pay $70+. Now it's for a license that can be revoked anytime. No disc to resell, lend, or keep.

The disc wasn't a format. It was ownership.

Meta built an AI that can star you in photos you never took 🎆

Meta's Muse Image launched this month: free, built in-house by Meta Superintelligence Labs, and already sitting at No. 2 on the image-generation leaderboards.

Here's the feature that didn't make the highlight reel. Any user can tag someone with a public Instagram profile, pull their photo, and generate a new AI image built around them. Meta's own policy is blunt about it: "you will not be notified about content created using AI features at Meta." A setting to opt out exists. It's off by default.

One X user called it "a privacy landmine waiting to detonate." Given Meta's history, that's not paranoia; that's pattern recognition. The $5 billion Cambridge Analytica fine and the shuttered facial recognition system both came from the same instinct: use people's data by default, unless they explicitly opt out.

Muse Image is genuinely impressive tech. Whether Meta earned the trust to ship it this way is a separate question.🧐

Key Trends in Robotics

The first humanoid IPO is here

Agility Robotics is going public via SPAC at a $2.5B valuation, making Digit the first humanoid robot on US public markets. Already deployed with Amazon, Toyota, and Mercado Libre.

I didn't expect humanoid IPOs before humanoid robots were everywhere... but that's how infrastructure bets work. The market's buying the pipeline before the product is mainstream. Smart or premature. 2026 might tell us which.

A robot that folds your laundry for less than a humanoid's down payment 🧺

Weave Robotics just opened preorders for Isaac 1: a wheeled home robot that folds your laundry, makes your bed, and clears clutter for $7,999. That's less than half of what 1X charges for Neo.

No legs. No humanoid theater. Just an adjustable-height base, two arms, and two very specific chores nailed down: laundry and daily tidying.

This is a big deal; NEO claims it got the hand solved. As a reminder, hand is the biggest challenge in robotics.

Cheaper than a humanoid… Still not private. Pick your trade-off. 😄

Key Trends in Fashion

Rick Owens solved Paris heat waves by putting AC in a jacket

Rick Owens put air conditioning in a jacket. Actual air conditioning.

At his SS27 Paris show, he debuted inflatable jackets with built-in AC units in collaboration with Adidas. Paris hit 40 degrees during the shows.

Not a concept. Not a runway joke.

His answer to the climate was to build climate control into what you wear. 😄

Absurd and completely logical at the same time.

Reformation x Umbro: round two, right on time

Reformation and Umbro just launched their second collab, timed perfectly to the World Cup.

Six pieces, featuring Devon Lee Carlson, landed while football fever was at its peak. Their first collab was last summer. This one is more confident, better timed, and doing better numbers.

Sustainable fashion meeting a classic sports brand, twice in a row.

This is no longer a one-off. Watch for a permanent line.

Key Trends in CPG

Eli Lilly is betting on a drug for baldness and endometriosis. Same drug.

Eli Lilly just put $40 million into Absci, a startup that used AI to design a single injectable antibody aimed at two conditions that have nothing to do with each other: androgenetic hair loss and endometriosis.

No approved treatment exists for either using this mechanism. Absci's pitch is that AI drug design plus running trials in China can compress a $150 million path to Phase 2 down to $15–20 million.

Early Phase 1 data on safety looks clean. Phase 2 and 3 are still ahead, so this is a bet on a method as much as a molecule.

Hair loss and endometriosis, solved by the same shot. If it works, the injectable boom didn't stop at weight loss. 😄

Crayola x CamelBak: nostalgia as a design philosophy 🖍️

CamelBak made a water bottle shaped like a crayon. The lid looks like the tip. Cherry Red, Sky Blue, Aquamarine.

Sold out within days. 😄

The lesson most nostalgic collabs miss: it's not about putting the logo on something. It's about building the emotion into the form.

By the way, talking about nostalgies, we also saw the trend: bb777 used Prelaunch to improve metrics and get customer insights; the launch was amazing. 7 million within 2 months.

Pepsi looked at sleep deprivation and called it a market

Pepsi launched a version with 30% more caffeine. Called it Pepsi Night.

Launched in the Middle East, timed to the World Cup. Matches in North America air past midnight for fans in the Gulf. Pepsi saw a behavioral reality and made a product out of it.

Tagline: "Every match deserves extra hype."

Energy drinks have been stealing soda share for years. This is Pepsi's answer, with a sports hook instead of a wellness one.

68% of breast cancer patients can skip chemo. That's not a small thing.

68% of patients in the OPTIMA trial qualified to skip chemotherapy entirely.

The trial, reported at ASCO 2026, showed that for women with ER-positive, HER2-negative early breast cancer with low Prosigna test scores, skipping chemo produced outcomes non-inferior to receiving it.

The researchers called it "practice-changing evidence." That phrase gets overused.

In this case, it's accurate. This redefines the standard of care for one of the most common cancer presentations, using tumor biology instead of clinical instinct to guide the decision.

68%. That's not a rounding error. That's the majority. 🙏

Unilever, P&G, and Haleon are all bidding for the same supplement brand

Three of the world's biggest consumer companies are bidding for the same supplement brand.

Thorne was taken private by L Catterton at $680M in 2023. Now being shopped at $4 billion. Unilever, P&G, and Haleon are all circling. Revenue tracking toward $650M this year, 30%+ CAGR since the buyout.

Unilever just spun off ice cream and merged its food division with McCormick. They're clearly building toward something in health and nutrition.

Whoever wins Thorne gets a brand that already crossed from the supplement aisle to clinical credibility.

That line took decades to build. Very few brands have managed it.

🚀 What's New at Prelaunch.com

Spent late June in Cannes at Insights Lighthouse's event. One of the sharper rooms in the industry this year.

The question everyone kept circling: does more data automatically mean better decisions? Not necessarily.

Everybody starts with AI and ends with humans. Put an insights assistant at every table, every meeting, every decision point... fine. But that assistant needs to be seeded with truth, not noise. That's exactly where the human role gets more important, not less.

Best metaphor of the event: autopilot has existed for decades, but nobody wants to hear the pilot say "I'm working from home today." 😅 AI can fly more of the plane. Trust still needs a human in the cockpit.

The real shortage was never information. It's clarity.

AI will make data abundant. Clarity is the actual advantage.

Until next time,

- Narek