GPTeach your children well

Top News

• OpenAI pitches free teacher AI: If you are a teacher in the United States and want to use AI at work, but can’t quite afford it, Sam Altman has your back. ChatGPT for Teachers, a purpose-built version of the popular AI tool, will be free for teachers through 2027. Altruism from the big AI lab? Not exactly. MagicSchool and Subject AI are just two startups among many working to bring AI to the classroom. OpenAI would like that business itself, thank you very much. And it can almost afford to eat a mountain of inference spend to do so.

• Luma AI raises $900M: Luma has raised a massive round and announced a partnership with Humain to build out a massive 2GW compute cluster to pursue its vision. The thesis: to reach AGI, we’re going to lever data of all types and pursue a multimodal model approach. Humain is of course the Saudi Arabian AI effort housed in the state’s Public Investment Fund, giving it ample financial and energy resources to bring to bear. Luma slots neatly into the ‘world model’ trend that has captured a chunk of AI attention, particularly amongst companies and founders that want to bring artificial intelligence into the physical world.

• Kraken files to go public: The day after it announced $800 million worth of fresh capital and a newly minted $20 billion valuation, crypto exchange Kraken filed to go public. While smaller than global icons Coinbase, Kraken’s movement towards the public markets is not novel. Stablecoin company Circle listed earlier this year, for example. Asked why Kraken would raise so much on the eve of its IPO filing, Jason said on the show today that the company is merely de-risking. Expect to see Kraken debut in early 2026.

TWiST 500

Humans love music. What I did not know until I had children was how deeply ingrained enjoyment of rhythm and melody are. My kids, sans prompting, are both big dancers. Put on some tunes, and they just start moving. They want more songs. More music. And once our oldest child learned to request specific tracks, you can be sure our Spotify recommendations took a major turn.

This is why I am not entirely shocked that TWIST500 member Suno has scaled to $200 million worth of annual revenue. The AI-powered music generation service is one of a brace of companies — alongside rival Udio — building consumer-friendly music creation tools, with no music theory or experience required. Given how much humans love music, and what a personal experience it has always been, letting long-time music consumers get in on the creation process was a brilliant idea.

Suno is growing so quickly that it just raised $250 million at a nearly $2.5 billion valuation. Given the sheer size of the round, the startup is raising defensive capital so that it can stick it out and win, or settle the lawsuits it faces from music rights holders on favorable terms.

Naturally, I don’t want to come down on one side or the other of ongoing litigation, but I can say that when my kids learn to type, they are going to want to make their own songs. If Suno and Udio survive the copyright gauntlet, perhaps I’ll become one of their paying customers. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2211: Grok 4.1 and Gemini 3 went HEAD TO HEAD this week, launching right on top of one another. But how do we really KNOW which who’s leading the seemingly endless AI Death Race? On a new TWiST, Jason and Alex survey the current AI landscape, and try to look beyond the mega-deals and benchmarking stats to get a real sense for the state of play. Plus Cloudflare shuts down the internet, how to turn off “Learn From This App” on iOS, ChatGPT takes a nosedive on Polymarket’s “Top AI” market, and more.

E2210: In a news-packed Monday show, Jason and Alex talk about Ramp’s huge raise, AI companies growing significantly faster than their SaaS counterparts, Joby’s big moves in Aub Dhabi, the death of San Francisco’s beloved bodega cat KitKat, Jeff Bezos’ grand return to the C-suite with Project Prometheus, and much more.

E2209: Molly Cantillon of Nox stops by the show to debut RPLY, an AI helper that lives in your iMessages and helps you keep up with all your various threads and groupchats. She thinks it’s the first step to an AI-powered future in which an “Invisible OS” monitors our activity all day and intervenes when needed. Then we’re chatting with Gregg Mojica about the state of the art in AI agents, and whether we’re in a “lull” right now. Finally, another TWiST Flashback features a classic 2013 chat with Shopify mastermind Tobi Lutke.

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Investor Networking Lunch in SF

Jason and LAUNCH are hosting an investor networking lunch, followed by pitches from our latest Accelerator batch. We'd love for you to join us for Dim Sum in San Francisco on Friday, December 5th. (Or forward this to your investor friends.)

• Date/Time: Friday, December 5th, 2025 at 12-3PM PT

• Format: Dim sum lunch, followed by founder pitches & investor networking

• Location: TBA (Chinatown area)

Spots are limited, please RSVP here. The LAUNCH team will email you confirmation once your registration is accepted. You must be an accredited investor or work for a VC Fund to join.

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