☕ OpenAI's revenue run rate tops $40 billion & Google must ease rival app installs.
Stripe to acquire OpenRouter for over $7 billion & People aren’t buying Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for an AI-powered future.
Breaking News
Stripe has reportedly finalized a $7B+ acquisition of OpenRouter, the AI gateway that gives developers access to more than 400 models through a single platform. OpenRouter was valued at just $1.3 billion in May, and the deal could turn Stripe into a major infrastructure layer connecting AI developers, model providers, and payments.
OpenAI has reportedly surpassed a $40 billion annual revenue run rate, roughly doubling from late 2025 as ChatGPT subscriptions, AI coding tools, and advertising drive growth. The milestone comes as OpenAI prepares for a potential IPO while racing Anthropic, which has reportedly already crossed a $47 billion revenue run rate.
FROM OUR PARTNER - KAPITALWISE
💹 Your financial goals are personal. Your advisor should be too.
Not every financial advisor is right for every investor. The right fit depends on what you’re building toward, the kind of guidance you need, and where you are financially.
Kapitalwise AdvisorConnect uses AI-powered matching to connect you with vetted financial advisors and planners based on your needs - making it easier to find relevant expertise without spending hours searching and comparing.
Think of it as a smarter starting point for an important financial decision: fewer random options, more relevant matches.
See which financial advisors match your needs →
PARTNERSHIP WITH US
🤝 Get your brand in front of 125,000+ decision makers.
Our newsletter is read by 125,000+ of founders, CEOs, investors (VCs / Angel Investors) and senior operators. Get in touch today.
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
PRE-SEED
Riven Systems, a NYC-based provider of an AI platform for industrial chemistry and critical minerals processing, raised $7.9M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Cerberus Ventures with participation from Scout Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Lightscape Partners, CLAI, and New System Ventures.
Zerolook, a Zug, Switzerland-based travel technology startup, raised €1.6M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Playfair, with participation from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Venture, and angel investors.
SEED
Clarity Systems, a San Francisco, CA-based retail fraud detection company, raised $4.4M in Seed funding. Backers included LMnT Ventures, Regeneration VC, Humba Ventures, and Massive Technology Ventures.
River Markets, a New York City-based financial infrastructure provider for prediction markets, raised $8.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, UFO Holdings, Qube Research & Technologies, TENET, Humbition, Kima Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Stack Asset Management, Perpetual Strategies, and angel investors.
GROWTH
Aligned Marketplace, a NYC-based primary care marketplace, raised $20M in Series A funding. The round was led by Venrock.
AGent Energy, a Houston, TX-based provider of AI-driven distributed power plants, raised $11M in Series Seed funding. The round was led by Spero Ventures and MassMutual Ventures with participation from Intrepid Investment Management, CIV, and Zero Infinity Partners (ZIP).
Databricks, a San Francisco, CA-based data and AI company, closed a $5B strategic funding round at a $190B valuation. The round was led by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, and new investor Sixth Street Growth.
Curio, a Washington, DC-based provider of nuclear recycling technologies, received additional funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The amount of the deal was $2.5M (combined with a company investment of approximately $1M).
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ Must read post
What should your AI spend actually be measured against?: Most startups ask how much they’re spending on AI, but the better question is what each dollar is replacing. This piece gives founders a 30-minute audit to sort AI tools by payroll impact, productivity lift, and product COGS - helping them cut wasted subscriptions and reallocate spend toward automation that actually compounds.
Before VCs invest, they’ll call your customers. But what do they really ask?: Before writing a check, serious investors often call your customers to understand usage, renewal intent, defensibility, buying process, and whether your revenue is truly repeatable. This piece shows founders how to manage that process without burning customer trust - from gating intros to choosing the right references and framing the raise as a decision they are making.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
WovenEarth Ventures, a Palo Alto, CA-based investment firm backing early-stage cleantech companies, held the final close of its second fund, WovenEarth Fund II, at $155M. The investor syndicate includes The Pennsylvania State University, Glenmede, Mortenson Family Foundation, and M.A. Mortenson Companies. WovenEarth Fund II also welcomed additional partners, including foundations, family offices, and the J.M. Huber Corporation.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
Why people aren’t buying Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for an AI-powered future
Mark Zuckerberg argues that personal AI could give everyone powerful agents for learning, productivity, creativity, and everyday tasks. But critics say Meta’s history with social media makes those promises difficult to trust.
Meta also isn’t currently viewed as a leader in frontier AI or consumer assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. Zuckerberg’s manifesto could therefore be an attempt to reposition Meta around “personal AI” and individual empowerment.
The bigger problem is that the vision focuses heavily on AI’s benefits while giving less attention to potential costs and unintended consequences. For skeptics, abstract promises about AI improving humanity aren’t enough to build trust.
