Meet the startup helping the US Navy hunt for mines

Top News

• Mine hunting: The US Navy is turning to Domino, a startup that helps companies build, deploy, and manage AI to find mines in the Strait of Hormuz. With a fresh $100 million contract, Domino will help the American military “make underwater mine detection faster, more accurate, and less dependent on human sailors.” The Navy-Domino partnership underscores the rising importance of AI in military contexts, including keeping global shipping lanes free from explosives.

• Stablecoins are big business: Polymarket’s rapid growth was partly enabled by Fun, a startup that provides crypto and fiat on- and off-ramps for customers. The fintech upstart now processes $18 billion in annual payment volume, enough for venture capitalists to put $72 million into its coffers as part of an outsized Series A. As the stablecoin market grows, so too will demand for financial technology that makes their use simple and safe.

• The race to build efficient AI accelerates: Nebius, a public neocloud, announced today that it plans to purchase Eigen AI. Eigen helps make AI inference and certain AI training activities more efficient. Given that Nebius serves AI compute demand today and there’s not enough to go around, snapping up a smaller company to make existing GPUs stretch further makes good sense. And if you are Nebius and want to defend your valuation, then working to ensure your gross margins are as attractive as possible is simply good business.

TWiST 500

If you invest time learning about our universe, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers. Sure, Polaris is 440 light-years away, but how far is it really? About 4.1 quadrillion kilometers.

I’m concerned that, just as your eyes glazed over reading that distance figure, we’re losing sight of just how big some of the numbers are getting in the AI game. News that Anthropic was receiving interest at $800 billion gave us one big number to stare at. News that the company may actually raise another pre-IPO round at a $900 billion valuation feels like a very similar story. The only difference? $100 billion, or enough money to spend $10,000 every day for 10,000,000 days, or about 27,379 years.

See? The figures are hard to wrap your head around. When Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion, I recall the shock and awe in tech. People — such as your humble servant — reached for analogies to contextualize the exit price. Anthropic, in contrast, may have just added one hundred times that much money to its worth by simply waiting a few weeks before saying ‘yes’ to investors.

This year, we expect to see both OpenAI and Anthropic leave the TWIST500 by going public. Today, however, the two companies are trying to stretch the definition of ‘private business’ as far as they can before listing.

By the by, is Anthropic overvalued at $900 billion? Beats the pants off me. If you expect AI demand to grow, and customers to remain willing to pay top-dollar prices for market-leading AI models, then it could be cheap at 90% of $1 trillion. If you think that OpenAI will regain the crown, then perhaps it’s a bit pricey. Either way, when we get our hands on their S-1 filings, we won’t have to guess any longer. We’ll just have another set of big numbers that we need to, somehow, translate into something the human brain can properly grok. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2282: A beanie that reads your thoughts and turns them into text — no surgery required? Jason grills the Sabi co-founders on their noninvasive brain-computer interface, backed by Vinod Khosla, and calls a cap on the whole thing (until he doesn't). This episode of This Week in Startups covers a lot of ground: Jason's tactical tip of the day on making everyone the CEO of their domain, a deep dive into Sabi's thought-to-text beanie, a live demo of AI-powered podcast sidebars built by the TWiST audience, the announcement of a new $5K bounty for an annotation tool, and Jason's big five wellness framework.

E2281: Jason thinks the Chinese government blocking Meta’s acquisition of Manus might be the biggest AI story of the year. This was the deal that demonstrated that Chinese AI companies could move operations overseas (in this case, to Singapore) and start collaborating with Western companies. That loophole has apparently now closed. PLUS OpenAI and Microsoft changed the terms of their relationship, that viral video purportedly showing a Huawei self-driving vehicle hitting a young pedestrian, and Jason’s reaction to Russell Brand on Piers Morgan’s show.

BONUS: In this Saturday special, Lon and Jason run down some of the week’s biggest news. AngelList’s new USVC fund gives retail investors exposure to some of the world’s biggest and most sought-after private companies, but not every social media user likes the terms. Then, how should the US punish a Special Forces soldier who places wagers on America’s raid on Venezuela? Does it matter if he wagered on “his own team”? Finally, Jason’s thoughts on the controversial NYT podcast about “micro-looting” and “social murder.”

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