A Neuralink to the Future

Top News

• Neuralink closes Series E: The brain-computer interface startup from Elon Musk closed a new $650 million funding round, including investors from ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Thrive, and elsewhere. That’s on top of a $280M Series D raise in 2023 (with an extra $43 million cherry added on top just a few months later). The company’s now reportedly valued around the $9 billion mark, pre-money. Behind the scenes, Neuralink’s controversial tech is apparently making big strides, with human clinical trials currently ongoing. (Five individuals with severe paralysis now have the company’s brain chips implanted.)

• TikTok expands Topics options: The feature allows users to decide how often they want to see clips from the platform’s Top 10 topics (which include high-level categories like sports, travel, and humor). A pilot version rolled out in the US last year but now the “Manage Topics” option is going global. Even after you make the adjustment, the iconic mobile app cautions that your selections will take a little time to impact the overall algorithm.

• Nomupay raises another $40 million: The Irish fintech startup makes it easier for merchants to process payments across international borders. Their latest Series C raise, valuing the company at $290 million, comes just five months after it closed a $37 million Series B. They’ll use the new funds to expand into fresh marketplaces, including a big push into Japan.

TWiST500

In just about any discussion about the state and future of AI development in the the West, the specter of Chinese advancement is raised. We’re locked in a “race” against China to drive and power the globe’s use of AI technology, we’re told. Any new regulations or limits on AI development — like, say, protections for IP owners and publishers — threatens to throttle US and European advancement and hand a premature victory to our Chinese rivals.

While the specific consequences for “winning” or “losing” the AI race aren’t entirely clear, both regions and their respective tech industries are certainly BEHAVING like they’re locked in a life-or-death struggle, with AI serving as a sort of Technological Thunderdome: two countries enter, but only one leaves.

Take the Chinese lab and TWiST 500 members DeepSeek. They’ve been accused in the past of “borrowing” from OpenAI’s work to train models of their own. DeepSeek’s V3 memorably identified itself as “ChatGPT” to some observers back in December, and OpenAI has reported to the press that it has evidence of DeepSeek using a technique called “distillation” to extract data from their models.

Now, it seems that DeepSeek has moved on… to borrowing technology from Google’s Gemini. Melbourne-based developer Sam Paech posted to X this week that he has evidence showing DeepSeek’s latest model has been trained on Gemini outputs. It’s circumstantial — DeepSeek’s R1-0528 model occasionally uses words and phrases that are preferred by Gemini 2.5 Pro — but still fairly convincing, based on DeepSeek’s questionable history on this front.

Google and OpenAI’s Terms of Service obviously don’t allow other companies to train or distill models based on their own, though for now, it seems unlikely that DeepSeek will suffer any specific consequences for this potential ethical lapse. And when you consider that American AI companies and tech CEOs are currently trying to convince us that copyright shouldn’t exist and they should get to train their models on any published material for free, without permission, it’s a bit hard to take the claims here TOO seriously. All’s fair in AI and war, no? – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2133: On a special Singapore edition, Jason and Alex are chatting about Grammarly’s billion dollar mega-investment from General Catalyst, questioning how an AI copywriting assistant is generating THAT level of hype. Plus a new Neuralink rival has emerged, founder lessons from Udio and Spotify, and the New York Times’ new licensing deal with Amazon.

E2132: Jason’s busying himself in Singapore this week, so Alex is flying solo on today’s new TWiST, and chatting it up with two fascinating founders who are working on cool new AI innovations. First, from Athena HQ, Andrew Yan explains Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and how it will help brands rank better in AI-powered search engines. Then, Magnus Müller from Browser Use tells us how he’s making AI agents even smarter.

E2131: Jason’s in Singapore but he refuses to miss an episode, so we’re still doing TWiST. Along with Alex and Lon in the US, he check out Google’s new “Stitch” AI design took, examines Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica and what it means for the wider world of M&A, and hypes up Circle’s IPO and the future of stablecoins. PLUS why Jason is bullish on Joby, Trump’s “golden share” of US steel, and much more.

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