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A space that once held 5,000 tons of corn, grains, and wheat has just undergone a surgical transformation that’s turned it from an industrial complex into a new hotel. Now open in Bremen, Germany, the John & Will Silo Hotel is a unique repurposing of the silos of a former Kellogg’s cereal factory. Hulking concrete structures that enabled decades of breakfast cereal production are now luxe, if quirky, accommodations for travelers. It’s a strange second life for a former cereal factory, but its also part of a 600-acre urban redevelopment project in the industrial area of Bremen, located along the Weser river. The former Kellogg’s factory, with a silo-topping sign that’s become a local landmark, is the project’s visual centerpiece. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] The design comes from Vienna-based Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA), who worked with the project’s developer to preserve and reuse the factory as part of a new commercial and residential district known as Überseestadt. [Photo: courtesy DMAA] “The possibility of demolishing the building was never up for discussion,” says Eva Schrade, senior project manager at DMAA. She says the idea of converting the structure into a hotel came during an evening brainstorming session with the client, which was considering turning the silos into some kind of sports center, like a climbing gym. The architects offered a more challenging alternative. “The structure of the round rooms is unusual for a hotel, but the task was all the more exciting,” Schrade says. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] The 130-foot silo shells now contain 117 circular and semicircular hotel rooms. Winding interior hallways run along their curves inside the structure, and the round walls of the silos frame bedrooms, seating areas, and even showers. Horizontal bands of windows have been cut through the silo walls to give hotel guests wide views of the river and city beyond. The raw concrete of the silo structure lent itself to the minimalist interior design of the hotel, with spare furnishings and steel-framed fixtures. It’s not the first time grain silos have found new purpose. Grain silos in Cape Town, South Africa, have been used for a contemporary art museum. Some DIY designers have even turned smaller-scale grain silos into boutique hotel suites. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] The Bremen project is on a much larger scale, and therefore involved a bigger lift. Physically carving up the building was labor-intensive. The concrete walls of the silos are more than 6 inches thick. To keep the building structurally sound, the architects had to preserve a significant amount of the structure of the silos themselves, both their exterior shells and the partition walls between them. Bracing wall had to be added inside smaller rooms, as well as the insulation that the silos previous life holding corn and grain did not require. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] Despite the significant changes to the structure, the architects sought to ensure the silos still presented as silos. “Inside, all interventions were to remain visible as far as possible. The raw concrete floors were only cleaned and the cuts were left visible,” Schrade says. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] Beyond the hotel rooms, many of the building’s original details were kept intact, including steel bracing inside a penthouse bar and the original funnel-shaped outlets of the silos, which hang overhead in the hotel lobby. Another original feature no one wanted to lose is the building’s towering Kellogg’s sign on the roof. “Many Bremen residents have a long-standing connection with the company,” Schrade says. The hope is the hotel conversion will give Bremen a new kind of connection with this building.
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E-Commerce
Spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are used worldwide to organize and analyze data, but getting the right information into them isnt always straightforward. Businesses often need engineers to write code that pulls information from cloud systems and databases, then clean and process it before its ready for Excel. AI spreadsheet company Sourcetable is trying to simplify that process with what it calls Superagents: AI tools that connect to different systems across the internet, fetch relevant data, and make it ready for analysis. Technically, Superagents manage a collection of AI agents that link to databases and cloud services like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Stripe. Once connected, Sourcetables agents can answer questions directly, such as analyzing customer spending data from Stripe or website traffic from Google Analytics. They can insert raw or processed data into a Sourcetable spreadsheet, which users can work with just like Excel. To do this, the system can run Python number-crunching libraries on a virtual machine, avoiding the math errors that generative AI often produces. “There’s a full Python ecosystem under the hood,” says Sourcetable cofounder and CEO Eoin McMillan. “Basically every data science library you could possibly want or ask for is just embedded in the product, just rolled in for free.” McMillan says the idea came from his experience at startups, where accessing and analyzing data was always a heavy lift. “The conclusion that I came to was that everybody was trying to patch a broken ecosystem for data, and the reason for this was because Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets were not built correctly for the modern information environment,” he says. Despite its advanced features, Sourcetable still looks like a traditional spreadsheet and supports hundreds of familiar formula functions. It can import and export Excel files, too. Earlier this year, the company launched an autopilot mode that lets users