☕ DeepSeek launches two new AI models to rival OpenAI, Samsung unveils first multi-folding phone & US wants laws to force App Store age checks.
OpenAI’s investment into Thrive Holdings is its latest circular deal & Nvidia announces new open AI models.
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📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: Startup legal docs for founders, user research without users, enterprise AI adoption insights, unicorn comeback guide, $1B founder’s fundraising playbook.
OpenAI’s investment into Thrive Holdings is its latest circular deal.
Nvidia announces new open AI models and tools for autonomous driving research.
US wants laws to force App Store age checks.
DeepSeek launches two new AI models to rival OpenAI.
Runway’s new AI beats Google and OpenAI in video benchmarks.
Samsung unveils first multi-folding phone as competition set to heat up.
India demands Apple preinstall government security app onto iPhones.
Apple just named a new AI chief with Google and Microsoft expertise, as John Giannandrea steps down.
MKBHD’s wallpaper app Panels is shutting down.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
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🗞️ What else is brewing
Break into VC: A Curated Resources – Guide by Leading Venture Capitalists. (Link)
Tech predictions for 2026 and beyond. (Link)
40 real startup pitch decks that raised $350M+ (Including leading startups decks) (Link)
NVIDIA backs nearly every major AI player except Anthropic. (Link)
AI trends in Q3 2025. (Link)
The productivity paradox of AI coding assistants. (Link)
Gen Z is facing record challenges in today’s labour market in the AI economy. (Link)
AI landing page analyser. (Link)
Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? (Link)
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
Jeeva AI, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an AI platform that enahnces productivity for sales teams, raised $9m in funding. The round was led by JLL Spark with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Alt Capital (Jack Altman, Sam Altman’s brother), Launch Capital, GTMFund, Nonstop Capital, Coyote Capital, Bonfire Ventures, Techstars, Marc Benioff, and Mucker Capital.
Nevis, a NYC-based provider of an AI platform for wealth management, raised $35M in Series A funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ and Ribbit Capital.
Mixx Technologies, a San Jose, CA-based optical connectivity company for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, raised $33M in Series funding. The round was led by ICM HPQC Fund, with participation from TDK Ventures, Systemiq Capital, Banpu Innovation and Ventures, G Vision Capital, Ajinomoto Group Ventures, AVITIC Innovation Fund, and other strategic partners.
Tutor Intelligence, a Watertown, MA-based provider of an AI-powered fleet of warehouse robot workers, raised $34M in Series A funding. The round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Fundomo, and Neo, which led Tutor’s Seed round.
Circular Genomics, a San Diego, CA-based developer of circular RNA-based precision medicine tools for neurology and psychiatry, raised $15M in Series A funding. The round was led by Mountain Group Partners, with participation from Poplar Grove Investors, HIP Fund, and the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF).
Raindrop, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a monitoring platform for AI agents, raised $15M in Seed funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Figma Ventures, Vercel Ventures, founders of Replit (Amjad Masad and Michele Castata), Cognition (Walden Yan), Framer (Koen Bok and Joen van Dijk), Speak (Andrew Hsu), Notion (Akshay Kothari), and YC.
Morphocell Technologies Inc., a Montreal, Canada-based biotechnology company providing tissue therapeutics for organ replacement, raised US$10M in Series A extension funding. The round was led by Investissement Québec, and CDP Venture Capital.
Sokin, a London, UK-based provider of a platform that streamlines cross-border accounts payable, receivable, and treasury operations for global businesses, raised $50M in Series B funding. The round was led by Prysm Capital and Watershed Ventures, with participation from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, Aurum Partners, Gary Marino, former Chief Commercial Officer at PayPal and Mark Britto, former Chief Product Officer at PayPal.
Xposure Music, a Montreal, Canada-based technology-driven financing and investment platform for independent artists, raised $42.5M USD in debt and equity funding. The round included debt financing from Andalusian Credit Partners and equity participation from select family offices and private investors.
Protego Biopharma, Inc., a San Diego, CA-based clinical-stage biotechnology company, closed a $130m Series B financing. The round was led by Novartis Venture Fund and Forbion, with participation from new investors including Omega Funds, Droia Ventures, YK Bioventures, and Digitalis Ventures. Existing investors, including Vida Ventures, MPM BioImpact, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Scripps Research, also participated.
Adcities, a Madrid, Spain-based adtech startup, raised over €3m in seed funding. The round was led by Adara Ventures with participation from PlusPartners and Bynd, and angels including Albert Nieto (co-founder of Seedtag) and Scott Painter (global mobility leader and founder of TrueCar and Fair).
Onton, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a search and discovery engine for products, raised $7.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Footwork with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, 43 and others.
Black Forest Labs, a Freiburg, Germany-based visual intelligence company, raised $300M in Series B funding, at $3.25B valuation. The round was led by AMP and Salesforce Ventures.
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NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
OpenAI’s investment into Thrive Holdings is its latest circular deal
OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings and will embed its engineers and researchers inside Thrive-owned companies to accelerate AI adoption, creating value that grows OpenAI’s own stake.
