☕ Amazon plans $200B in AI spending & EU says TikTok needs to drop "addictive design".
Big Tech’s $600B AI spending plan is rattling investors & More.
Breaking News
Amazon plans to spend $200 billion on AI-related capital expenditures in 2026, far above its $125B estimate for 2025, as CEO Andy Jassy doubles down on AI infrastructure, custom chips, robotics, and satellites. The scale of spending rattled investors—Amazon shares fell over 10% after hours—highlighting growing market anxiety around whether Big Tech’s accelerating AI buildout will translate into durable profits or strain balance sheets.
Anthropic has released Opus 4.6, introducing “agent teams” that let multiple AI agents split up and work on large tasks in parallel rather than sequentially. The update expands Claude’s context window to 1 million tokens and embeds Claude directly into PowerPoint as a live side panel, signaling Anthropic’s push to turn Opus into a full productivity engine for knowledge workers like product managers, analysts, and operators—not just developers.
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
PRE-SEED
Naoma, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of an AI video sales agent, raised $440k in pre-seed funding. The round was led by ULTRA VC, with participation from Sparkle Ventures and several angel investors.
SEED
Chiral, a Zurich, Switzerland-based nanotechnology company developing semiconductor and quantum technologies with nanomaterials, raised $12M in Seed funding. The round was led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from Quantonation, HCVC, and Founderful, as well as public funding from Innosuisse.
Linkup, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of a web search and retrieval platform for AI products, raised $10m in Seed funding. The round was led by Gradient, with participation from Elaia, Leblon Capital, Weekend Fund, Seedcamp, Axeleo Capital, Motier Ventures, OPRTRS CLUB, and several angel investors including founders from Datadog, Mistral, Deel, and Dataiku.
Adaption Labs, a San Francisco, CA-based adaptive intelligence startup, raised $50m in seed funding. The round was led by Emergence Capital Partners with participation from Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, and Neo.
Fintower, a Gothenburg, Sweden-based software company developing an AI-driven platform for financial planning, analysis, and reporting, raised €1.5M in Seed funding. Backers included Chalmers Ventures, Akka, the Stena family through William Olsson, Almi, Daniel Jonsson from Inet, Alexander Hars and angel investors.
pHatom Technologies, a Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada-based climate technology company developing carbon capture solutions for existing coastal bioenergy and industrial facilities, raised $4M in funding. The round was led by Propeller Ventures, with participation from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation (NBIF), Invest Nova Scotia, and strategic investor Carmeuse Ventures.
Uplift360, a Bristol, UK- and Luxembourg-based materials startup developing chemical regeneration technologies, raised €7.4M in Seed funding. The round was led by Extantia, with participation from the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), Promus Ventures and Fund F.
Sapiom, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of a machine-native financial infrastructure platform, raised $15.75m in Seed funding. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Gradient, Array Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Coinbase Ventures, Formus Capital, and Operator Collective.
Cadastral, a NYC-based AI-native software company building vertically specific intelligence for the commercial real estate (CRE) industry, raised $9.5M in funding. Backers included Navitas, JLL Spark Global Ventures, AvalonBay, Equity Residential, and 1Sharpe.
GROWTH
Twaice, a Munich, Germany-based provider of predictive battery analytics for energy storage and electric mobility, raised €24m in venture debt financing. The funding was provided by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and is backed by the InvestEU programme.
Nixtla, a San Francisco, CA-based time series intelligence company, raised $16M in Series A funding. The round was led by Energize Capital, with participation from True Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures.
Forerunner, a San Francisco, CA-based AI-powered platform for governments that manage their built environment, raised $39M in funding. The amount consisted of $26.3M in Series B led by Wellington Management and a previously unannounced $12.7M Series A led by Union Square Ventures.
Capalo AI, a Helsinki, Finland-based sustainable technology company improving energy storage systems, raised €11M in Series A funding. The round was led by Heartcore Capital, with participation from Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment), VentureFriends, PROfounders, Inventure, Innovestor, as well as a few family offices.
Daytona, a NYC-based infrastructure company building programmatic, composable computers for AI agents, raised $24M in Series A funding. The round was led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Pace Capital and existing investors Upfront Ventures, E2VC, Darkmode, Datadog and Figma Ventures.
