Top Stories
With sweeping US crypto legislation stalled, the SEC and CFTC are moving to set rules themselves, including an SEC exemption for some token offerings from securities laws. — Reuters
Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65B in July, up from $9B at 2025’s end. — TechCrunch
OpenAI will lease a potentially 8-gigawatt Ohio data center for 20 years, backed by Nvidia’s $105 billion financing commitment. — CNBC
Wired profiled Proton CEO Andy Yen, who aims to pull 100 million users from Google while defending privacy against US politics and EU Chat Control. — Wired
Snowflake added dynamic model routing to Cortex AI Gateway, automatically matching each query with an appropriate model to cut enterprise AI costs by up to 3x. — VentureBeat
Top Funding Announcements
Groq — The former AI chipmaker raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation to pivot into a neocloud provider and expand its Nvidia-powered data center footprint. — TechCrunch
Reach Capital — The venture firm raised an oversubscribed $265M fifth fund to back AI founders building products that expand human potential. — TechCrunch
Etched — The AI startup designing its own inference chips is in the midst of two raises at once: a round valuing them at $20 billion led by Jane Street, and a separate round at a $10 billion valuation led by Sequoia. – WSJ
Grounded — The Detroit startup raised a $5M round to expand its custom outfitting of electric and gas-powered vans for small businesses. — TechCrunch
Terra Industries — The African defense tech company raised a $52M seed round, including $18M in new funding. — TechCrunch
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Top Tweets
@OleLehmann spoke on the “most Australian startup I’ve (he’s) ever seen,” called Brumby (formerly GrazeMate). From 19-year-old Sam Rogers, the company raised $1.2M for autonomous "robot cowboy" drones that muster cattle.
"When you hear that data is the new oil, this is ultimately what that looks like…we’re entering an era where it’s valuable almost in any form...," comments @AaronLevie, arguing that AI's hunger for training data has created an insatiable appetite for any useful data.
@David Hansson personally notices how xAI's Grok 4.6 has closed the gap with OpenAI's flagship GPT-5.6 Sol tier, while Meta's Muse now lands closer to OpenAI's cheaper Luna tier, calling it “crazy”.
This Week in Startups
Timestamps:
0:00 New Segment: "Enough Already!"
3:04 Anthropic's record-breaking IPO plans
9:27 Why it's "Springtime for Trump and M&A"
10:07 PayPal - Built for payments, growth, and agentic. Paypal Open, built for all business. Visit https://paypalopen.com to get started
15:28 Sami Khoreibi of Wisewell joins
16:58 Hiring a water sommelier
19:51 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou
28:28 The problems with tap and bottled water
30:02 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist
49:26 Puneet Puri of Gritt Robotics joins
54:03 Solar's version of "Moore's Law"
1:04:36 Are you using the Boomer emojis?
1:08:30 Why Jason loves the DJI Mic 3
1:11:04 Jason & Lon's streaming recommendations
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Today’s Fascinating Fact from Harmonic
Etched was founded by three Harvard students who teamed up for a class project on transformers. They theorized that these chips, rather than Nvidia’s general purpose GPUs, would one day dominate AI workloads. As CEO Gavin Uberti later told CNBC, the trio staked their entire futures on this insight: "If transformers go away, we'll die. But if they stick around, we're the biggest company of all time." Today’s $20 billion valuation announcement suggests they made a smart bet.
Try it yourself at harmonic.ai
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