☕ Amazon's Starlink rival launches internet service this year & Meta paid contractors to pose as teens attacking rival AI.
Microsoft lays off nearly 5,000 employees & Samsung expected to post 18-fold profit.
Breaking News
Meta reportedly hired hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers and bombard rival AI models with thousands of harmful prompts to test their safety. The secret program has sparked criticism over transparency and raised questions about where competitive AI benchmarking crosses the line.
Researchers documented the first known AI-driven ransomware attack where an AI agent autonomously breached systems, escalated privileges, encrypted files, and generated a ransom note. Despite the automation, humans still chose the target, supplied credentials, and orchestrated the attack, showing AI is amplifying- not yet replacing - cybercriminals.
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
PRE-SEED
Nudge, a NYC-based company building commerce infrastructure for AI shopping, raised $1.1M in Pre-Seed funding. Backers included s16vc, Antler, and operators from Shopify, Nutanix, and Postman.
SEED
Katalyze AI, a Mountain View, CA-based provider of an agentic operating system for pharmaceutical companies, raised $10.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Inovia Capital, Ripple Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram and Farzad Soleimani.
Arato Software, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based developer of an AI application testing and simulation platform, raised $10M in Seed funding. The round was led by TLV Partners, with participation from Jibe Ventures and angel investors including Raghu Raghuram and Marianna Tessel.
Spense, a Bangalore, India-based developer of an embedded fintech and digital payment orchestration platform, raised $2.8M in Seed funding. The round was led by Arkam Ventures, with participation from Razorpay Ventures and GrowthCap Ventures.
Digiclean Solutions, a Gothenburg, Sweden-based developer of an AI-powered industrial monitoring platform, raised €2.5M in Seed funding. The round was co-led by Almi Invest GreenTech and Unconventional Ventures, with participation from S-E Bankens Utvecklingsstiftelse, Impact Shakers, and Feminvest Ventures.
Acti, a Singapore-based developer of an AI-native agentic smartphone keyboard platform, raised $5.3M in Seed funding. The round was led by Bitkraft Ventures.
geoSurge, a London, UK-based AI company helping brands inside generative AI systems, raised $12M in Seed funding. The round was led by AlbionVC, with participation from Play Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Celero Ventures, Boost Capital, Passion Capital, Tuesday Capital, and angel investors from Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, and Signal AI.
Worldmodeldata, a Cambridge, UK-based database service company for video game-generated AI-training data, raised £7M in Seed funding. The round was led by Iona Star Capital.
GROWTH
CurifyLabs, a Helsinki, Finland-based healthtech startup automating pharmaceutical compounding, raised $14M in Series A funding. The round was led by Sandwater and HealthCap, with participation from Tesi and existing investors including Lifeline Ventures.
The Protein Brewery, a Breda, Netherlands-based biomass fermentation company, raised €18M in Series B extension funding. The round was led by ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund, with participation from Novo Holdings, Invest-NL, and BOM.
Bespoke Labs, a Mountain View, CA-based AI agent training platform, raised $40M in funding. The raise included a Series A led by Wing VC, with participation from Mayfield and The House Fund, alongside a Seed round led by 8VC.
Tripo AI, a Dongcheng, China-based AI 3D foundation models company, raised $150M in Series A3 funding. Backers included Geely Capital, 4399 Network, Tanwan, Giant Network, Fosun Capital, Orinno Capital, CoStone Capital, Addor Capital, T-Capital, and Muhua Tech Ventures.
TaiSan, a Cambridge, UK-based sodium-ion battery developer, raised £4.65M in funding. The round was led by Eos Advisory and Mercia Ventures, with participation from AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, Adeline Arts & Science, Techmind, InnoEnergy, TSP Ventures, Exergon, and Heartfelt.
Hypefy AI, a Zagreb, Croatia-based AI-powered influencer marketing platform, raised $7.2M in Series A funding. The round was led by AYMO Ventures, with participation from Interactive Venture Partners, Oktogon Ventures, and Euroventures.
Extended, a fully remote developer of an on-chain perpetual futures platform, raised $12.5M in strategic funding. The round was led by eToro, with participation from Jump Crypto and Albert Blanc.
Beeline Medicines Corporation, a Stamford, CT-based clinical-stage biotechnology company, raised $126.3M in Series A extension funding. Backers included Bain Capital, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), and Bristol Myers Squibb.