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NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates
2048 Ventures, a NYC and Boston, MA-based thesis-driven earliest stage venture capital firm, closed its third fund, at $82M. Fund III is backed by fund-of-funds, family offices, founders and executives from DigitalOcean, Duolingo, Duo Security, Google, IG Group, Kelso, MongoDB, Reddit, Red Hat, Tiger Global, Twitter, Tempus and others. The fund will lead pre-seed and seed rounds with $500K – $3M checks in Vertical AI, Deep Tech, Healthcare and Biotech startups in NYC and Boston.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
EU says TikTok needs to drop "addictive design"
The European Commission announced preliminary findings that TikTok’s addictive design, including features like infinite scroll, breaches the Digital Services Act and fails to protect users adequately.
Regulators said TikTok’s Daily Screen Time warnings are “easy to dismiss” and its parental controls require too much effort, so the company must “change the basic design of its service.”
TikTok called the findings “categorically false and entirely meritless” and vowed to challenge them, while the ongoing investigation could eventually lead to fines of up to 6 percent of global annual turnover.
Apple scales back AI health coach plans
Apple has scaled back Project Mulberry, its planned AI-powered health coach for the Health app, after leadership changes in the company’s health and AI organizations prompted a reassessment of the initiative.
Services chief Eddy Cue, who now oversees the health team, told colleagues that Apple’s plan wasn’t compelling enough compared to rivals like Oura Health and Whoop and their iPhone apps.
Some Project Mulberry features may still ship individually over time, including one that would use the iPhone’s camera to analyze how a person walks, plus Siri health queries in iOS 27.
Meta tests a standalone app for its AI-generated ‘Vibes’ videos
Meta confirmed it is testing a standalone app for Vibes, its AI-generated short-form video feature that lets people create, share, and browse AI videos in a dedicated feed.
Vibes previously lived inside the Meta AI app, but spinning it out positions the product as a more direct competitor to Sora, OpenAI’s AI video and social app.
Meta also plans to explore freemium access and paid subscriptions for Vibes video creation, letting users unlock additional monthly video creation opportunities in the coming months.
Big Tech’s $600B AI spending plan is rattling investors
Big tech firms are expected to spend over $600B on AI in 2026, spooking investors worried about profitability and capital discipline; Amazon fell 7% after flagging $200B in capex, while Alphabet dropped after saying spending could double.
The market reaction shows a split: infrastructure winners like Nvidia and Microsoft rose, while software, data, and analytics firms sold off on fears that advanced AI models could commoditize their businesses.
Investors are no longer rewarding AI headlines by default; instead, they’re scrutinizing ROI, balance-sheet risk, and whether AI gains will stay concentrated among a few mega-cap players or spill over into the broader market.
Global chip sales set to hit $1T in 2026
Global semiconductor sales are expected to reach $1 trillion this year, up from $791.7B in 2025 (+25.6%), driven largely by massive AI data center spending, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Advanced computing chips were the biggest growth driver in 2025, with sales up nearly 40% to $302B, led by companies like Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel.
Memory chips were the second-largest segment, with sales rising 34.8% to $223B amid AI-driven shortages, and industry executives say order books remain full heading into 2026 despite uncertainty about how long the AI buildout will last.
AI is not a bubble, says Nvidia supplier Wistron
Wistron chairman Simon Lin said AI is entering a new era, not a bubble, and expects AI-related order growth in 2026 to be higher than last year, with visibility extending into 2027.
The Taiwan-based manufacturer, a key supplier to Nvidia, said growth this year will be significant, supported by strong demand across industries adopting AI.
Wistron’s new U.S. manufacturing facilities for Nvidia will begin volume production in the first half of 2026, supporting Nvidia’s plan to build up to $500B worth of AI servers in the U.S. over the next four years.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other News
Reddit says it’s looking for more acquisitions in adtech and elsewhere
Reddit told analysts it plans to pursue more M&A, focusing on companies whose products either scale well across Reddit’s user base or help drive user growth.
CFO Andrew Vollero said Reddit has historically moved faster by acquiring proven adtech and AI capabilities instead of building them in-house, helping speed up monetization and product launches.
While adtech remains a core focus, Reddit isn’t ruling out other areas, including AI-driven products like search, building on past acquisitions such as Memorable AI and other machine-learning and moderation tools.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
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