ask the AI to answer questions, generate graphs, or build visualizations. McMillan says this helps spreadsheet users who’ve struggled with more complex features, like those pesky pivot table operations and VLOOKUP, or vertical lookup, functions. “Most people in the world use spreadsheets, but they don’t know how to use VLOOKUP or pivots, and having a spreadsheet that can combine data, and summarize data, and analyze data for them is a huge unlock in terms of this new capability they have,” he says. For power users, the built-in Python libraries can replace hours of manual spreadsheet work or external coding, producing results in seconds. While the product is most popular with operations and analysis teams, McMillan says its also used for everything from scientific research to fantasy football, where Sourcetable even built specialized tools. In a demo for Fast Company, McMillan showed how Sourcetable could pull data from the web, downloading and processing a sitemap file listing each of the Sourcetable website’s individual pages, then visiting each page and cataloging page titles and descriptions in a spreadsheet. While the platform includes prebuilt connectors for popular cloud services and databases, the AI can also fetch data from other systems using standard API documentation. Generally, connections to outside services cost $100 each per month, though one per organization is included with Sourcetable’s $20-per-user-per-month “Pro” plan and five per organization with a $200-per-user-per-month “Max” plan. A promotion celebrating the launch of Superagents makes connectors added the week of September 8 free forever. Currently, users can edit the SQL code Sourcetable generates but can only viewnot rewritethe Python scripts. McMillan says that will likely change in the future. For now, if Python doesnt produce the desired results, users must re-prompt the AI. The AI also asks permission before overwriting spreadsheet contents. It can, in some cases, push data back to cloud systems, but McMillan stresses thats still a beta feature. In the future, Sourcetable will likely allow outside systemsincluding other AI agentsto connect proactively as well. Sourcetable, which has raised $5.5 million in funding, isn’t the only company trying to use AI to modernize the spreadsheet (Excel and Google Sheets each offer their own AI features). But McMillan says Sourcetable has an advantage in being created with AI and integration with online data in mind, rather than having such features added on well into the product’s life. However, he says, the AI chat interface alone is unlikely to replace the tabular spreadsheet format that people have been using for thousands of years. “The reason why Sourcetable is powerful, McMillan says, is because you have this Excel-like spreadsheet interface, which is the data tool that everyone knows how to use.
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E-Commerce
Aven, a fintech startup known for its home-equity-backed credit cards, has raised $110 million in Series E financing at a $2.2 billion post-money valuation. The San Francisco-based company is one of a growing number of startups focused on helping U.S. consumers take advantage of the estimated $35 trillion in wealth tied up in their homes. The latest round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing backers General Catalyst, Caffeinated Capital, GIC, Electric Capital, and Founders Fund. In July 2024, Aven raised $142 million in Series D financing at a $1 billion valuation. Avens primary product is a secured credit card designed for prime and super-prime homeowners. The card offers consumers interest rates in line with that of a home-equity line of credit, or HELOC, with the ease of a credit card experience. Aven says it has issued $3 billion in aggregate credit lines and has saved consumers more than $215 million in interest costs. Our core product is really working, says CEO Sadi Khan, who cofounded the company in 2019. His team plans to use the financing round to hit the gas pedal hard, he says. We have the ability to be cash-flow positive, Khan says, citing Avens unit economics. But we decided that investing in our growth and investing in more products is the right decision. Aven delivers lower rates by streamlining the HELOC application and administration processes. The company has even gone so far as to develop a patented robotic arm that it uses as part of its digital notary workflow. A traditional HELOC application process can take 42 days; Avens process can take as little as 15 minutes. Shortening the timelines and lowering the costs associated with home-equity-secured credit make the model more attractive to consumers, who are using Aven for debt consolidation, home improvement, summer camp, and more. Over the past 12 months, Avens customer base has tripled in size. Other companies are chasing homeowners, too. In just the past week, my own household received HELOC offers in the mail from Figure, Alliant, and Rate. (Direct mail is also an important marketing channel for Aven.) Overall, HELOC balances today stand at around $400 billion, an increase of 27% above pandemic-level borrowing. As with any kind of secured debt, borrowers risk losing the underlying asset. Khan says that Avens delinquency and default rates are in line with that of traditional HELOCs. Just 0.87% of HELOC balances were more than 90 days delinquent in Q1 2025, versus over 10% of credit cards, according to the Federal Reserve. This financing round will also position Aven to expand its product portfolio. Up first is a move into mortgage refinancing. Our goal is very simple, Khan says. Its to be able to build a mortgage product that [could] do a cash-out refinance in as fast as 10 days. Aven is running live tests on mortgage refinancing and expects to roll out the product over the next six months.
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E-Commerce
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