Top News
Anthropic signs a new lease: Despite so much backlash from municipalities and local residents, America’s still finding lots of room for fresh data centers. Anthropic announced plans to utilize a TeraWulf project about an hour southwest of Louisville, Kentucky, signing a new 20-year lease. The facility boasts a total capacity of 400 megawatts, and should start selling power in the second half of 2027, if all goes to plan. TeraWulf is among the former crypto mining interests that have doused their market caps in rocket fuel by pivoting to AI infrastructure.
Tencent drops Hy3 model globally: The Chinese conglomerate released the 295B parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model under a relatively permissive Apache 2.0 license. It’s a bit too soon to tell objectively how well Hy3 stacks up against open source leaders like Z.ai’s GLM-5.2. Tencent claims they used a “blind test” rather than a straight-up leaderboard for their evaluations, and that Hy3 outperformed GLM-5.1 in categories like frontend development, data, and storage work. If the early buzz turns out to be accurate, Tencent may have just, in VentureBeat’s terms, “become one of the leaders of open source.”
Reddit monitors AI with AI: GEO, or “generative engine optimization,” works a lot like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the long-ago years of Google supremacy. Getting mentioned on a popular, influential, authoritative website like, say, Reddit tells AI models the same thing it once communicated to Google’s web crawlers: this is a reliable link that is recommendation-worthy. The problem is, this makes backlinks from Reddit highly valuable and sought-after for marketers and growth hackers, white hat and otherwise. Reddit is getting so overwhelmed by AI-generated attempts to game the system, they’re fighting back… with AI. The company announced Monday that their freshly-redesigned automated moderation system caught 25,000 “spammy posts and comments” each day in Q1, reducing overall exposure to users by around 20% vs. just one year ago. Still, Reddit makes the case that it’s catching more spam because its tools have improved, and become more proactive about shutting down “suspicious actors” before they can even post. Not because spam itself has increased significantly.
TWiST 500
First up, a major milestone for AI staffing startup Mercor, which has now topped $2 billion in gross annualized revenue, according to The Information. For those keeping track, that’s double the company’s pace from earlier this same year.
Many AI companies — even many startups on the TWiST 500 — are tackling the problem of post-training, data refinement, and fine-tuning. That is, producing increasingly sharper and more specialized AI models not just by throwing more compute at the wall, but by providing nuanced, detailed feedback on results from humans with expertise.
Mercor essentially functions as a next-generation staffing agency, addressing this specific concern. They use an AI interviewer/recruiter to find experts in sought-after professional domains — PhDs, former researchers, and so forth — then match them with AI labs that need experts in their specific disciplines.
This is also important to bear in mind when considering Mercor revenue numbers. They pay around 60-70% of this GROSS revenue out to the expert contractors, so that $2 billion is really $600-$800 that Mercor gets to keep.
In other T500 news this week, Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson spoke with TechCrunch about the startup’s plans to go public through a merger with Michael Klein’s SPAC, Churchill Capital Corp XI. (SEC approval of the deal is still pending.) In Johnson’s view, this is an attempt to capture first-mover advantage: Agility becomes the first singularly-focused humanoid robotics company to hit public markets in the US. The company hopes to capitalize on excitement around the sector to fund increased production at its Salem, Oregon, facility, and start shipping more robots. – Lon
A message from Northwest Registered Agent
Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.
This Week in Startups
E2308: First up, Alex chats with Hanover Park CEO and co-founder Chris Hladczuk about what $100 trillion+ in global assets are being overseen by what he calls “human duct tape.” That is, teams of accountants working in back offices, patching together important data and results from a variety of legacy applications (like QuickBooks and Bill.com) that are essentially holding them hostage. His startup suggests that AI is the answer. PLUS Alex and Lon look back on a classic TWiST chat from March 2020 between Jason and Figma CEO Dylan Field.
E2307: Forget the triple-triple-double-double-double; the new bar for startups hoping to raise venture capital has reached the stratosphere, though our venture panel is worried that startups are focusing too much on today’s problems that may not become companies tomorrow. During a lively VC roundtable, Cowboy’s Aileen Lee, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, and Lerer Hippeau’s Ben Lerer joined Alex to dig into exiting pre-AI startups, rising valuations, token spend, why they are keeping their funds small, and whether the government just tripped OpenAI and Anthropic!
E2306: It’s the debut of our new Summer 2026 series “TWiST All Stars.” We’re inviting back some of Jason’s favorite guests from throughout the long history of the pod, and we’re kicking things off with one of his “Besties,” investor and 8090 co-founder/CEO Chamath Palihapitiya. He’s talking about the groundbreaking development platform, which is helping enterprises save money and protect their data by building out their own internal software. Plus he shares with Jason his origin story, why he started the Learn With Me and Drink With Me communities, his advice for young people graduating college in the age of AI, and more.
TWiST Partner Offers
Vanta: Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 reports fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at http://www.vanta.com/twist.
Sentry.io: Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST
CLA: Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou.
Subscribe to Us On Your Favorite Podcast Platforms
Our Favorite Tool
If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!
SF Live-Work Space Now Available
Need a flexible living and working environment in San Francisco? This thoughtfully designed loft-style residence at 787 Bryant St., the heart of the vibrant SOMA district and the city’s creative hub, is now available for rent or purchase. Check the listing for more details.
The TWiST500 newsletter is the new, updated, and improved TWiST Ticker.
