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Top News

• The TikTok deal is a go: The sale of TikTok US from its Chinese parent company Bytedance will formally occur on January 22, 2026. An investor group including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX are taking a 45% stake in the new entity, with Bytedance’s existing investors receiving around 30%, 20% going to Bytedance itself, and the rest headed for still-unnamed investors. TikTok’s global business will still handle ecommerce, advertising, and marketing, according to an internal memo.

• Neurable raises $35M: While Neuralink is the best-known brain-computer interface (BCI) company today, it does have rivals. Those include Neurable, which has built its own BCI technology and offers brain-scanning hardware that consumers can already purchase today. The startup’s new capital is earmarked to bring its technology to “new devices and new industries,” Neurable said in a release. (Another BCI startup, Precision Neuroscience, is on our TWiST500 list.)

• DraftKings launches stand-alone predictions app: As Coinbase works to block states from regulating prediction markets, the market is working overtime to ensure that the now-legal form of wagering on real-world outcomes continues to grow. Polymarket and Kalshi — both TWiST500 members — have raised mountains of capital in recent months. Perhaps to fend of competition from rivals like DraftKings, the sports-betting service. DraftKings bought Railbird to power its prediction-market products and is launching a stand-alone application to house them.

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Expectations that M&A would tick higher this week appear to be coming true. Today we learned that Anysphere, the company behind the popular Cursor AI coding service, is buying Graphite, a code review service.

Cursor frames its purchase of Graphite as a natural extension of its existing work: AI has made coding easier and faster, but code reviews are often manual and slow. Graphite, when independent, was working on making code reviews no longer a “bottleneck for building production-grade software.”

• Are you a Graphite fan? Don’t worry. Cursor intends to let it continue to operate as-is. For now, at least.

The transaction is not merely another case of startups buying startups in 2025. More like two companies with a shared backer joining forces. The Grammary-Coda deal was one such transaction. In the case of Cursor (Anysphere) and Graphite, Accel backed both. In a short post on the transaction, the venture group argued that “code generation and review are rapidly blending together, and collaboration is becoming fluid across teams of humans and agents.” From that perspective, you can’t imagine a better pairing than Cursor + Graphite.

Naturally we’d like to know more about the deal’s mechanics, but we’ll take what we can get as 2025 comes to a close. Recall that Cursor’s revenue run rate has reached the $1 billion mark, so it could have purchased Graphite with cash, stock, or a blend of both. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2225: On the debut of our new spinoff — “This Week in AI” — Jason hangs with three all-star founders: Mikey Schulman of Suno, Ali Ansari of Micro1, and Wade Foster from Zapier. Together they chat about the AI talent wars of 2025 (and soon to be 2026), the value of a “high-agency” mindset, how to work around the design bottleneck, entering the Post Training Era, and much more!

E2224: Roomba… we hardly knew ya! The company behind the iconic disc-shaped autonomous vacuum, iRobot, had a chance to get acquired by Amazon back in 2022, but European and US regulators stalled the deal. NOW iRobot is entering bankruptcy. Per Jason, allowing this deal to go through would have benefitted everybody, but because of over-cautious antitrust action, the world lost out on a once-great company.

E2223: Disney signed a landmark new deal with OpenAI, investing $1 billion in the ChatGPT maker and licensing over 200 of their most famous characters for use in the Sora app. Jason naturally saw all this coming, and predicted as much on the “All-In Podcast” over the summer. Hear him unpack why this was so important for the future of BOTH companies, plus lots more of the week’s biggest stories for founders.

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