☕ Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines launches it's first product, Anthropic hires new CTO & New spacecraft aims for one hour global delivery.
Instagram head denies using your microphone to listen & more.
Google Images was created after Jennifer Lopez wore *that* infamous dress at the 2000 Grammys.
So many people were searching for her outfit, the search engine added an image function.
Love or hate this intro? Hit reply and tell us why!
📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: Secretive VC behind Elon Musk, AI agent startups at $500M ARR, AI vibe analysis.
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines launches AI tool Tinker.
OpenAI is the world’s most valuable private company after private stock sale.
Perplexity acquires the team behind Sequoia-backed AI design startup Visual Electric.
OpenAI’s Sora soars to No. 3 on the US App Store.
Major music labels are close to AI deals.
New spacecraft aims for one hour global delivery.
Instagram head denies using your microphone to listen.
Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
RESOURCES FOR FOUNDERS
📃 Access Expertly Curated Resources
Most resources online are generic. We’ve built and curated the ones that actually matter — with input from leading VC firms and founders who’ve raised millions (and some who bootstrapped).
Here’s what’s new (and improved) in our resources:
💰 Fundraising Tools
📊 Strategic Templates
📩 Communication Tools
📄 Legal & Operational
PARTNERSHIP WITH US
💪 Get your startup in front of over 95,000+ audience.
Our newsletter is read by thousands of tech professionals, founders, investors (VCs / Angel Investors) and managers around the world. Get in touch today.
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ What else is brewing
The secretive VC firm behind Elon Musk’s empire.
How AI agent startups hit $500M ARR in 2 years.
Vibe Analysis: AI is about to change how we work with data.
ESOP Value Calculator Template: How to communicate ESOP value to your team.
Startup legal document pack – essential legal docs for founders.
Tom Bilyeu’s $100,000 validation test before you build anything.
The 5-step cold email playbook every founder should copy.
The only startup valuation guide you need as a founder.
Step-by-step GTM funnel to close your first 10 B2B deals.
How YC startups design LLM prompts that behave like agents.
Investor data room guide & templates for founders.
Y-Combinator Fall 2025 request for startups.
The CRM template every founder needs before starting their fundraise.
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
Significo, an Austin, TX-based health AI and digital therapeutics company, closed its Series B financing round of undisclosed amount. The round was led by JSTAR Capital Investments’ Horizon Fund II, a premier growth investor in healthcare innovation.
Cirrus Therapeutics, a Cambridge, MA-based ocular immunology-focused biotech company, closed an $11m seed financing. The round was led by ClavystBio, with participation from Polaris Partners and SEEDS.
DualEntry, a NYC-based provider of an AI-native ERP platform, raised $90m in Series A funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Contrary, and Vesey Ventures. This brings total funding raised to over $100m in the last 15 months.
DEXA, a Dayton, OH-based autonomous drone delivery company, closed a $15M Seed funding round. The round, raised in three stages (2021, 2023 and 2025), each totaling $5M, was led by G2A Investment Partners, with participation from Venture 53 and Tech Square Ventures’ Engage Fund.
Pacaso, a San Francisco, CA-based tech-enabled marketplace for co-owned luxury vacation homes, closed its SEC-qualified Regulation A+ growth round, raising over $72.5m from more than 17,500 individual investors. The raise, powered by DealMaker, brought Pacaso’s total equity funding to more than $300m.
Cartograpgy, a San Francisco, CA-based oncology company advancing a pipeline of T-cell engaging bispecific and multi-specific antibody therapeutics that target novel and highly specific tumor antigens, raised $67M in Series B funding. The round was led by Pfizer Ventures awith participation from new investors LG Corp, Amgen Ventures, Finchley H.V., Global BioAccess Fund, and Lotte Holdings CVC, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, 8VC, Wing Venture Capital, Catalio Capital Management, AME Cloud Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, and Gaingels.
