☕ Apple just delayed the iPhone Air 2 indefinitely, Intel CTO quits to join OpenAI & SoftBank’s $5.8 billion Nvidia stake sale.
Meta plans $600 billion US spend as AI data centers expand & Nvidia CEO Huang sees strong demand for Blackwell chips.
Honey basically never expires.
Archaeologists have found jars of it from ancient Egypt, still perfectly edible.
It’s sugar, science, and a little bit of bee magic, the only food that could outlive your situationship. (I said what I said.)
📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: Startup legal docs for founders, YC’s MVP customer strategy, engineering-as-marketing playbook, valuation guide, Reddit-hacked $1M SaaS story.
OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says.
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun reportedly plans to leave to build his own startup.
Apple just delayed the iPhone Air 2 indefinitely.
Anthropic is on track to profit faster than OpenAI.
Meta is killing off the external Facebook Like button.
SoftBank’s $5.8 billion Nvidia stake sale stirs fresh AI bubble fears.
Intel CTO and AI boss quits to join OpenAI.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
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DAILY PICKS
🗞️ What else is brewing
Startup legal document pack – essential legal docs for founders. (Link)
Michael Seibel literally reveals how YC founders find their first customers for MVPs. (Link)
Engineering-as-Marketing: The growth strategy most startups overlook. (Link)
This is what every founder should know about valuation. (Link)
This founder literally hacked Reddit and built a $1 million SaaS. (Link)
Excel template: early-stage startup financial model for fundraising. (Link)
The number one fundraising mistake founders make. (Link)
How You.com Survived ChatGPT With a Pivot to Enterprise AI — Lessons for Founders. (Link)
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
EVE, a San Francisco, CA-based inbox revenue engine for B2B small businesses, raised $2M in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Firsthand.VC, with participation from a16z’s Scout Fund, Acquisition.com Ventures, Geek Ventures, Founders Future, Punch Capital, Silicon Gardens and angels, including co-founders of Slack and Hugging Face, and the former CEO of Oura.
Uare.ai (formerly Eternos.life), a Palo Alto, CA-based startup that creates Individual AIs, raised $10.3m in seed funding. The round was led by Mayfield and Boldstart Ventures, with participation from additional strategic investors.
Qorium, a Maastricht, Netherlands-based biotechnology company advancing cultivated leather, raised €22m in funding. Backers included Invest-NL and LIOF, as well as existing investors Brightlands Venture Partners and Sofinnova Partners.
NextSense, a Mountain View, CA-based wearable EEG technology company, closed a $16m Series A funding round. The round was led by Ascension Ventures, with participation from investors including Satori Neuro and Corundrum Neuroscience Fund (CNS), and individual investors include David Eagleman, PhD, neuroscientist at Stanford University; Esther Dyson, founder of Wellville; and Bradley Horowitz, General Partner at Wisdom Ventures and former Google Vice President of Product.
Neros, an El Segundo, CA-based supplier of FPV drones to the U.S. Army through the purpose-built attritable systems (PBAS) program, raised $75M in Series B funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Vy Capital US and Interlagos.
Iambic, a San Diego, CA-based clinical-stage life science and technology company developing novel medicines using its AI-driven discovery and development platform, raised over $100M in funding. Backers included Abingworth, Alexandria Venture Investments, Alumni Ventures, ARK, Ascenta, Catalio, Everbright Biofund, Freeflow Ventures, Illumina Ventures, Mubadala, Pegasus Tech Ventures.
AirOps, a NYC-based provider of a content engineering platform for AI search, raised $40M in Series B funding. The round was led by Greylock, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, XFund, Village Global VC, and Frontline VC.
Majestic Labs, a Hod HaSharon, Israel-based developer of new servers delivering memory capacity services for AI workloads, raised $100M in funding. Bakers included Bow Wave Capital, who led the company’s Series A, and Lux Capital, who led the previous Seed round. In addition, SBI, Upfront, Grove Ventures, Hetz Ventures, QP Ventures, Aidenlair Global and TAL Ventures participated.
BITE Data, a Leesburg, VA-based AI-native SaaS company, raised $2.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Las Olas Venture Capital(LOVC).
Spectral Compute, a London, UK-based company behind SCALE, a software framework that enables CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) applications to run on any GPU, raised $6M seed in funding. The round led by Costanoa, with participation from Crucible and angel investors.
TRIP, a NYC-based drinks brand, raised $40M in funding. Backers included Joe Jonas, Alessandra Ambrosio, Paul Wesley, Ashley Graham, and consumer fund Coefficient Capital.
