Tuesday, August 5, 2025

August 05, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Tuesday, August 5, 2025 

In today’s digest, NYC travel chatbots, a Hamilton-NYC scavenger hunt, and tech hiring in July. 💼

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  • Travelers to NYC can now count on a new AI chat platform, called Libby (short for Liberty, of course), when planning their visit. The AI tool is available in 60 different languages and will give personal answers to any travel or tourism-related questions. 🗽 (TravelPulse)

    • Check out the tool in the bottom right corner on the NYC Tourism + Conventions website here.

  • The New York Film Festival announced its lineup today, showcasing 34 films including some favorites from Cannes and Sundance. (Variety)

    • The festival kicks off next month (Sept. 26), but you can get tix before Aug. 14 here to save some money for that popcorn splurge. 🍿

  • NYC is the melting pot of the world (quite literally these days 🥵) with so many great cultures, communities, and cuisines. Check out Grub Street’s guide to where to eat this August, featuring lots of great Mexican restaurants. 🍽️ (Grub Street)


In other reading:

  • This is officially the greenest, most beautiful block in all of Brooklyn (TimeOut New York)

  • Legionnaires’ disease sickens 58 in New York. Here’s what to know (New York Times)

  • New ‘Hamilton’ scavenger hunt around New York City offers chance to win tickets to see Tony Award-winning musical (amNY)

July’s data on tech hiring does little to offer clarity on the state of the job market, as the overall labor market was rocked by a weaker-than-expected jobs report and steep downward revisions for the months of May and June.

What’s 🆕: The U.S. tech industry saw a mixed report in July as hiring activity offered ambiguous signals, according to CompTIA’s latest tech jobs report. But the NYC tech ecosystem continued to be a bright spot. 💪

🫤 The not-great news: 

  • Tech companies reduced staffing last month by 10,314 jobs across all roles, with the reductions concentrated in IT and custom software services, cloud infrastructure, and telecommunications.

  • The unemployment rate for tech occupations ticked up to 2.9% in July.

Yes, but: The tech unemployment rate is more than a full percentage point behind that of the national rate of 4.2%

☺️ The better news:

  • Active employer job listings for tech positions totaled 440,083 in July, with 44% newly added last month.

  • Highest demand jobs included software developers and engineers, systems engineers and architects, tech support specialists, cybersecurity engineers and architects, and network engineers and architects.

  • Tech employment rose by an estimated 54,000 workers in July.

☀️ NYC shines bright:

  • NYC had the second highest number of tech job postings in the U.S. in July with 11,531, fewer than 400 jobs away from Washington, D.C., the leader.

  • Overall, the unemployment rate in NYC improved for the sixth straight month, falling to 4.7%. 

  • The city added 3,400 private sector jobs in June, reaching another record high for private sector jobs.

Did you know? Tech:NYC has a jobs board, powered by Getro, with over 3,000+ open tech roles just a click away. Explore the jobs board here.

“In an environment where uncertainty is the norm, the latest tech employment data is a welcome mix of some reasonably positive measures, and then of course, some lagging measures,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer, CompTIA.

In other reading:

  • OpenAI just released its first open-weight models since GPT-2 (Wired)

  • What new CEOs should ask themselves in their first 100 Days (HBR)

  • The future of work is human-led and AI-powered (Forbes)

  • Clay, an NYC-based AI go-to-market development platform, raised $100 million in Series C funding at a $3.1 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Meritech Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, and Boldstart, as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures.

  • Resolvd AI, an NYC-based developer of technology designed to automate reconciliation workflows in the health care supply chain and IT operations, raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding from Spice Capital, Betaworks, Factorial Capital, and angel investors.

  • August 6: How to Raise a Pre-Seed Round in 2025, to learn what investors are actually looking for in 2025, how other founders broke through the early-stage wall, and who you should be talking to next whether for advice, feedback, or funding. Register here.

  • August 7: Early-Stage Poolside Founder Event, bringing together early-stage founders for a relaxed poolside hang. Register here.

  • August 8: New York City Tech Mixer and Social, for afterwork drinks and networking with tech workers in NYC. Register here.

  • August 8: Deep Dive Into LLMs Watch Party, an all-day watch party and discussion of Andrej Karpathy’s video on LLMs. Register here.

  • August 14: AI Agent Buildathon, for builders, AI-nerds, tech-enthusiasts, and investors. Register here.

  • August 21: August Founder Dinner, for a curated group of pre-seed to series A founders, especially those building in B2B SaaS & AI. Register here.

  • August 26: Brderless x Rho Founder Breakfast, for a curated group of seed-stage founders (post raise) who are scaling or gearing up for Series A. Register here.

  • September 3-4: Go-To-Market: Building Distribution Engine that Scales, a two-day workshop for early-stage founders to master go-to-market strategy, build a scalable distribution engine, and get real feedback from top operators and founders. Register here.

  • September 10: NYC Summit, Primary’s annual invite-only conference, bringing together 2,000 top founders, VCs, and LPs. This year’s speakers include Larry Fitzgerald (Arizona Cardinals), David Karp (Tumblr), Toyin Ajayi (Cityblock Health), Lina Khan (FTC), Kareem Amin (Clay), and more. Apply to attend here.

  • September 23: Deep Tech Forum + Startup Showcase in NYC, bringing together deep tech startups from across the globe alongside corporate innovation leaders, investors, and ecosystem partners, for a full day of mainstage sessions and startup exhibitions. Register with promo code TECHNYC for a 20% discount here.

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