There's a new unicorn in town

Top News

• Reka AI graduates to unicorn status: The LLM maker raised a new $110 million funding round led by Nvidia and Snowflake Inc., valuing the company at over $1 billion. Reka — which comes from a handful of former Google and Meta researchers — primarily aims to churn out foundation models more efficiently and quickly than their rivals, but they’ve also branched out into developing interfaces and customized AI apps for enterprise partners. Snowflake senior engineer Vivek Raghunathan claims they’re “one of the rare independents” that can keep up with the major players in the foundational model game.

• Delve grabs $32M Series A: The startup — launched by a group of researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley — uses AI agents to automate the arduous, time-consuming, and painstaking regulatory compliance process. Their Series A — led and largely funded by Insight Partners — values Delve at a solid $300 million, a 10x jump over their previous round. The company’s only 2 years old and they’ve already had one successful pivot. The original incarnation was an AI-powered medical note-taking app that helped doctors deal with patient documentation, and dealing with the headache of HIPAA compliance inspired the new direction.

• Amazon decides to Bee aggressive: The retail and streaming giant announced plans to acquire AI device startup Bee. They make a self-titled $50 wearable that strongly resembles a Fitbit, but instead of tracking your steps, it transcribes everything that you and the folks around you say throughout the day, enabling you to later generate personalized summaries and reminders. (You can also give Bee access to your calendar, emails, contacts, and even photos, if you’re feeling like an open book.) Amazon assures us that the Bee isn’t saving any recordings and purely uses them for transcription purposes.

TWiST500

Another day, another massive trove of news items about the mega AI company of the moment for us to sift through.

Today, we’re talking all things xAI, the TWiST 500 standout from Elon Musk that makes the Grok model and, of course, owns X, The Everything App.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company is attempting to raise $12 billion in fresh funding — through the sale of both stock and debt — in order to fuel “ambitious expansion plans.” WSJ suggests that Valor Equity Partners — founded by long-time Musk associate Antonio Gracias — is in talks to lead the new round, which will be largely set aside for purchasing Nvidia chips to power the company’s (somewhat controversial!) mega-data center outside Memphis, TN.

It’s a kingly sum, even if xAI hadn’t just raised an additional $10 billion in debt and equity earlier this month. There’s expansion and then there’s EXPLOSION.

In other xAI news, Business Insider suggests — after reviewing internal documents and Slack messages — that the AI company’s staff were asked to record themselves speaking to co-workers and making various facial expressions, in order to help train Grok to better interpret and understand human emotions. (It’s unclear whether or not this has anything to do with the recent launch of Grok’s AI Companion avatars, Ani and Rudi.)

The internal project — known as “Skippy” — apparently raised privacy concerns among some xAI staffers about how their likenesses might be used, even though they were advised that the videos would only be used for training and would never be publicly released.

At this point, it’s clear that AI companies want any and all data about the human experience that they can access in order to train these models. The only question that remains is how much information we’re all willing to give them. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2154: Jason’s on the road this week, so Alex is doing quick-hit interviews with three of our favorite TWiST 500 founders. First up, John Jeremy Harris of Harbinger Motors shows us how they’re making EV batteries right here in the USA. Then, James Hawkins of PostHog advises us on the benefits of maintaining a low burn rate. Finally, Yoshi Yokokawa of Alpaca HQ swings by to talk about building in a niche category that’s no longer the Valley’s primary obsession.

E2153: On an all-new TWIST, Jason and Alex consider the future of indie publishing, and the growing rivalry between newsletter platforms Substack and Beehiiv. PLUS we’re talking Lovable’s latest raise and what it says about the economics of vibecoding, Uber’s new deal with Lucid and Nuro, AND what is “meme processing”? We’re unpacking Jason’s unified theory of internet humor.

E2152: Jason’s in Silicon Valley this week with Launch Accelerator’s Cohort 34, and he and Alex are going deep on VC Geoff Lewis’ perplexing social media activity, the ENORMOUS seed rounds going to relatively early-stage AI startups, and they’re crunching the numbers on just how long it takes before data centers turn profitable. Plus, WHO will be the next CEO of X, the Everything App? Polymarket’s sharps want to know.

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Founder U is coming to the MENA region!

Our 12-week pre-accelerator—designed to help early-stage founders build and grow—kicks off this fall in Saudi Arabia. The first cohort launches in Riyadh on November 3rd, followed by in-person and virtual sessions throughout the program. Founders in MENA: this is your chance to turn your idea into a business and get world-class insights on building a successful startup. Apply today: https://mena.founder.university/

LAUNCH Accelerator

Our current Accelerator batch is graduating! Watch 11 strong startups pitch to Jason and our investor-judges. We are livestreaming the event on Monday, July 28th at 12:30 PM PT. Register here.

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