☕ Musk’s xAI to raise $15B at $230B valuation, Google launches Gemini 3 & Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble’.
SpaceX delays NASA moon landing to 2028 & Google CEO warns no firm is immune if AI bubble bursts.
The plastic or metal tip on your shoelace has a name: it’s called an aglet.
Completely useless information, but now you know.
📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: Startup legal docs for founders, where to post for first users, how to study new markets, 3 winning AI product types, VC scorecard framework, Vinod Khosla’s investor truth.
Musk’s xAI in advanced talks to raise $15B at $230B valuation, WSJ reports,
Baidu’s Q3 revenue falls 7% as ad slump offsets cloud growth.
Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble,’ not an AI bubble.
Google launches Gemini 3 with new coding app and record benchmark scores.
SpaceX delays NASA moon landing to 2028.
xAI launches Grok 4.1 with improved accuracy and emotional understanding.
Google CEO warns no firm is immune if AI bubble bursts.
Intuit signs $100M+ deal with OpenAI to bring its apps to ChatGPT.
TikTok now lets you choose how much AI-generated content you want to see.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
FROM OUR PARTNER - WORTHY WEALTH
Invest in the Surging Senior Living Market
The 80+ population is growing fast and creating high demand for senior living. At the same time, new construction is at its lowest levels since 2014, causing a growing supply gap.
Worthy Wealth purchases underperforming and undervalued facilities in order to upgrade and modernize them prior to selling them for a profit. We are targeting a 15% annualized return for our investors, which comes from quarterly dividends and a share of the profits when we sell the upgraded properties.
Worthy Wealth Senior Living Shares are only $10 each with a minimum initial investment of $100.
Start Investing with Worthy Wealth →
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
Startup legal document pack – essential legal Docs for founders. (Link)
Where to post your startup and get first users. (Link)
How to study a new market and build expertise — tactics from a Twitter PM turned healthcare founder. (Link)
The 3 AI product categories that actually work (and why everything else keeps failing). (Link)
The VC scorecard that early-stage investors use to evaluate startups. (Link)
Vinod Khosla’s brutally honest quote about investors (Link)
How should a founder tell their story (Link)
The 3 rules that every good app idea follows (Link)
Writing a memo for investors after your first meeting (Link)
Hunter Isaacson on the importance of onboarding (Link)
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
Federato, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an AI-native platform for insurance work, raised $100M in Series D funding. The round was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with participation from returning investors Emergence Capital, Caffeinated Capital, StepStone Group, and Pear VC.
Scale Social AI, a Durham, NC-based marketing technology company, raised $1.3M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by LAUNCH, and The Syndicate, with participation from RTP Angel Fund, Primordial Ventures, Charlotte Fund, Triangle Tweener Fund, Blue Valley Capital, and additional angel groups and individual investors.
Asseta AI, a NYC-based provider of an accounting platform for family offices, raised $4.2m in seed funding. The round was co-led by Nyca Partners and Motive Partners.
Orion, a Los Angeles, CA-based provider of a personalized smart mattress, raised $17.5m in seed funding. Backers included Mucker Capital, Lead VC (Adidas Family Office), Browder Capital, Family Fund, Hawke Ventures, Breaktrail Ventures, Intuition VC, Stephen & Allison Ellsworth (Poppi), Jim McKelvey (Square), Eytan Elbaz (Scopely), Kathy Fields (Proactiv), Luke Harries (Eleven Labs), Alon Matas (BetterHelp) and NBA player Kyle Kuzma.
Chromologics, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based company developing fermentation-based natural colours, raised €7M in funding. The round was led by Novo Holdings, EIFO (the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark), Döhler Ventures, Collateral Good Ventures and Synergetic.
Hammerhead AI, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an orchestrated RL control agents (ORCA) platform, raised $10M in Seed funding. The round was led by Buoyant Ventures, with participation from SE Ventures, AINA Climate AI Ventures, MCJ Collective, WovenEarth Ventures, Bombellii Ventures, Clearvision Ventures, Stepchange, Acclimate Ventures, and Jack Cogen.
Agentio, a NYC-based provider of an AI-native platform for creator-led advertising, raised $40M in Series B funding. The round was led by Forerunner with participation from Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line.
