Drones are big business

Author

Alex Wilhelm
May 13, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Top News

  • LinkedIn swings the axe: LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned business social network, is cutting back on humans. Reuters pegs the number at around 5% of its 17,500 workers, or perhaps 875 people. The company’s memo on the matter reads like most missives from major tech shops cutting staff, focusing on the need to “reinvent” how it works and building more “agile teams focused on [its] highest priorities.”

  • Everyone wants to fix cybersecurity: As the world clamors for access to Anthropic’s Mythos model, OpenAI works on its ‘Daybreak’ cyber project, and Mistral gears up to build a competing model for Europe, Microsoft is entering the ring. Its new product, MDASH, “orchestrates more than 100 specialized AI agents across an ensemble of frontier and distilled models to discover, debate, and prove exploitable bugs end-to-end,” the company said.

  • Anthropic takes on the world: As it races to a $50 billion run rate, It is not slowing down its work to expand its presence across an ever-larger number of industries. This week, Anthropic’s new legal plugins for Cowork made news, and directly on the heels of that announcement, the foundation model company announced new features for SMBs. Can anyone slow Anthropic down?

TWiST 500

The only startup category hotter than AI today is defense tech, and as many defense-focused startups are neck-deep in AI, the distinction is often without difference. Regardless, TWiST500 stalwart Andruil is back with a new round, this time a $5 billion Series H that raises its valuation to $61 billion.

Well-researched readers will recall that Anduril was last valued at $30.5 billion when it raised its Series G, making its new valuation is a cool doubling of its last worth. So too has the company’s revenues expanded:

Investors in its latest round are therefore securing shares at roughly the same effective revenue multiple as in its preceding round.

Confused as to why Anduril is not worth hundreds of billions? Simple: It’s far smaller than the leading AI labs, and its growth is slower. Doubling in revenue in a year from a base of around $1 billion would be the stuff of startup legend, if a handful of companies weren’t scaling even faster. Anthropic has grown from a $9 billion run rate to perhaps as much as $45 billion this year, for example.

Of course, a $61 billion valuation is nothing to scoff at; indeed, apart from OpenAI and Anthropic and the artist formerly known as xAI, it would be a towering worth that stood out from the market. The Anduril round is therefore a success for the drone maker, but also a reminder of how odd a market we find ourselves in, when it is not the most famous value gusher in the game! — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2287: Cerebras just jacked its IPO range to $150–$160 a share, OpenAI bought a consulting firm to seed its $4 billion private-equity joint venture, and a startup in Oakland is electrolyzing magnesium out of seawater for one-third the going price. Alex Wilhelm and Jason Calacanis go deep with AI21 co-CEO Ori Goshen on why model orchestration, not bigger LLMs, will decide who wins enterprise AI. The crew also covered the decline of OpenClaw, TikTok's new £3.99 ad-free tier, more entries in the live-show sidebar bounty, and had time for a little Off Duty before signing off.

E2286: Banks don’t want to hand over their data to AI labs. So David Moscatelli built a $250,000 box that runs AI on-prem. He already has 1,600 pre-orders. On today’s episode of TWiST, Jason and Alex sit down with the Go Abacus founder and Yanez's Jose Caldera to unpack how regulated industries are getting AI without the cloud, why Bittensor subnet 54 is incentivizing miners to attack identity systems, and why Cloudflare just laid off 20% of its workforce in the same week it raised guidance. The show closes with Jason explaining what it means to build an AI-first startup, and how workers can derisk their future employment!

E2285: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg argues we may be witnessing the end of a 60-year run for venture capital as a craft business. Maniv's Mike Granoff and Oxcart's Larry Covert push back, arguing it's merely splitting into two asset classes: "Consensus VC" and traditional VC. Either way, the implications for founders, LPs, and the next decade of innovation are enormous. Tune in for the IPO drought, "bullshit ARR" in the AI era, AI gross margins, the U.S.-China chip war, the Iran conflict's impact on defense tech, the death of NATO and the rise of allied supply chains, why Tel Aviv's stock exchange could become the next NASDAQ, and more.

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