Given that the author was quite vague about the nature of this “pipeline” and that their product is an “AI-powered Startup Selection engine”, I have a suspicion they were probably crawling and scraping a whole bunch of pages for new startups. It’s possible that this was totally legit and it just looked like a ddos attack, or that it was something else entirely, but everyone here seems to have taken him at his word that what they were doing was actually above board.