Voltai, a Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada-based cleantech company focused on ocean and renewable energy solutions, raised CAD$1.83M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Invest Nova Scotia with participation from an angel investor group headed by Mahir Sahin, former advisor to Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory X (formerly Google X), and founder of Cloudberry Ventures.
Feedzai, a Lisbon, Portugal-based provider of an AI-native RiskOps platform for financial crime prevention, raised $75M in funding. The round was led by Lince Capital, Iberis Capital, and Explorer Investments, with backing from Oxy Capital and Buenavista Equity Partners.
OncoC4, a Rockville, a MD-based clinical-stage biotechnology company, raised nearly $50M in Series B funding. The round was led by GBA Fund, and supported by additional capital from the company’s co-founders and existing investors, including HM Capital, 3E Bioventures Capital and Kaitai Capital.
kiutra, a Munich, Germany-based provider of magnetic cooling for quantum technologies, closed a €13m equity funding round. The round was co-led by NovaCapital and 55 North, alongside participation from High-Tech Gründerfonds and other existing backers.
TiHive, a Grenoble, France-based company which specializes in industrial inspection solutions, raised €8M in funding. The round was led by Karista, Wind, and the EIC Fund.
Saga, an Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based provider of d lawyer-centric AI platform, raised over €1.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by backed by Dutch and Norwegian investors.
Cyvl, a Boston, MA-based AI infrastructure intelligence platform provider, raised $14M in Series A funding. The round was led by Sentinel Global.
Ansa Biotechnologies, an Emeryville, CA-based DNA synthesis company, raised $54.4M in Series B funding. The round was led by Cerberus Ventures with participation from Blue Water Life Science Advisors, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Fall Line Capital, AIM13, and Black Opal Ventures.
CyberCube, a San Francisco, CA-based cyber risk modeling and analytics company, received over $180M by Spectrum Equity. With this investment, Spectrum Equity will join existing investors ForgePoint Capital, Hudson Structured Capital Management (Bermuda) Ltd, and MTech Capital, as a cornerstone institutional investor.
Composite, a San Francisco, CA-based startup automating the browser to eliminate digital work, raised $5.6M in Seed funding. The round was led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross of NFDG, with participation from Menlo Ventures and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund.
Einride, a Stockholm, Sweden-based technology company providing autonomous solutions for road freight, raised $100M in funding. Backers included EQT Ventures, IonQ (who made an investment earlier this year) and other unnamed investors.
FROM OUR PARTNER - MECO
The best new app for newsletter reading
Reading newsletters in the inbox is frustrating - it is noisy and easy to lose control of subscriptions. Now with Meco you can enjoy your newsletters in an app built for reading, while giving your inbox space to breathe.
Meco connects to Gmail & Outlook, allowing you to instantly move your newsletters to the app (and clear your inbox)
The experience is packed with features to supercharge your reading including the ability to group newsletters, set smart filters, bookmark your favorites and read in a scrollable feed.
You can try the experience for free and available on iOS, Android and web (desktop)
Over 30k readers are enjoying their newsletters (and decluttering their inbox) with Meco - try the app today!
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
American Exceptionalism, a SPAC launched by VC Chamath Palihapitiya, has gone public with $345 million raised. The SPAC, aimed at acquiring startups in energy, AI, crypto/DeFi, or defense, is 98.7% institutionally backed. Palihapitiya has warned retail investors to avoid buying the stock, citing volatility and poor historical returns of SPACs.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines launches AI tool Tinker:
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has launched its first product, a flexible API called Tinker that is designed to help researchers and developers build their own custom AI models.
The tool is a managed service granting users low-level control over algorithms and data, while it handles the complex infrastructure required for distributed training on various open-weight models.
To support the platform, the company also released an open-source library called the Tinker Cookbook and has opened a public waitlist after a private beta with several research institutions.
OpenAI is the world’s most valuable private company after private stock sale
OpenAI reached a $500B valuation after employees sold $6.6B worth of shares, making it the most valuable privately held company.
Buyers included SoftBank, Dragoneer, Thrive Capital, MGX, and T. Rowe Price; the sale acted as a retention tool amid Meta’s poaching spree.
