☕ This AI coding startup raised $1 billion & Meta launches paid subscriptions across Instagram and WhatsApp.
YouTube will now automatically label AI videos & Google engineer charged over $1.2M Polymarket insider trading scheme.
Breaking News
Meta has launched paid subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI, pushing deeper into recurring revenue beyond ads. The company is also testing premium AI plans with advanced reasoning, image generation, and future smart-glasses features — signaling Meta’s ambition to turn AI into a consumer subscription business at massive scale.
Robinhood now allows AI agents to place stock trades for users, letting people automate actions like portfolio rebalancing or buying stocks at specific conditions through natural language commands. The launch marks an early but important shift toward AI-driven finance, where autonomous agents may eventually handle increasingly complex personal investing workflows.
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🗞️ What else is brewing
40+ investor contact databases and 50+ fundraising resources every founder needs (Link)
The AI industry is quietly moving from growth-at-all-costs to cost-accounting mode. (Link)
Why are LPs fighting for access to the most valuable AI deals? (Link)
Did OpenAI win attention while Anthropic built a better company? (Link)
What every founder needs to understand about AI economics? (Link)
Where AI seed investors are most likely to find outliers. (Link)
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
PRE-SEED
Fields Good, an Austin-based cookie brand, raised $1.8M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Female Founders Fund.
Canyon Code, a Sunnyvale-based infrastructure company building control layers for multi-agent AI apps, raised $5M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Cota Capital.
SEED
Certo, a Paris-based AI compliance platform for beauty and consumer packaged goods companies, raised $4M in Seed funding. The round was led by Daphni.
Cypher AI, a Cambridge-based AI-native digital infrastructure startup for life sciences R&D, raised $2M in Seed funding. The round was led by MaC Venture Capital.
Sychedelic, a NYC-based neurotechnology startup building brain wearables, raised $3.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Cultadvisors LLP, TurboStart, and IdeaBaaz.
Protuoso Biosciences, a San Carlos-based biotech company developing multifunctional biologics, raised $9.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Taya Venture and Darwin Ventures.
Itera, a San Francisco-based real-time electronics prototyping company, raised $12M in Seed funding. The round was led by Upfront Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Colle Capital.
GROWTH
Cognition, the U.S.-based AI coding startup behind autonomous software engineer Devin, has raised $1 billion in a new funding round at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC.
Thea Energy, a New Jersey-based fusion energy company building stellarator power plants, raised $100M in Series B funding. The round was led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT).
RevEng.AI, a London-based cybersecurity company building binary-native verification infrastructure for software supply chains, raised $15M in Series A funding. The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund.
C2i Semiconductors, a Bengaluru-based semiconductor company focused on software-defined voltage regulator platforms, raised $16.7M in Series A funding. Backers included TDK Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
Capchase, a NYC-based vendor financing platform for enterprise tech, raised over $200M through a mix of debt facilities and equity financing.
Captive Radiology, an Ohio-based diagnostic imaging solutions company, received a strategic growth investment from RC Capital.
Ember LifeSciences, a Los Angeles-based healthcare cold-chain logistics company, raised an undisclosed Series A extension round led by Amgen Ventures and TDF Ventures.
Tensormesh, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI inference optimization company, raised $20M in funding. Backers included AMD Ventures, CoreWeave, and NVentures.
Slamcore, a London-based spatial intelligence software company, raised $14M in funding backed by ROKStar Ventures.
ClearNote Health, a San Diego-based cancer early detection company, raised $52M in Series D funding.
Mykor, a Bristol-based biotech company developing low-carbon construction materials, raised $4M in funding. The round was led by Clean Growth Fund.
Olyzon, a Paris-based agentic decisioning platform for CTV advertising, raised $10M in Series A funding. The round was led by S4S Ventures.
WeRoad, a Milan-based travel-tech company, raised $58M in Series C funding. The round was led by Airbnb.
NavigateAI, a San Francisco-based AI copilot platform for field workers, raised $25M in funding. The round was led by Elad Gil with participation from Khosla Ventures.
Caudal Energy, an Oxford-based renewable energy company, raised £4.3M in funding. The round was led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Empirical Ventures.
Go Swag, a Glasgow-based corporate gifting platform, raised $5M in funding. The round was led by Mercia Ventures.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
Transition Ventures, a London, UK and NYC-based early stage investment firm, closed its second fund, at $150m. Fund II took the firm’s assets under management to over $300m. Transition Ventures invests from inception to Series A in companies advancing energy systems powering AI, robotics for industrial efficiency, and next-generation solutions for critical minerals refining across Europe and the US.
