Top Stories
Hugging Face is working with a bank to explore a possible sale at a $13B+ valuation, showing buyers may value widely used AI developer tools as highly as model makers. — Business Insider
Anthropic’s Fable 5 accounts for just 11% of customers’ AI spending, as businesses favor cheaper models that can handle everyday tasks. — Financial Times
Xiaomi unveiled its Xring O3 smartphone chip, reportedly made by TSMC, as it seeks more control over premium devices and less dependence on Qualcomm and MediaTek. — Yahoo Finance
Dutch regulators fined Uber $968 million for allegedly suspending drivers through entirely automated processes, without warning or human oversight; Uber plans to appeal. — TechCrunch
California canceled settlement talks over Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, accusing the company of leaking and misrepresenting discussions as 12 states seek to block the deal. — The New York Times
Top Funding Announcements
Perplexity — The AI search and agentic startup is reportedly raising an equity round at a $30B-plus valuation, with Nvidia in talks to invest. — Tech Funding News
Dogotix — Xpeng’s humanoid robotics unit will raise $900M from Alibaba, Tencent, IDG Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Xpeng, and executives. — Yahoo Finance
Letara — The Japanese spacecraft propulsion startup raised $16M co-led by Headline Asia, JIC Venture Growth Investment, and Incubate Fund to develop larger hybrid rocket systems for space, defense, and security markets. — TechCrunch
Embedd — The physical AI startup raised a $2.7M pre-seed led by Seedcamp to expand its chip-integration platform and deepen semiconductor partnerships. — Tech Funding News
Boldr — The HVAC contractor platform raised a $5M pre-Series A led by Unconventional Ventures to expand across the US. — Tech Funding News
A message from Superhuman
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This Week in Startups
Timestamps:
0:00 What is Jason's Grok Bot up to?
4:43 Systems over goals
9:09 Superhuman - Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Sign up to get the best in AI at https://Superhuman.com
12:34 OpenAI will go public soon
13:45 Top line ARR matters way less than churn
20:09 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST
29:21 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
30:18 Harvey launches Tenet
33:58 "Open source is going to win it all"
35:24 Allan Guo of Willow joins
38:44 Managing a single source of truth across a team
46:26 Lon and Jason love the Toyota Alphard
50:26 Stanford student and AV expert Ethan Goodhart joins
59:35 How Ethan got Jensen Huang to go for a ride
1:00:03 Punk Rock 101
1:05:50 Phoebe Gates' secret Harvard class
TWiST Partner Offers
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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.
Today’s Fascinating Fact from Harmonic
Hugging Face was founded in Paris in 2016 as a social chatbot app for teens and young people. (Hence the name, derived from the 🤗 emoji.) Founding trio Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf quickly realized the underlying architecture they were building was far more valuable than the actual app, and pivoted the project into an open-source “picks and shovels” resource for ML developers. As of Spring 2026, the platform hosts more than 2.7 million models and over 927,000 data sets, serving more than 13 million users.
Try it yourself at harmonic.ai
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