☕ Anthropic wants to develop its own drugs & ByteDance discovers new scaling law that could sustain the AI boom.
Meta says its next AI matches GPT-5.5 performance & Alibaba bans employees from using Claude Code.
Breaking News
Anthropic plans to move beyond AI software and develop its own drugs, building wet labs and hiring biologists and pharma researchers. The shift could put the AI company in direct competition with the pharmaceutical industry instead of simply selling AI tools to it.
ByteDance researchers claim AI agents can double their learning speed every three months through long-term real-world interactions, offering a potential path beyond traditional scaling with more data and compute. If validated, the finding could reshape how next-generation AI systems are trained.
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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
BrainsMingle, a Cairo, Egypt-based developer of an AI-driven, video-first professional networking platform, raised $400K in Seed funding. Backers included BasharSoft Group.
PlayBlue, a Bengaluru, India-based developer of an omnichannel multi-brand sports retail platform, raised $2.7M in Seed funding. The round was co-led by Centre Court Capital and MIXI Global Investments, with participation from WEH Ventures.
Ora Computing, a Vienna, Austria-based developer of quantum-inspired AI model compression software and edge deployment architectures, raised €3.5M in Seed funding. The round was co-led by Constructor Capital and Greencode Ventures, with participation from XISTA Science Ventures.
GROWTH
Venice AI, a remote and distributed developer of a privacy-focused generative AI and decentralized model inference platform, raised $65M in Series A funding. The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures.
Alva Industries, a Trondheim, Norway-based deep-tech company developing ultra-compact electric motors, raised €16M in funding. The round was led by Nysnø Climate Investments, Sandwater, and Emerald Technology Ventures, on behalf of Nabtesco Technology Ventures, with participation from Statkraft Ventures and EnvisionTech.
Quantum Systems, a Munich, Germany-based developer of AI-powered autonomous drones and software-defined defense systems, raised $1.2B in Series D funding. The round was co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent International, with participation from BOND, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Wellington Management, A.P. Moller Holding, Elephant Lake Ventures, Balderton Capital, and HV Capital.
Celea Therapeutics, a Boston, MA-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, closed $180M in financing. Participants included RA Capital Management, Leaps by Bayer, and PureTech Health, alongside a U.S.-based healthcare-focused fund and a sovereign wealth fund.
Ubotica Technologies, a Dublin, Ireland-based developer of orbital AI software, raised $11M in funding. Backers included Act Venture Capital, Greencode Ventures, and Atlantic Bridge.
StirlingX, an Oxford, UK-based developer of sovereign data intelligence and threat autonomy platforms, raised $20M in Series A funding. The round was led by Ventura Capital and RCM Private Markets Master Fund, with continued backing from its founding venture builder ecosystem.
Xellar Biosystems, a Boston, MA-based AI-driven biotech company advancing a 3D Bio Intelligence platform, raised $50M in Series A and A+ financing. Backers were undisclosed.
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ Must read writeups
Automate your startup fundraising with Claude: Founders can use Claude to rank investors, shape their deck narrative, draft better outreach, plan follow-ups, and pressure-test investor questions before real meetings. This piece breaks down a simple three-bucket framework: fully automate research, let AI draft but humans send outreach, and never automate the actual relationship-building part of fundraising. (Read Here)
How to build faster with AI: AI has removed many of the old barriers to building software, but it has also made it easier to build the wrong thing faster. This piece breaks down how founders should use AI across idea validation, MVP development, launch systems, and scale - without falling into the trap of confusing speed with real demand. (Read Here)
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
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
Midjourney asks Hollywood studios to disclose their own AI use
Midjourney is asking a court to require Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to reveal how they use AI internally as part of an ongoing copyright lawsuit over AI-generated images.
The AI startup argues the studios may be using AI in similar ways for storyboarding and content development, which could support its fair use defense.
Midjourney is also seeking access to all prompts and generated outputs the studios created with its platform, while the studios maintain the lawsuit is about protecting copyrighted characters from unauthorized AI-generated copies.
Alibaba bans employees from using Claude Code
Alibaba will reportedly ban employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code starting July 10, classifying the AI coding tool as high-risk software.
The move follows Anthropic’s efforts to tighten access to its models in China and close loopholes that allowed unauthorized usage and potential model distillation.
Alibaba is directing employees to use its in-house AI coding assistant, Qoder, instead of Claude Code.
Google Maps is building in-app food ordering
Google Maps is preparing an in-app food ordering feature, which would place your order on your behalf so that it’s ready by the time you arrive at the restaurant.
The clues turned up in a new version of Google Maps for Android, where new text strings describe the feature, though no actual food ordering options are live in the app yet.
It remains unclear whether the ordering would be handled by Gemini in the cloud, or depend on specific smartphone hardware, as seen with Gemini’s agentic ordering on the Pixel 10 series.
Chipmakers urge White House to leave the memory market alone
SEMI, a chip industry group representing major semiconductor firms and memory makers, has sent a letter to the White House asking it not to intervene in the memory market in ways that distort pricing or capacity choices.
The letter, addressed to four Trump administration secretaries, instead pushed for narrower steps like tax deductions or credits to lower consumer electronics prices and defended the long-term purchase contracts some companies use to source memory chips.
SEMI, which counts Micron, SK hynix, and Samsung as members, said the industry expects to grow memory production capacity by 19% annually, yet demand is still expected to exceed supply for the foreseeable future.
Meta says its next AI matches GPT-5.5 performance
Meta’s superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang told employees in an internal town hall that the company’s upcoming AI model, codenamed Watermelon, has caught up with OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5.5 model on closely followed AI benchmarks he did not name.
Wang said Watermelon, the next model after one codenamed Avocado, is currently in training and uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado, Meta’s internal codename for Muse Spark, released in April.
In a post on X, Wang said a Muse Spark update is coming soon with gains in coding and agentic capabilities, and told a user a coding model on par with Anthropic’s Claude Opus would arrive “pretty soon.”
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other News
Amazon begins winding down Mechanical Turk
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30, marking the beginning of the end for its two-decade-old crowdsourcing platform, though existing customers can continue using it.
The service, launched in 2005, became widely known for paying workers to complete small tasks such as data labeling and AI training, but Amazon says it has no plans to add new features.
The decision comes as AI automation, fraud, and declining platform activity have reduced Mechanical Turk’s relevance, with many users believing the platform has been in decline for years.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
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