The EU wants to accelerate startup development

Top News

• The Synapse mess is still hurting people: Reporting indicates the collapse of Synapse is leaving a lot of consumers stuck holding the bag. To catch you up, Synapse was an embedded banking startup. However, a “dispute over account balances arose between Synapse and lender Evolve Bank,” Axios reports, leading to individual users seeing their accounts frozen with little recourse. Whether or not any entity will step in to help fund help is not clear.

• Pony goes public: Priced at the top of its range, Pony.AI is going public today at $13 per share. That means the Chinese self-driving company will raise $260 million from its 20 million share IPO. Private placements will bolster the figure. Now that we’ve seen two self-driving companies from China list here in the States, wouldn’t it be nice to see a domestic self-driving company do the same? Cough, Waymo.

• The EU wants to accelerate startup development: Earlier this week on TWiST, we hosted Dune’s CEO to discuss wealth taxes in Europe and how nations like Norway are navigating startup creation and their tax codes. Norway isn’t an EU member state, but the conversation we had on the show is also taking place in the halls of power in the European Union. How so? European Union’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, wants to close an innovation gap with other blocs and markets by, TechCrunch reports, “unlocking more support for startups to scale and reducing red tape that may be holding business back.”

TWiST500

We’re heading into a feasting holiday here in the United States — note that TWiST will return to your ears and eyes on Monday! — but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a little TWiST500 news to catch up on.

Anthropic, a member company of our list for some time, released a “Model Context Protocol” this week. In English, it’s a piece of software that helps connect external data sources to AI models. Why did Anthropic build it? Per the company, MCP will “help frontier models produce better, more relevant responses.” Given that Anthropic makes its bread and butter from frontier models, you can see why it built and released the tool.

The move comes as Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI giants are working to help their technology do more. Anthropic’s Computer Use tool, OpenAI’s search engine and o1 model—the list goes on. What I appreciate about the Anthropic-MCP project is that it’s open-source. Anthropic is a closed-source AI shop, but that doesn’t mean its non-model work has to be, right?

All this is to say that while OpenAI continues to consume most of the media oxygen, the Anthropic crew is also hard at work. And that means no matter which AI giant wins more market share over time, we, the consumers, will win. — Alex

p.s. A thank you to folks who have nominated startups for inclusion. Keep ‘em coming. We read your emails. Shoot a note to [email protected] if you want!

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This Week in Startups

E2051: Jason and Alex sit down with a fantastic guest—Alex Kendall, founder and CEO of Wayve, an AI company working on self-driving. You might recall that Wayve raised $1 billion earlier this year, but TWIST wanted to know how the company intends to commercialize —and how soon. From there, it was back to the bitcoin mines. Figuratively, as the hosts dug into MicroStrategies' bitcoin buying bet. Precisely why it is trading at such a NAV premium remains occluded to the show, but we did chase down its debt terms.

E2050: Jason and Alex have Fredrik Haga on the show to discuss Norway's controversial wealth tax and its impact on startup formation, including the exodus of top taxpayers. They explore Dune Analytics' revenue growth, Michael Saylor's bold Bitcoin strategy, and OpenAI's new browser project and its potential to reshape search. Plus, they dive into CoreWeave's IPO and the evolving GPU cloud market.

E2049: Jason and Alex dive into Nvidia’s blockbuster earnings, highlighting the massive demand for Blackwell GPUs and what it means for AI’s future. They break down the DOJ’s antitrust push against Google, including potential divestitures of Chrome and Android, and how it could reshape search and advertising. Jean-Paul Schmetz from Brave joins to talk about privacy-first search and the future of AI, and we wrap up with inspiring Founder Fridays stories from Georges Colbert and Longview’s Kitty and Coco, showcasing how startups are thriving in unexpected places.

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LAUNCH Cloud Kitchens Incubator

Applications are open for Cohort 2 of the LAUNCH CloudKitchens Incubator (LiCK). We're looking for food entrepreneurs who wish to expand into the ghost kitchen space or tech founders with a team and a great idea. The application and more information can be found at https://ck.launch.co/.

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