SpaceX officially completes $60B Cursor acquisition
SpaceX has officially closed its acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, following an April agreement that gave the company an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion.
Cursor says joining SpaceX gives it access to what it describes as the world’s largest GPU fleet, allowing the AI coding platform to tap into SpaceX’s rapidly expanding computing infrastructure.
The acquisition further expands SpaceX beyond rockets and Starlink into AI and computing infrastructure, following its earlier acquisition of Elon Musk’s xAI and growing compute deals with companies including Anthropic and Google.
Anthropic CEO says the AI backlash is really a crisis of trust
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues that growing public skepticism toward AI isn’t primarily caused by executives warning about risks. Instead, he believes people increasingly distrust corporations, governments, and the tech industry.
Amodei says AI companies deserve criticism for failing to deliver on their biggest promises. Talking about AI curing diseases isn’t enough — actually producing meaningful benefits would do far more to change public perception.
He also argues that thoughtful regulation could reduce AI safety risks while limiting the power of frontier labs and protecting smaller competitors, rather than automatically concentrating power among the largest companies.
Alibaba releases open-weight Qwen 3.8
Alibaba made Qwen3.8-Max generally available on August 3, 2026, releasing the flagship model with a published benchmark table, per-token pricing, and a production API, and has now officially published the open weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope.
The model uses a Mixture-of-Experts design with 2.4 trillion total parameters and about 95 billion active per token, handles a 1-million-token context, and accepts text, image, and video input, with output limited to text.
On Alibaba’s own tests, Qwen3.8-Max leads Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6, and Opus 4.8 on computer-use and long-document tasks, but trails Fable 5 by 12 points on the harder SWE-bench Pro coding test and finishes last on broad reasoning.
Google must ease rival app installs
A US federal judge, James Donato, ordered Google to simplify how people install competing Android app stores, giving the company one week to strip out extra warning screens and confirmation steps that block rival marketplaces.
During a hearing in the Epic vs Google antitrust case, Epic showed users faced needless prompts, including tapping a “view” button before an “install” option appeared, which Donato called unacceptable “anticompetitive friction.”
The order builds on Epic’s earlier win, where a jury found Google held an illegal monopoly over Android app distribution and billing; the judge rejected Google’s claim that the barriers exist for user security.
Gemini lets you turn off AI watermarks
Google’s Gemini app now lets people turn off the visible spark watermark that shows up in the corner of images, videos, and songs made with its Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria tools.
The option won’t appear in countries where law requires keeping the mark, and Gemini still embeds invisible SynthID watermarks plus C2PA metadata so the media stays traceable even with the corner icon removed.
On the web, a new “Media watermark” section under the settings gear offers “On” and “Off” choices, with On staying the default, and the feature is reaching all platforms over the coming days.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other News
Trump slaps 100% tariff on imported drones
President Trump signed an order placing a 100% tariff on imported drones weighing more than 55 pounds with security-sensitive features, while smaller drones face a 25% levy, a move that mainly hits Chinese makers like DJI.
Drones from allies including the EU, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Taiwan get a lower 15% tariff, and U.K.-made drones face just 10%, with the rules taking effect within 21 days.
U.S. drone stocks rose after the news, with Unusual Machines jumping over 14% to about $31; Donald Trump Jr. joined that company’s advisory board in 2024 and holds shares and warrants in it.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
💼 Today’s VC & Startup Job Opportunities
Most aspiring VCs struggle with interviews, unclear expectations, no structured prep, and generic advice that doesn’t actually help. So we partnered with a leading investor group to build an all-in-one VC Interview Preparation Guide that gives you real clarity and frameworks. (Access Here)
Analyst - Yournest Capital | India - Apply Here
Financial Management Analyst - Duke Capital Partner | USA - Apply Here
VC Associate - Artha Group | India - Apply Here
Investment Principal - Contrarian Thinking Capital | USA - Apply Here
Senior Associate - Yamaha Motor Venture | USA - Apply Here
Principal - Neuraleap Group | India - Apply Here
Incubation Associate, Compute - Primary | USA - Apply Here
Associate or Senior Associate - Bessemer Partner | USA - Apply Here
Partner 18, Events Associate, Crypto - a16z | USA - Apply Here
AI Analyst - Array Venture | USA - Apply Here
SMB Program Associate - Plug and Play tech center | USA - Apply Here
VC Fellow - V11 | Remote - Apply Here
Associate, Healthcare - B Capital Group | USA - Apply Here
Portfolio Reporting Team Lead - Cerity Partner | USA - Apply Here
Associate - Mount Judi Venture | USA - Apply Here
Technical Investment Operations Associate - Alpaca VC | USA - Apply Here
WHEN YOU’RE READY, HERE’S HOW I CAN HELP:
💁 You might need our help!
Reach 125,000+ 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.