The structure mirrors OpenAI’s recent circular deals — such as investing in CoreWeave, which then buys Nvidia chips to power OpenAI — raising questions about interdependence and how much success is organic versus engineered.
Thrive disputes the “circular” label, saying the partnership meets real market demand, but analysts note that overlapping ownership makes it harder to judge whether these businesses can scale profitably without OpenAI’s direct involvement.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
Nvidia announces new open AI models and tools for autonomous driving research
Nvidia unveiled Alpamayo-R1, the first open reasoning vision-language action model designed specifically for autonomous driving, aimed at giving vehicles more “common-sense” decision-making on the road.
The model builds on Nvidia’s Cosmos-Reason family and comes with a new Cosmos Cookbook — guides, workflows, and resources to help developers train and customize these models using curated and synthetic data.
The launch reflects Nvidia’s push into “physical AI,” with CEO Jensen Huang positioning advanced AI models and GPUs as the future brains of robots and autonomous systems.
US wants laws to force App Store age checks
The App Store Accountability Act requires app storefronts like the App Store and Google Play to verify the age of all users while linking minor accounts to a guardian for parental consent on purchases.
Social networks like Pinterest endorsed the bill because centralized age checks effectively shift the blame for moderation lapses onto Apple and Google rather than the creator apps and services actually hosting the content.
Although Apple already provides Family Sharing tools to limit mature content, the bill ignores that strict storefront verification cannot stop a child from accessing explicit material through an account registered to an adult.
DeepSeek launches two new AI models to rival OpenAI
The Chinese startup released DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2 Speciale to challenge western supremacy, and the standard version has already replaced the V3.2-Experimental model as the default choice on its website and app.
DeepSeek-V3.2 Speciale beat GPT-5 High on pure math benchmarks like AIME and achieved gold-medal performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, while also defeating every other AI model listed on CodeForces.
This new model scored higher than GPT-5 High on Humanity’s Last Exam but fell behind Gemini 3 Pro, and it is currently restricted to API use rather than regular users.
Runway’s new AI beats Google and OpenAI in video benchmarks
Runway released Gen-4.5 to claim the top spot on the Video Arena leaderboard, displacing Google’s Veo 3 and pushing OpenAI’s Sora 2 Pro to seventh place with a score derived from blind A/B testing.
The startup optimized inference for NVIDIA’s new Blackwell architecture to build world models that understand physics, allowing objects to move with realistic weight and momentum while surface details maintain coherence during rapid camera movements.
CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela says his team of 100 people out-competed trillion-dollar generalist AI labs by focusing exclusively on video dynamics rather than spreading resources across text, code, and multimodal research.
Samsung unveils first multi-folding phone as competition set to heat up
Samsung introduced the Galaxy Z TriFold, its first multi-folding smartphone, priced at 3.59M won (~$2,440), featuring a 10-inch display made from three panels — aimed more as a tech showcase than a mass-market device.
The TriFold launches December 12 in South Korea, with China, Singapore, Taiwan, UAE later this year and a U.S. rollout expected in early 2026; rising component costs made pricing a challenge.
Competition in foldables is escalating with Huawei’s earlier three-way foldable and Apple expected to enter next year, but analysts say the category will remain niche at under 3% market share by 2027 due to high prices and production limits.
India demands Apple preinstall government security app onto iPhones
India’s telecoms ministry has directed smartphone makers to preload the Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity application on all new devices within 90 days while also deploying it to existing handsets via software updates.
The mandate poses a specific challenge for Apple because the company strictly blocks third-party tools on iPhones before sale and has fought a previous request to develop a specific anti-spam app.
Officials say the tool prevents IMEI tampering and helps recover lost phones, yet privacy advocates warn that forcing a system-level installation with no deletion options effectively eliminates meaningful consumer choice.
Apple just named a new AI chief with Google and Microsoft expertise, as John Giannandrea steps down
Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down after a rocky rollout of Apple Intelligence; he’ll advise through spring and be replaced by Amar Subramanya, a veteran of Google and Microsoft who most recently led engineering for the Gemini Assistant.
The leadership change follows major internal struggles — failed Siri revamps, embarrassing AI errors, delayed launches, and an exodus of researchers — with reports that Giannandrea had already been sidelined months earlier.
Subramanya now faces the challenge of helping Apple catch up in AI while the company balances its privacy-first, on-device strategy against rivals’ far more powerful cloud-based models.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other news
MKBHD’s wallpaper app Panels is shutting down
Panels, Marques Brownlee’s high-profile wallpaper app, is closing on December 31, 2025 after failing to find a sustainable paying audience, despite strong initial hype and a #1 launch on app stores.
The app’s business model — selling premium artist-made wallpapers for $12/month or $50/year — struggled as consumers are used to free wallpapers, leading to just 900,000 downloads and $95,000 in lifetime spend.
Panels will refund annual subscribers, delete all user data after shutdown, and open-source its code so others can build on the project.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
💼 Today’s VC & startup job opportunities
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