☕ Lightspeed raises $9 Billion fund, iRobot files for bankruptcy & Starlink and Chinese satellites nearly collided.
Nvidia considers boosting H200 chip output as China demand surges & More.
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📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: Investor outreach email templates, why lead investors matter, valuing pre-revenue startups, building in public playbook, software getting 10× cheaper, why AI teams hire seniors.
Lightspeed raises record $9B in fresh capital.
Disney’s OpenAI deal is exclusive for just one year — then it’s open season.
Nvidia doubles down on open source with Slurm acquisition and new Nemotron models.
OpenAI hires longtime Google dealmaker to lead corporate development.
Netflix to open physical stores in American malls.
Starlink and Chinese satellites nearly collided.
Nvidia considers boosting H200 chip output as China demand surges.
Roomba maker iRobot files for bankruptcy after 35 years.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
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🗞️ What else is brewing
Investor Outreach Email Sequence Pack: 20+ Proven Templates Used & Approved by VCs. (Link)
Why do VCs care so much about who’s leading your round? (Link)
How investors value pre-revenue startups with an Excel sheet. (Link)
The Founder’s Guide to Building in Public (With 20+ Real Examples) (Link)
Has building software quietly become 10× cheaper overnight? (Link)
Why do AI companies hire fewer juniors and more seniors? (Link)
The only question that predicts startup success. (Link)
Big Ideas 2026 by a16z. (Link)
Debunking the hype of innovation and continuous growth. (Link)
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
Soverli, a Zurich, Switzerland-based cybersecurity company, raised USD 2.6m in pre-seed funding. The pre-seed round was led by Founderful, with participation from the ETH Zurich Foundation, Venture Kick, and other figures in cybersecurity.
Link Cell Therapies, a San Francisco, CA-based oncology cell therapy company, raised $60M in Series A funding. The round was led by Johnson & Johnson, through its corporate venture capital organization, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc. , with participation from founding investors Samsara BioCapital and Sheatree Capital, as well as Wing Venture Capital and other new strategic and financial investors.
HP-1, a London, UK-based startup developing products to stay focused, raised nearly £1M in funding. The round was led by Yianni Charalambous with participation from other investors.
Navier, a San Francisco, CA-based company building autonomous engineering teams for hardware design and development, raised $5.6M in Seed funding. The round was led by GV (Google Ventures), HCVC, and Y Combinator.
Auxira Health, a Chicago, IL-based virtual cardiology company, raised $7.8M in Seed funding. The round was led by Route 66 Ventures and Abundant Venture Partners with participation from DigiTx Partners, American Heart Association Ventures, Ensemble Innovation Ventures, and City Light Capital.
Octane, a NYC-based fintech company that aims to improve the buying experience across recreational activities, raised $100M in Series F funding. The round was led by Valar Ventures with participation from Upper90, Huntington Bank, Camping World and Good Sam, Holler-Classic, and others.
Chai Discovery, a San Francisco, CA-based AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules, raised $130M in Series B funding, at $1.3 Billion valuation. The round was led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, with participation from Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Menlo Ventures, Lachy Groom, Yosemite, Neo, and SV Angel. New investors Emerson Collective and Glade Brook also joined the round.
Mirelo, a Berlin, Germany-based audio company generating synchronized sound effects for videos, raised $41M in Seed funding. The round was led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Atlantic.vc and TriplePoint Capital.
AIR, a NYC-based provider of an AI-powered credit intelligence platform, raised $6.1M in Seed funding. The round was led by Work-Bench Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.
LI.FI, a Berlin, Germany-based provider of a toolkit that enables developers to build on-chain swaps and cross-chain bridging within their applications, raised $29M in Series A funding. The round was led by Multicoin and CoinFund, bringing total capital raised to $51.7M.
Alphyn Biologics, an Annapolis, MD-based clinical-stage dermatology company, raised $25M, in Series B funding. The round was led by QCA Investment Group and included existing investors Angel Physicians Fund, Serial Stage Venture Partners, a corporate fund, and new investors.
PolyAI, a NYC-based company which specializes in enterprise conversational AI, raised $86M in Series D funding. The round was led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla Ventures. Additional investors included NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), British Business Bank, Citi Ventures, Squarepoint Ventures, Sands Capital, Zendesk Ventures, and Point72 Ventures.
Athian, an Indianapolis, IN-based company that provides a platform developing tools supporting GHG emission reductions, raised $4M in Series A funding. Backers included Ajinomoto Group Ventures, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Cultivate Next Fund, and Mondelēz International, through its investing platform, Sustainable Futures.
Trustyfy, a Tallinn, Estonia-based company offering DeFi banking services to businesses and individuals, has raised $6.8M in seed funding. The round was led by Tokenee Select and the Sixth Society Angel Syndicate.