Arkyn, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based provider of a digital platform for asset maintenance operations on top of SAP, raised €4M in funding. The round was led by Compounding Capital and Trifork Labs.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
Glasswing Ventures, a Boston, MA-based vc firm focused on AI-native and Frontier Technology startups, closed its Fund III, at over $200m. Existing and new limited partners participated in the raise. Fund III will continue to invest in enterprise applications, cybersecurity innovations, and AI-native productivity and automation, including ERP, procurement, and workflow systems.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says
A Munich court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from nine songs, including works by popular musician Herbert Groenemeyer, after using them in model training.
The case, brought by Germany’s music rights body GEMA, marks one of Europe’s first major legal victories against AI firms over data scraping; OpenAI was ordered to pay damages, with exact figures undisclosed.
GEMA called the decision a precedent-setting win for creators, while OpenAI said it disagreed with the ruling and may appeal, arguing that outputs depend on user prompts rather than stored copies of training data.
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun reportedly plans to leave to build his own startup
Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner, is reportedly planning to leave the company in the coming months to launch a startup focused on developing “world models,” AI systems that simulate cause-and-effect to predict outcomes.
His departure follows internal tension at Meta’s AI divisions, as the company reorganizes under its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) led by Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, sidelining LeCun’s long-term research group, FAIR.
LeCun, a vocal critic of current LLM hype, has argued that AI still lacks fundamental intelligence, joking that no one has yet designed a system “smarter than a house cat.”
Apple just delayed the iPhone Air 2 indefinitely
Apple reportedly notified engineers and suppliers that the iPhone Air 2 is off the schedule indefinitely, a rare move that postpones its launch alongside the new iPhone 18 Pro.
This decision is linked to lower-than-expected sales of the first model, causing partners Foxconn and Luxshare to halt or dismantle their existing iPhone Air production lines completely.
The now-delayed device was planned to be lighter with a larger battery capacity and was also set to include the vapor chamber cooling system from the iPhone 17 Pro.
Anthropic is on track to profit faster than OpenAI
Anthropic’s financial road map shows the startup expects to break even for the first time in 2028, driven by business users adopting its Claude chatbot for coding tasks.
By contrast, OpenAI forecasts its operating losses will swell to about $74 billion that same year due to ballooning spending on computing costs, delaying profitability until at least 2030.
OpenAI’s aggressive plan requires investing far more in chips and data centers and doling out more stock-based compensation in a high-risk strategy to set the pace of the AI boom.
Meta is killing off the external Facebook Like button
Meta announced its external Like and Share buttons will be discontinued for third-party sites, with the social plugins set to disappear from the internet on February 10, 2026.
After the discontinue date, any remaining plugins will “gracefully degrade” on websites by automatically rendering as a 0x0 invisible element, requiring no immediate action from site admins for removal.
The company explained that the tools reflect an “earlier era of web development” as their usage has naturally declined over time while the digital landscape and Meta’s business has evolved.
SoftBank’s $5.8 billion Nvidia stake sale stirs fresh AI bubble fears
SoftBank’s $5.8 billion sale of its entire Nvidia stake sent shockwaves through the market, triggering fears that the AI boom may be overheating amid warnings from Wall Street leaders and short-seller Michael Burry.
The move aims to fund CEO Masayoshi Son’s massive AI ambitions, including up to $40 billion for OpenAI and the $500 billion Stargate data-center project, though investors questioned whether Son is selling near the top of the market.
Nvidia shares dipped over 2%, and AI cloud provider CoreWeave’s stock dropped 9% after a forecast cut, deepening concern that valuations across the AI sector may have outpaced real-world fundamentals.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other news
Intel CTO and AI boss quits to join OpenAI
Sachin Katti, who served as Intel’s chief technology officer and head of artificial intelligence, has officially departed the chipmaker to accept a new position with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan will now personally oversee the company’s artificial intelligence and Advanced Technologies Groups, taking direct control of the team following the high-level executive’s departure.
At OpenAI, Katti will be designing and building the compute infrastructure needed to power the firm’s artificial general intelligence research and scale its applications for widespread use.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
💼 Today’s VC & startup job opportunities
All-In-One VC Interview Preparation Guide: With a leading investors group, we have created an all-in-one VC interview preparation guide for aspiring VCs. Don’t miss this. (Access Here)
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Associate - Venture Capital - Artha Venture Fund | India - Apply Here
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Analyst / Associate - Core Innovation Capital | USA - Apply Here
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VC Associate UK - Breega | UK - Apply Here
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