Ursa Major, a Berthoud, CO-based aerospace and defense company, raised $100M in Series E funding. The round was led by Eclipse, with participation from Woodline Partners, Principia Growth, XN, Alsop Louie Partners, and others.
VahatiCor, a Santa Clara, CA-based medtech company which specializes in cardiac care for coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD), raised $23M in Series B funding. The round was led by S3 Ventures, with participation from Intuitive Ventures.
Nudge Security, an Austin, TX-based SaaS and AI security governance company, raised $22.5M in Series A funding. The round was led by Cerberus Ventures with participation from existing investors Ballistic Ventures, Forgepoint Capital, and Squadra Ventures. With the new funding, Morgan Mahlock of Cerberus Ventures joined the Nudge Security board.
Chargeflow, a NYC-based AI-powered chargeback automation platform provider, raised $35m in Series A funding including a $10m debt facility. The round, which brought total funding to $49m was led by Viola Growth, with participation by existing investors OpenView Venture Partners.
Venn, a NYC-based provider of an operating system for multifamily housing, raised $52M in Series B funding. The round, which brought the total amount to $140M, was led by NOA and CIM Group, with participation from Group 11, Oren Zeev, Hamilton Lane, Latitude, LocalGlobe, and FinTLV.
Barker, a NYC-based fintech company, raised $3.5M in funding. The round was led by Walkabout VC.
Xenia, a Chicago, IL-based provider of AI-powered operations software for multi-location organizations, raised $12M in Series A funding. The round was led by PSG.
GetVocal, a Paris, France-based provider of a conversational AI platform, raised $26M in Series A funding. The round was led by Creandum with participation from Elaia and Speedinvest.
Cellbyte, a Munich, Germany-based provider of an AI-native platform that helps pharmaceutical companies accelerate drug launches, raised $2.75m in seed funding. The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Pace Ventures, Saras Capital and Springboard Health Angels.
Apono, a NYC-based cloud identity-security company, raised $34m in Series B funding. The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from Swisscom Ventures, Vertex Ventures, 33N, and existing investors.
Hummink, a Paris, France-based High-Precision Capillary Printing (HPCaP) technology company, raised €15m in funding. The round was co-led by KBC Focus Fund, Cap Horn and Bpifrance. The latest funding round was supported by historical investors Elaia Partners, Sensinnovat and Beeyond.
Planet Smart, a London, UK-based biomaterials startup, raised $1M in Seed funding. The round was led by General Inception and Vertical Venture Partners, with participation from Innovate UK and the Undaunted Accelerator.
Voltrac, a Valencia, Spain-based robotics startup, raised €7M in Seed funding. The round was led by Extantia Capital, with participation from FoodLabs, Antler, PUSH, and Prototype Capital.
Condukt, a London, UK-based provider of a compliance platform for financial services, raised US$10M in funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and MMC Ventures, with participation from Cocoa Ventures.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
nvp capital, a New York-based seed-stage venture capital firm investing globally in enterprise software and vertical AI, closed its second fund, at $80M. Fund II received support from Prudential Financial, Rutgers Endowment, Ford Foundation and Liberty Mutual Investments and corporate partners such as Audible (an Amazon Company) and Horizon Mutual Holdings, Inc., the parent company of New Jersey’s largest health insurer. This close brought total assets under management to $200M.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
Musk’s xAI in advanced talks to raise $15B at $230B valuation, WSJ reports
xAI is reportedly close to raising $15B at a massive $230B valuation — more than double the $113B valuation disclosed when it merged with X earlier this year.
The fundraising pitch was shared with investors by Jared Birchall, Musk’s wealth manager, as xAI races to scale supercomputing capacity and compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
The push comes amid strong investor appetite for AI despite bubble concerns, with Tesla shareholders recently approving an investment in xAI as the startup builds its Colossus supercomputer in Tennessee.
Baidu’s Q3 revenue falls 7% as ad slump offsets cloud growth
Baidu’s quarterly revenue dropped 7% to 31.17B yuan, with ad spending down 18% as China’s weak economy and reduced tech budgets hit its core search business.
AI cloud remained the bright spot, growing 21% to 6.2B yuan as companies adopt Baidu’s AI agents and large language models.
The company posted an 11B yuan net loss due to asset write-downs but says it will continue disciplined AI investments, having already spent over 100B yuan since 2023.
Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble,’ not an AI bubble
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue believes the hype is specifically around large language models — not AI as a whole — and predicts the “LLM bubble” could burst next year.
He argues that companies don’t need giant general-purpose models for most tasks, and that smaller, cheaper, specialized models will take over practical use cases.
Delangue says Hugging Face is insulated thanks to a diversified AI ecosystem and capital-efficient strategy, noting the company still has half of its $400M in funding untouched.
Google launches Gemini 3 with new coding app and record benchmark scores
Google released Gemini 3, its most advanced model yet, now available in the Gemini app and AI search, and surpassing prior models with major improvements in reasoning and benchmark performance.
The model hit a record 37.4 on Humanity’s Last Exam — beating GPT-5 Pro — and also topped LMArena; a research version called Gemini 3 Deepthink will roll out to AI Ultra users after safety checks.
Google also launched Antigravity, a Gemini-powered coding interface that combines prompting, terminal, and browser panes for agentic, multi-step coding similar to advanced IDEs like Warp or Cursor.
SpaceX delays NASA moon landing to 2028
An internal SpaceX document shows the company now targets September 2028 for the earliest first attempt of its Artemis 3 crewed mission to land on the lunar surface.
Key milestones preceding the crewed mission include a June 2026 orbital refueling demonstration and an uncrewed lunar landing one year later, according to the company’s internal plan.
The Starship lunar lander requires up to 12 separate orbital refueling transfers to gather enough propellant for its trip to land on the moon and launch back into orbit.
xAI launches Grok 4.1 with improved accuracy and emotional understanding
xAI used large-scale reinforcement learning systems and automated evaluators to train Grok 4.1, which users preferred nearly 65 percent of the time during a silent rollout testing phase on live traffic.
The new “quasarflux” reasoning variant tops the LMArena Text Arena leaderboard with a high Elo score, while the faster “tensor” version sits second overall even without using specific reasoning tokens for answers.
Engineers lowered the hallucination rate to roughly four percent for information-seeking prompts, while the system also achieved top rankings on EQ-Bench3 by displaying a better grasp of grief and interpersonal vulnerability.
Google CEO warns no firm is immune if AI bubble bursts
Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai told the BBC that current spending levels show elements of irrationality, warning that no tech business is immune if the industry bubble eventually bursts like past crashes.
American financial regulators fear inflated prices are dragging down wider markets, yet Google continues pouring £5 billion into British infrastructure and a new data center to boost its DeepMind research lab.
The CEO admitted climate goals will slip as AI systems consume immense electricity, and he cautioned users that models are prone to errors and cannot be trusted to provide accurate information.
Intuit signs $100M+ deal with OpenAI to bring its apps to ChatGPT
Intuit signed a multi-year deal worth over $100M to integrate TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp directly into ChatGPT, letting users handle tasks like tax estimates, credit checks, and invoicing inside the chatbot.
With user permission, Intuit’s apps can access financial data to generate personalized guidance, though the company did not clarify liability for errors despite maintaining its accuracy guarantees.
The deal expands Intuit’s use of OpenAI’s frontier models and gives it a new distribution channel through ChatGPT, while continuing its broader shift toward AI-powered financial tools across its ecosystem.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other news
TikTok now lets you choose how much AI-generated content you want to see
TikTok is adding a new control inside “Manage Topics” that lets users adjust how often AI-generated content appears in their For You feed, similar to how they tune categories like Dance or Sports.
The platform is also testing “invisible watermarking” to better detect AI content, adding it to videos made with TikTok’s AI tools and to uploads using C2PA Content Credentials.
Alongside these changes, TikTok is launching a $2M AI literacy fund to support groups creating educational content about AI safety and literacy.
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)
Partner 20 - a16z | USA - Apply Here
Investment Team - WEH Venture | India - Apply Here
Analyst / Associate - Core Innovation Capital | USA - Apply Here
Program Associate - Plug and Play tech Center | USA - Apply Here
Executive Assistant - AN Venture Partner | USA - Apply Here
Visiting Investment Analyst - Join Capital | USA - Apply Here
AI Tech Lead - Core Innovation Capital | USA - Apply Here
Investment Analyst - Caanan | USA - Apply Here
VC Associate UK - Breega | 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.