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Top News

• OpenAI partners with Instacart: OpenAI recently took heat for pushing Target’s ChatGPT app in the AI chat bot, but that’s not slowing down the company’s expansive partnership rollout plans, even a little bit. Today OpenAI and Instacart announced that users can ideate meals, shop, and order grocery delivery from inside the ChatGPT app. OpenAI hails the collab as its first ChatGPT-native “checkout experience.”

• Anthropic brings Claude Code to Slack: Anthropic and Salesforce have longstanding integrations, but the makers of the Claude Code’s AI software development service want more. Starting today, users of Slack and Claude Code will be able to call and task the agent from inside the business communications service. Given that startups are big Slack users, and likely are closer to the AI coding cutting edge than its hilt, the partnership makes good sense.

• Unconventional AI raises $475M: When MosaicML co-founder and former Databricks AI VP Naveen Rao struck out on his own once again, it was only a matter of time until he popped back up with a new venture. That startup, Unconventional AI, just raised $475 million from a sheaf of high-profile venture capitalists interested in betting on efforts to build a “more energy-efficient computer for AI,” as Bloomberg puts it. Unconventional is not alone in trying to take a fresh look at computing as it relates to AI. Extropic thinks that thermodynamic computing is the future, while Etched thinks that Transformer-specific ASICs are what’s next. Let’s see what Rao and his now very well-funded team cook up.

TWiST 500

Speaking of massive funding rounds, TWiST500 company Skild AI is putting together a funding round worth as much as $1 billion from SoftBank and Nvidia, valuing the AI robotics company at $14 billion. Skild was valued at just $4.5 billion earlier this year, meaning that its new funding round could multiply its trailing worth.

What does Skild do that enables it to raise such a substantial amount of capital so quickly? It’s working on AI robotics foundation models, as opposed to the hardware required to bring them to the world. It’s likely a more capital-efficient way to approach the market than what we see from companies like Figure and 1X, but also less vertically integrated. (Tradeoffs rule everything around me!)

Don’t think that Skild is just another humanoid robotics company. Instead, it’s building an AI model that can power robots of all types of form factors. (One brain, many robots, is the idea.)

To pull that off, the company “created a universe with 100,000 different robots and trained [its] AI to control them all.” As someone who wants a host of robots in my home handling the nitty-gritty details of modern life, I say “yes, please.”

We’re still a ways off from having general-purpose AI robots out in the market in force, but perhaps when they do reach our domiciles, we’ll care more about what software they are running than who built the hardware. Skild AI Inside? — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2219: Netflix wants to BUY Warner Bros… but is this just about wanting that sweet, sweet DC Comics IP? Or is there a secret plot embedded here to destroy the humble movie theater? We’re asking the TOUGH questions. Also… are Googlers gaming Polymarket? Why does Perplexity KEEP getting sued? AND a rundown of some of our fav startups from Y Combinator’s Fall ‘25 cohort.

E2218: Jason spends the full hour with Athena founder and chairman Jonathan Swanson, discussing their shared history from the Thumbtack days, and the decision to leave marketplaces behind and go all-in on virtual assistants. Together, they discuss how delegation can not just massively increase your productivity, but allow you to tackle all sorts of projects and goals that would have been unthinkable otherwise. Plus Jonathan gives us his tips on avoiding the “Cardinal Sins of Delegating.”

E2217: On a special Tuesday edition of TWiST, we welcome two awesome guests from noteworthy TWiST 500 startups. First, Monumental CEO Salar al Khafaji walks us through how his company makes construction robots “play nice” with one another on work sites. THEN we’ve got Seasats CEO Mike Flanigan showcasing the next generation of autonomous marine craft, and filling us in on why it’s so hard to defend against tiny, agile drones. Finally, Jason takes some of YOUR pressing Founder Q’s.

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