Way out Waymo

Author

Lon Harris
June 17, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Top News

  • Waymo expanding in California: Google’s autonomous vehicle division announced a plan to operate in more parts of California. The robotaxis can already be seen all over San Francisco and Los Angeles. (And sometimes they’re not even on fire!) But they’re coming soon to a fleet of new neighborhoods including Brisbane, South San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park up north, and Playa del Rey, Ladera Heights, Echo Park, and Silver Lake down south.

  • Teamworks is worth $1 billion: The North Carolina startup built a suite of tools for professional and college sports teams, helping them keep their recruitment, coaching, and professional development processes organized and effective. The products are used by more than 6,500 athletic teams globally, including the entirety of the NFL (seriously, every team) and 90% of Major League Baseball clubs. That kind of traction helped the company raise an additional $235 million this month, putting them officially in unicorn territory.

  • Threads across the Fediverse: Meta’s Threads app is now more closely integrated into the Fediverse, a shared collective of social media platforms that freely exchanges data and updates using a common protocol. That means you can now use Threads to browse posts from Mastodon, Flipboard, or any of your other favorite Fediverse destinations. (There are others!) For now, the features aren’t super-customizable; it’s just a feed of posts from people you follow on Fediverse services in reverse chronological order. There’s apparently still debate internally at Meta about how intimately Threads and The Fed should play together.

TWiST500

It’s a big news day for Elon Musk’s xAI, the AI company that trained Grok and also owns X, the everything app.

Bloomberg reports that the company is currently negotiating a new $4.3 billion equity investment raise, on top of the $5 billion it’s already borrowing from debt investors.

xAI launched in 2023 and raised $14 billion fairly recently, but Bloomberg suggests the company only has around $4 billion of that cash left. (Hey, making AI models is expensive. You need so many of these chips! It’s crazy.)

The company’s making internal changes to ease dilution fears among investors, including a limit on how much secured debt it can raise and rules making it more difficult to move assets around. Nonetheless, enthusiasm around Grok more generally remains strong. xAI was valued at a mighty $80 billion in Q1, up from $51 billion at the close of last year.

But wait… there’s more! X Corp., owners of what was once Twitter — that place where Grok lives and works — have filed a lawsuit against the State of New York. Their legal team claims a new state law signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in December — the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” — violates the First Amendment to the Constitution and its free speech protections.

The law would require social media platforms, including X, to file semi-annual reports to New York State, detailing their efforts to moderate hate speech, radicalization, disinformation, harassment, foreign political interference, and more. X previously, and successfully, challenged a similar law in California, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022. That legislation was ultimately reworked and altered based on X’s legal actions, which seems a likely potential outcome in New York as well. – Lon

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LAUNCH Accelerator

We’re hosting an in-person Demo Day for LA34 in SF on July 16 from 9a-12p PT, the latest cohort from Jason Calacanis’ Accelerator.

If you are an early-stage investor and interested in attending, please reach out to [email protected].

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Founder University

Applications are open for Founder University Cohort 11, a 12-week remote pre-accelerator program tailored towards navigating early-startup practices, building an MVP, and growing traction. Submit your application at Founder University— Cohort 10 will kick off Summer 2025!

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