Top Stories
Sony Music became the first music company to join the AI-focused creative responsibility coalition ARIAM alongside Disney and The New York Times. — Variety
Anthropic released Opus 5.5, which delivered its strongest results yet on internal safety evaluations and cut operation costs by 40% compared to Opus 5. — The New York Times
Apple is prototyping a screenless fitness band that could launch after 2027. — Yahoo Finance
Binance invested $100M in Circle and agreed to promote USDC for five years in exchange for monthly incentives. — CoinDesk
Top Funding Announcements
Micro1 — The AI training-data provider raised over $100M at a $4B valuation, with two frontier labs and two xAI cofounders participating. — AI Weekly
Basecamp Research — The London life sciences startup raised a $140M Series C led by S32, with Anthropic participating. — Tech.eu
Bessemer Venture Partners — Raised $5.75B across new funds, earmarking $4B for growth-stage investments and $1.75B for early-stage startups. — Bloomberg
Hubble Network — The satellite startup raised $200M at a $1.6B valuation to build a spacecraft network providing global Bluetooth connectivity. — Bloomberg Tech
Ema — The enterprise automation startup raised a $77M Series B led by Creaegis. This brings its total funding to $140M. — TechCrunch
A Message from The Conservation Fund:
Find out more about how The Conservation Fund is protecting land, wildlife, and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing economic opportunities. Visit https://conservationfund.org.
Top Tweets
This Week in Startups
Timestamps:
0:00 Elon Musk revives the Hyperloop: a 30-minute Austin–San Antonio tunnel
0:25 A brief history of Hyperloop and the white paper
8:56 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist
19:54 DigitalOcean - Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.
21:02 News: Trump proposes an "AI Force," an AI czar, and renaming AI itself
22:11 "Get back to work, nerds"
29:44 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you — it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app
31:18 TypeSafe's Jev, a "System One" model built to decide, not chat
39:11 Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI agent
49:19 Dina Powell McCormick's tense All-In Summit exchange with Jason
1:02:00 Off-Duty: Robocurve's RoboHarm benchmark
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Today’s Fascinating Fact from Harmonic
Hubble Network operates a global satellite network to which any standard Bluetooth chip can connect directly, with no cell towers or special hardware required. Their tagline — “Bluetooth to Space” — essentially tells the whole story. The company went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, and in 2024, announced a world-first: a direct Bluetooth connection from an ordinary chip to a satellite over 350 miles away. That’s about 10x farther than an ordinary Bluetooth signal on Earth.
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