The company recently raised $40B at a $300B valuation, and continues to secure massive funding to support its $300B Oracle deal and $100B Nvidia partnership.
Perplexity acquires the team behind Sequoia-backed AI design startup Visual Electric
Visual Electric, an AI design startup backed by Sequoia, is shutting down as its team joins Perplexity’s new Agent Experiences group.
Founded in 2022, the startup let designers create and edit images on an infinite canvas and later added video support; it had raised $2.5M from Sequoia, BoxGroup, and Designer Fund.
Visual Electric will close in 90 days, with data export options and prorated refunds for subscribers; deal terms remain undisclosed.
OpenAI’s Sora soars to No. 3 on the US App Store’
OpenAI’s invite-only Sora app hit 56,000 downloads on launch day and 164,000 installs in its first two days, ranking No. 3 overall on the U.S. App Store.
Its debut outpaced Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot, matched xAI’s Grok, but trailed ChatGPT and Google Gemini’s stronger launches.
Despite being U.S./Canada-only and invite-only, Sora’s rapid climb shows strong consumer demand for AI video apps with a social networking spin.
Major music labels are close to AI deals:
Universal Music and Warner Music are reportedly weeks from striking licensing deals with Google, Spotify, and AI startups over how their song catalogs are used by the tech industry.
These negotiations center on how the labels will license their songs for training AI models and for generating completely new music with artificial intelligence tools from various firms.
For compensation, the music giants are pushing for a system like streaming that gives a micropayment per play, requiring AI companies to build software for tracking this specific usage.
New spacecraft aims for one hour global delivery:
Inversion revealed its Arc spacecraft, a new on-demand vehicle designed for the US military to deliver 500 pounds of supplies almost anywhere on the globe in less than one hour.
The company’s mission involves pre-positioning Arcs on orbit for up to five years, ready to autonomously deorbit and land with cargo at a desired location within sixty minutes.
To prove its technology, Inversion launched a small spacecraft named “Ray” in January to test its in-house subsystems and perform a deorbit burn using its bipropellant rocket engine.
Instagram head denies using your microphone to listen
Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted on his account to deny the theory that Meta secretly records your private conversations with a phone’s microphone to show you more relevant advertisements.
Mosseri explained that the powerful recommendation system works by using data from advertisers and showing ads to people based on what users with similar interests also like, not from audio.
Coinciding with this denial, Meta’s upcoming privacy policy will allow it to target ads using data from your interactions with its AI products, creating an even more powerful signal.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other news
Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure
Anthropic appointed former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new CTO, replacing co-founder Sam McCandlish, who becomes chief architect focusing on large-scale model training.
Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and engineering, as Anthropic restructures to integrate product, infrastructure, and inference teams more closely.
With 20+ years of experience at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft, Patil’s hire comes amid intense infrastructure competition with OpenAI and Meta, both investing hundreds of billions into AI compute.
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)
Investment Analyst - Capital Oven | India - Apply Here
Capital Formation Associate - B Capital Group | USA - Apply Here
Trade Operations Lead - Manhattan Venture Partner | USA - Apply Here
VP of Fundraising - Scale Asia Venture | Japan - Apply Here
Research Analyst - Positive Sum | USA - Apply Here
Fund Operations Associate - TNB Aura | Singapore - Apply Here
2026 Venture Capital Summer Analyst - Stepstone Group | USA - Apply Here
AI Venture Analyst Intern - Untaped Venture | USA - Apply Here
Investor Relations Manager - Beco Capital | UK - Apply Here
WHEN YOU’RE READY, HERE’S HOW I CAN HELP:
💁 You might need our help!
Reach 95,000+ Founders & Investors: Partner with our newsletter to reach a highly engaged audience.
Build Your Pitch Deck: We write, design and model your pitch deck into a storyteller book within 4-5 days.
Do you have any news to share about your Startup or VC fund? Please email us.
We’ll be back in your inbox on Tomorrow.