A slice of the OpenClaw Pi

Top News

• OpenClaw boosts interest in Raspberry Pi: Shares in the British single-board computer makers are spiking thanks to enthusiasm around OpenClaw, adding more than $1 billion to its market value so far. Bloomberg suggests that the incredible rally is all thanks to a Long $RPI social media post from Monday (which didn’t even go that viral), suggesting that the company’s SBCs will become a preferred platform for running OpenClaw cheaply. If Raspberry Pi becomes the new Mac Mini, this could turn out to be a smart bet.

• Night Media raises $70 million: The talent management company represents many of the biggest online influencers, including Twitch streamers Kai Cenat and Hasan Piker. But they’re not resting on any laurels; the company plans to expand into gaming, sports, podcasts, and music through a string of acquisitions and investments in creator-led businesses. (First up was the Roost podcast network, home to Theo Von’s breakout pod “This Past Weekend.”) To further fuel these deals, Night Media raised a $70 million round led by StepStone Group.

• Anthropic drops Claude Sonnet 4.6: The increasingly high-profile AI concern released the latest version of their still-powerful but somewhat-lower-cost Sonnet model this week. For those keeping track, that’s one step above Haiku and one step below the flagship Opus series. (Are they named after poetry formats? Yes, they are.) Most notably, Sonnet 4.6 boasts a one million token context window, making it better than ever at reading and analyzing long documents, continuing very lengthy conversations, or performing other tasks with a long history, requiring deep memory.

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MEANWHILE, IN FRANCE…

Breakout European frontier AI startup Mistral announced their first acquisition. They’re picking up another Parisian company, Koyeb, which helps AI app developers process their data via serverless infrastructure. (In this set-up, developers write and deploy their code, then all the infrastructure concerns are invisibly managed on Koyeb’s side.) The startup’s most recent release was Koyeb Sandboxes, isolated environments in which AI agents can run securely.

Mistral launched their own AI cloud infrastructure, Mistral Compute, in mid-2025, and Koyeb’s small team and technology will work toward accelerating its growth. But a Koyeb blog post announcing the deal also notes that their own platform will continue operating, and that they plan to team with their new parent company on a program that will deploy Mistral’s models directly on to clients’ on-premises hardware.

In other global AI news, Cohere’s research division — Cohere Labs — dropped a new series of models called Tiny Aya, which are small enough to run on everyday consumer devices without an internet connection. They’re open-weight, meaning that the underlying code is publicly available for individuals to use and modify themselves. Plus they understand 70 languages, and have tighter regional variants for Africa, South Asia, West Asia, the Asian Pacific, and Europe.

Cohere cleverly timed the launch for this week’s India AI Impact Summit. Obviously, the Indian sub-continent is linguistically diverse. As well, many Indian developers are working on mobile devices in areas with inconsistent internet coverage. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2251: OpenAI hasn’t exactly ACQUIRED the open-source free AI virtual assistant OpenClaw, but it hired the project’s creator, Peter Steinberger. The company has promised to keep OpenClaw true to its open-source roots but what does this really mean for the project’s future? Jason and Alex play out the best and worst case scenarios with special guest experts Hiten Shah and Jesse Genet. PLUS we’re talking about the ethical implications of AI Scott Adams with his creator, John Arrow.

E2250: We talked to three awesome founders who are using OpenClaw like a real human co-worker, not just an AI helper. The list includes Ryan Carson, who built Antfarm, turning OpenClaw into a team of agents with specialized roles. Plus David Im, the creator of Clawra, an AI companion that learns more about you over time. Finally, we welcome Alex Liteplo of RentAHuman, the marketplace where bots can hire people, when they desperately need one in the loop.

E2249: Jason’s chatting with 2 more amazing founders making innovative new products on a special Thursday TWiST. First up, former LAUNCH staffer Presh Dineshkumar shows off Tempo, a new app from his startup The Wellness Company that monitors your health AND provides insightful, proactive, and most importantly consistent advice. THEN we’re chatting with Peter Cetale of Sourcerer, who’s using AI to simplify the sourcing and distribution process for manufacturers.

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