Are you master of your Domain?

Top News

• AI.com sets domain record: Financial Times reports that Crypto.com founder Kris Marszalek is back with a new project, and a new iconic, super-memorable domain name: AI.com. According to the deal’s broker — GetYourDomain’s Larry Fischer — Marszalek’s company paid a cool $70 million to an undisclosed seller, entirely in crypto, for the two-letter destination. That’s the largest domain sale on record… ever. (It’s also 1/10th what Crypto.com shelled out for naming rights to their iconic Los Angeles stadium and sporting venue.) The site itself offers a decentralized team of personal “AI agents” that provide automated services, from sending messages to trading stocks. It will make a splashy debut with an ad on this weekend’s Super Bowl LX.

• Daytona raises $24M for agent sandboxes: Today’s cloud infrastructure was built for conventional software, which operates in a conventional, and therefore predictable, way. Think of it like a robot arm on a factory assembly line; it works because the same parts come down the belt every time. But an AI agent behaves more like an unpredictable human, trying things out, experimenting, and sometimes needing to save their work as they go. Croatian startup Daytona developed instant digital environments known as “sandboxes” to support these less predictable agentic workflows at scale, over extended periods of time. They raised a $24 million Series A this week led by FirstMark Capital.

• Sapiom is building a financial layer for agents: Speaking of things your AI agents will need… What about a way to pay for essential services to complete their assigned tasks without bugging you? Let’s say your OpenClaw Replicant needs to purchase some bespoke software, or API access, to finish its work. It COULD just bother its human to get out their Ramp Card. But in our increasingly-automated future, humans want their agents to just get things done on their own. Enter Sapiom, a San Francisco startup that’s building a financial infrastructure and payment system specifically for agents, allowing them to safely and seamlessly purchase what they need with zero human intervention. The company raised a $15 million seed round led by Accel.

TWiST 500

Waymo operates as an Alphabet subsidiary these days, but this story is so interesting, we’re allowing the former TWiST 500 favorites back into the club for one night only.

The self-driving project has deployed its first Waymo World Model, built atop the Genie 3 AI model from Google’s DeepMind, to create realistic three-dimensional worlds. These will then help them train autonomous cars on so-called “edge case scenarios,” situations that could theoretically happen in the real world, but occur too rarely to produce helpful training data.

Visually, AI world models resemble video games, instantly generating expansive virtual environments that at least roughly obey the laws of physics. They really do have a number of potential applications in game development! But Waymo’s using them instead to generate hours of synthetic driving footage and data, which they can then use to fine-tune their cameras and LIDAR sensors. The company also has the power to take real data from dashcams and convert it into “scenes” and depth maps to power driving simulations. All of this will make Waymo vehicles more reliable, even when facing uncommon or unpredictable driving scenarios.

Two more T500 quick hits before we let you go for the week!

• Goldman Sachs has apparently been working with Anthropic in secret for six months, fashioning a bespoke line of custom AI agents. Goldman’s new Replicant helpers will assist human staffers in accounting for trades and transactions, along with client vetting and onboarding tasks.

• Polymarket filed trademark applications for both POLY and $POLY in the US, ahead of launching their own crypto token and potentially a crypto trading service. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2245: HQ Trivia legend Scott Rogowsky joins the show to tell Jason and Alex about his new livestreamed in-app game show, Savvy. (Think of it like Wordle meets HQ Trivia meets “Win Ben Stein’s Money.”) Join us for a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the rise and fall of the once-viral trivia game, and a sneak peek at Scott’s new project. PLUS Alex chats with Dr. Trevor Bennett of Starfish Space about the Otter Spacecraft and why orbital paths around Earth need so much clean-up.

E2244: In our final TWiST Tokyo update, Jason welcomes The League founder Amanda Bradford and Uber veteran Will Barnes to discuss the TOP priorities for early stage founders. These are the areas where they can’t afford to lose focus for even a week. Find out why it’s so important to keep a close eye on your expenses, why trust and reliability are so crucial, even for an MVP, why distribution should always be top of mind, and more vital lessons from the trenches.

E2243: SpaceX and xAI are MERGING into what will be the world’s most valuable private company (at least until a planned IPO later this year). Get Jason’s thoughts on why this makes sense, and how Elon Musk will turn humanity into a Kardashev II-level civilization, on TWiST. PLUS, we’re running down all of the LAUNCH Team’s favorite OpenClaw Skills that have exponentially increased our productivity.

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• Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist

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