Bridgewest Ventures, an Auckland, New Zealand- and Miami, FL-based venture capital arm of Bridgewest Group, held the first close of Bridgewest Venture Fund I LP, at approximately NZ$60.2m. Backers included a group of institutional investors, family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and international migrant investors from Australia and New Zealand.
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KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
Apple builds iPhone anti-snatch auto-lock
Apple is developing an iPhone feature that automatically locks the device when it detects the phone has been snatched out of the user’s hand, similar to Android’s Theft Detection Lock system already on rival phones.
The system will rely on signals like the iPhone’s accelerometer to confirm a snatch, and it will also check the distance from a paired Apple Watch to judge whether the device has left its owner.
Once fully built, the feature will follow Stolen Device Protection rules, checking for familiar WiFi networks and familiar locations like home or work, and restricting access to the same protected areas when conditions look suspicious.
YouTube will now automatically label AI videos
YouTube will now automatically apply labels to videos when its internal systems detect “significant photorealistic AI” content, taking the job out of the hands of creators who previously had to disclose this themselves through Creator Studio.
Starting in May, the labels will sit directly below the video player above the description on long-form videos and overlay on Shorts, and creators can’t remove them if the content was made with YouTube’s own tools like Veo or Dream Screen.
Labels will be permanently attached when content carries C2PA metadata showing it was fully AI-generated, and YouTube says the tags won’t affect how a video is recommended or its ability to monetize.
Tech CEOs may be overestimating what AI can actually automate
Aaron Levie warned that many tech CEOs are suffering from “AI psychosis,” overestimating how much work AI agents can reliably replace.
The article points to rising AI-driven layoffs, including at ClickUp, where 22% of staff were cut after deploying thousands of AI agents internally.
Researchers cited in the report said AI productivity gains remain limited, with agents still far from consistently performing human-quality work across most tasks.
Pentagon signs $9.7B Microsoft software consolidation deal
The U.S. Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $9.69 billion, five-year agreement to consolidate software licenses across military and intelligence agencies.
The deal aims to reduce duplicated spending by combining scattered Microsoft 365, cloud, and enterprise software contracts into one centralized system.
Officials said the agreement doesn’t add new spending, but uses existing budgets more efficiently while strengthening Microsoft’s footprint across U.S. defense operations.
Google engineer charged over $1.2M Polymarket insider trading scheme
U.S. prosecutors charged a Google engineer for allegedly using confidential search trend data to place insider bets on Polymarket and make $1.2 million in profits.
The engineer, Michele Spagnuolo, reportedly used the alias “AlphaRaccoon” to bet on Google’s “most-searched people” rankings before the data became public.
Google placed the employee on leave and said it’s cooperating with law enforcement, while Polymarket said its cooperation helped lead to the insider trading charges.
OpenAI Foundation commits $250M to address AI-driven job disruption
The OpenAI Foundation announced a $250 million commitment to fund research, grants, and programs helping workers and economies adapt to AI disruption.
The initiative will support communities facing job displacement, study AI’s labor market impact, and explore ways to distribute AI-driven economic gains more broadly.
OpenAI said the foundation will directly run some programs itself, with first initiatives expected later this year as AI-related workforce concerns continue to grow.
Zuckerberg-backed Biohub launches AI model for protein and drug discovery
Biohub, the philanthropic venture led by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, launched an open-source AI “world model” focused on protein biology and drug discovery.
The AI system is designed to better understand protein behavior and help researchers create new protein binders for cancer and immune disease treatments.
Biohub said the models will be available through its own platform and partners like AWS Bio Discovery, with compute credits offered to researchers for wider adoption.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other News
NASA picks Blue Origin for first lunar mission
NASA has chosen Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin over Elon Musk’s SpaceX to run the first mission for its planned $20bn moon base, with the uncrewed flight scheduled as early as fall 2026.
Blue Origin received $230.4m to support each of its first two moon base missions, sending its cryogenically propelled Endurance cargo lander to the Shackleton de Gerlache Ridge near the moon’s south pole.
Administrator Jared Isaacman called it the first privately funded lunar lander mission in history, with Blue Origin largely paying for the operation itself and carrying scientific payloads from NASA and private partners.
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