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ Must read writeups
What founders should never automate: Not every startup task should be automated with AI. Some tasks are busywork, while others quietly carry the customer signal founders need to find product-market fit. This piece explains how to separate repeatable work from signal-rich work, so founders can automate the right things without losing the insights that shape the product. (Read Here)
The venture funding barbell: Record venture funding doesn’t mean capital is widely available. Much of the money is flowing into a handful of massive AI companies, while seed and Series A founders face higher traction expectations, longer fundraising cycles, and tougher graduation benchmarks. (Read Here)
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
Marlinspike Partners, an Arlington, Va.-based venture capital firm investing in dual-use technologies with national security and commercial applications, closed Marlinspike Disruptive Technology Fund II, at $127m. Fund II is supported by legacy investors, family offices, Conway Investment Solutions, and institutional investors including Fairfax County Employees’ and Police Officers Retirement Systems.
Magnify Ventures, a Los Angeles, CA-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on transforming the care economy, announced the closing of Fund II, at $46.6m. Backers include returning investor Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates organization, new investors Jordan Park and Unum, with financing from California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank), alongside leading foundations, funds of funds, family offices and other business leaders.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
Vercel CEO says AI infrastructure, not models, will define the next wave
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch says AI is moving from experimentation to production, with coding agents and internal enterprise agents emerging as the two biggest real-world use cases.
He believes companies are shifting away from relying on a single AI provider, instead combining models like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, and GLM-5.2 based on cost and performance.
Rauch argues the long-term battle is separating AI models from agents, positioning Vercel as the infrastructure layer that lets businesses build agentic applications regardless of the underlying model.
Microsoft lays off nearly 5,000 employees across Xbox, commercial sales
Microsoft is cutting around 4,800 jobs (2.1% of its workforce), with Xbox losing 1,600 employees and commercial sales also seeing significant reductions as the company restructures around AI.
The company says the layoffs are not direct AI replacements, but acknowledges AI is changing how work gets done while continuing to invest heavily in AI initiatives like its $2.5 billion Frontier Company.
Xbox will streamline operations by reducing management layers, prioritizing core businesses like Minecraft and Candy Crush, and moving several game studios under new ownership or back to independence.
Reddit uses AI to fight the AI spam problem
Reddit has deployed LLM-powered moderation tools to detect coordinated spam and AI-generated manipulation, blocking around 23 million spam views and removing roughly 25,000 spam posts and comments every day.
The company says the new AI system reduced users’ exposure to spam by 20% in the first quarter by identifying subtle patterns that older moderation systems often missed.
Reddit says AI is becoming essential for content moderation, but notes that human reviewers still play a critical role in handling complex and policy-sensitive decisions.
Amazon's Starlink rival launches internet service this year
Amazon Leo, the company’s answer to Starlink, will start offering limited satellite internet service to US customers later this year, though pricing and coverage details have not yet been decided.
Amazon launched 29 more satellites into low-Earth orbit on Thursday, raising its total to 396, still far behind Starlink’s roughly 10,000 satellites that already reach more than 150 countries.
Leo aims to have 7,727 satellites up by 2035 through nearly 100 scheduled launches costing $82 billion, and it has contracts with JetBlue in 2027 and Delta in 2028.
Judge rejects Elon Musk’s bid to overturn Twitter fraud verdict
A U.S. federal judge upheld a jury verdict finding Elon Musk misled Twitter investors during his 2022 takeover attempt, rejecting his request to overturn the decision and allowing the investor class action to proceed.
The lawsuit alleges Musk falsely raised concerns about spam bots to pressure Twitter into renegotiating the $44 billion acquisition, with potential damages estimated at around $2.6 billion.
The judge also awarded prejudgment interest to investors, while ruling Musk was not liable for one of the challenged tweets due to its limited impact on Twitter’s share price.
Samsung expected to post 18-fold profit surge as AI memory demand booms
Samsung is expected to report an 18-fold jump in second-quarter operating profit to around 86 trillion won ($56.3 billion), driven by soaring demand for AI memory chips and higher DRAM and NAND prices.
Strong demand for AI inference infrastructure and agentic AI applications continues to create a memory supply shortage, with analysts expecting tight market conditions to persist into next year.
While AI remains a major growth driver, analysts warn that any slowdown in AI infrastructure spending could weigh on future demand, even as Samsung expands chip production and signs multi-year supply agreements.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other News
SpaceX burned up 260 Starlink satellites in six months
SpaceX brought 260 Starlink satellites out of orbit to burn up in the atmosphere between December 2025 and May 2026, according to new filings the company submitted to the FCC earlier this month.
Of the 260 satellites that were deorbited, 176 came from the first generation and the rest from the newer generation, while another 349 satellites were decommissioned and are set for disposal soon.
Starlink satellites last about five years, then use their leftover fuel to lower their orbit and re-enter, since recovering the units, which weigh between 573 and 2,756 pounds, would be difficult and costly.
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