RIP Sora App (2025-2026)

Top News

• OpenAI’s latest raise: In major OpenAI news, Bloomberg reports that the company is nearing a deal for $10 billion in fresh funding from a string of venture firms and funds, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX, Coatue Management, and Thrive Capital. This will value the company at a staggering $730 billion, according to the report, which suggests the deal will close by the end of the month. That’s on top of the $110 billion in funds announced last month, coming into the House of Altman from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. (For comparison’s sake, OpenAI’s fiercest rival Anthropic recently completed a $30 billion round — which also included MGX — valuing the Claude maker at $380 billion.

• Not you, Sora: To what will OpenAI dedicate all of this incoming capital? Unclear, but definitely not the Sora “slop feed” app, which the company announced plans to discontinue. In a post to the official Sora account on X, OpenAI confirms “we’re saying goodbye to Sora,” adding “what you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.” Disappointing, perhaps, but it’s not a COMPLETE surprise, though. Just one week ago, WSJ reported that OpenAI’s CEO of Applications Fidji Simo had told staffers the company was shifting focus to productivity applications for enterprises, and away from “side quests.” Sora clearly fell in the latter category.

• Amazon picks up Fauna Robotics: The New York-based robotics startup is developing a humanoid 3.5-foot domestic helper bot, named Sprout, designed for handling basic household chores like fetching small items and doing a little cleaning up. (Fauna’s also focused on “fun robots,” so naturally, Sprout is capable of human interaction and has some dance moves.) No announced plans yet for a Sprout consumer release, but the company started sending prototypes to “research and development partners” earlier this year.

TWiST 500

We wrote recently in this space about Superhuman, the suite of productivity apps (including Grammarly) that ran afoul a number of authors — and their estates — with an AI-powered “Expert Review” feature. To sum up: AI simulated how various authors, journalists, and academics, living and dead, might evaluate and edit a user’s text. The company did not get anyone’s permission before simulating their writing advice. Following backlash, CEO Shishir Mehrotra pulled the feature and apologized.

Mehrotra appeared on the “Decoder” podcast this week with host Nilay Patel — one of the writers who “inspired” Expert Review — to dissect the controversy from his perspective. He concedes that, as launched, it was a low quality feature, and adds that it was likely the work of a small team — “a product manager and a couple engineers” — rather than a company-wide initiative. Though he does offer some defense — the feature was not really impersonating anyone, but was simply “inspired” by their work, he argues — Mehrotra still dismisses it as unsatisfying and incomplete, and seems to have no interest in resurrecting the concept any time soon.

More intriguingly, Mehrotra also dives into some of the thinking and context behind Expert Review, unpacking how it came to be in the first place. Grammarly aims to provide specific rather than generic feedback on a user’s writing, not just from the perspective of an English tutor but from essentially anyone in their lives. So an AI that could simulate favorite authors was perhaps an inevitable brainstorming concept. The company also apparently hoped that creators and authors would embrace the feature over time, as a way to connect with their online audiences.

If you’re interested in AI, copyright, and the startups working around them, the podcast is probably worth a listen. Not just for a breakdown of the Grammarly situation specifically, but of how good intentions and clever pitches can lose their way through the development process.

Final Note: I noticed recently that Crusoe Energy — a friend of the pod and recent guests on TWiAI! — was not the TWiST 500, so I took the liberty of adding them. And lo and behold, they’re already making headlines. The company provides power for data centers from otherwise wasted or “stranded” energy sources. They just signed a fresh deal with Microsoft for a data center project in Abilene, Texas, which has been abandoned by Oracle and OpenAI after months of negotiation. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2266: Jason’s exploring the controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve with special guests Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund and Ryan Mahdavi from Ceel (another compliance startup, and a Delve competitor). Is Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture to blame? And why did Ryan always have deep suspicions about the once promising Y Combinator-backed company? PLUS two more demos from data center energy savers Brick and Bittensor Subnet 71, lead generation service LeadPoet.

E2265: In our LaunchFest grand finale, Jason’s joined by Zipline founder Keller Cliffton, who shares his company’s journey from transporting life-saving blood donations to Rwandan hospitals through scaling up to 8 countries and deliveries of all kinds. Plus we’ve got Rahul Vohra from Superhuman sharing his own entrepreneurial backstory, from launching Rapportive while living in Cambridge through his latest startup’s merger with Grammarly.

E2264: This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at LaunchFest in San Francisco! Jason sits down with Robinhood co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Vlad Tenev. Together they reminisce about their first meeting — when Vlad pitched Jason on Robinhood in a dive bar — plus thoughts on the importance of doing multiple launches for a new product, how Robinhood identified its ideal customers, tips for navigating negative press and mistakes that feel existential, plus Vlad’s thoughts on working with AI and nurturing talent internally.

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