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With peak fundraising starting in January, founders who show up early with a sharp deck and strong-fit matches get real conversations faster. Start the year ready to raise.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
Lightspeed just raised a record $9B across six funds, marking the largest raise in its 25-year history. Now positioned as a leading AI investor, it’s backed Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Glean, and more — even co-leading a $13B round for Anthropic. The raise includes a $3.3B opportunity fund for follow-on bets in breakout portfolio companies. As LPs consolidate capital into top firms, Lightspeed joins a select club alongside a16z, Founders Fund, and General Catalyst.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
Disney’s OpenAI deal is exclusive for just one year — then it’s open season
Disney’s three year licensing partnership with OpenAI includes only one year of exclusivity, after which Disney is free to strike similar deals with other AI companies, CEO Bob Iger confirmed.
The deal allows OpenAI’s Sora to legally use more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars, giving OpenAI a short term edge as the only approved platform.
Disney is using the partnership as a controlled experiment with generative AI, weighing future agreements even as it simultaneously challenges Google over alleged copyright infringement.
Nvidia doubles down on open source with Slurm acquisition and new Nemotron models
Nvidia acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, a critical open source workload manager used across high performance computing and AI infrastructure. Nvidia says Slurm will remain open source and vendor neutral, signaling it wants to sit at the center of AI infrastructure, not lock it in.
Alongside the acquisition, Nvidia launched Nemotron 3, a new family of open AI models designed for agentic systems, ranging from lightweight task specific models to large multi agent and complex reasoning models.
The move shows Nvidia’s broader strategy: make its GPUs, software, and open models the default foundation for next generation AI and physical AI systems like robotics and autonomous vehicles.
OpenAI hires longtime Google dealmaker to lead corporate development
OpenAI has appointed Albert Lee, a senior corporate development leader from Google, as vice president of corporate development, reporting to CFO Sarah Friar.
At Google, Lee led corporate development for Google Cloud and DeepMind and worked on more than 60 acquisitions and strategic investments worth over $50 billion.
The hire signals OpenAI’s push to strengthen M&A and strategic partnerships as it scales, following recent senior business hires from Amazon and xAI.
Netflix to open physical stores in American malls
Netflix is converting empty department stores at American malls into permanent entertainment venues called Netflix House that feature branded shops, themed restaurants, and live experiences based on its hit shows.
Inside the 100,000-square-foot space, visitors can try a One Piece escape room, walk through a Wednesday festival, buy Squid Game merch, or eat a Hellfire Club sandwich at the sports bar.
The project fits a growing trend of experiential retail where landlords replace shuttered anchors with interactive options like slime museums to attract foot traffic back to the huge shopping complex.
Starlink and Chinese satellites nearly collided
A SpaceX internet satellite avoided a Chinese spacecraft by just 200 meters in low Earth orbit, prompting a Starlink executive to call for better coordination between operators to prevent future crashes.
Michael Nicolls wrote that no deconfliction was performed, while CAS Space says it used a ground-based awareness system to select launch windows that avoid hitting any known satellites or space debris.
CAS Space notes the incident occurred 48 hours after payload separation, highlighting traffic risks as 13,000 satellites are now in Earth orbit, almost four times more than the number in 2020.
Nvidia considers boosting H200 chip output as China demand surges
After US approval to sell H200 GPUs to China with a 25% revenue cut, Nvidia is seeing strong interest from Chinese tech companies and is weighing an increase in production capacity.
The H200 is far more powerful than the China-specific H20 chips, making it attractive for companies like Alibaba and ByteDance that are racing to train advanced AI models.
While demand is high, Chinese regulators still need to greenlight imports, and Nvidia says expanding H200 supply will not affect shipments to US customers.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other news
Roomba maker iRobot files for bankruptcy after 35 years
The Roomba maker has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after 35 years and says it will be wholly acquired by Shenzhen Picea Robotics and its subsidiary, Santrum Hong Kong.
Problems got worse when EU regulators blocked a $1.7 billion Amazon deal in January, causing shares to fall to just $1.40 and leaving the firm with less than $25 million to survive.
iRobot assures that it will continue operating without any anticipated disruptions to app functionality and product support for current customers, even as its common stock is wiped from stock exchanges.
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)
Associate - Allocator One | UK - Apply Here
AI Lead / Technical Builder - Pan Adria Partner | USA - Apply Here
Associate, Secondary Investments - Adam Street Partner | USA - Apply Here
Chief of Staff – DeVC - Z47 | India - Apply Here
VC Investment Intern - First Momentum Venture | USA - Apply Here
VC Investor - Quamtum Light | UK - Apply Here
Head of Operations - Sagest Capital | USA - Apply Here
Portfolio Management Lead - Yzi Labs | Remote - Apply Here
Office Manager - Seedcamp | USA - Apply Here
(Senior) Investment Manager - Finch Capital | USA - Apply Here
Partner - a16z | USA - Apply Here
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