When you wish upon a Starcloud

Top News

• Starcloud snags $170M for space data centers: Just last week, we had a news item about Aetherflux, which plans to launch solar-powered data centers into orbit starting in 2027. But they’re not alone! TWiST 500 company Starcloud just closed a $170M Series A, a scant 17 months after graduating from Y Combinator, at a $1.1 billion valuation. They famously launched a small proof-of-concept satellite with a single Nvidia H100 GPU chip into orbit in November 2025. Up next is Starcloud 2, which will launch later this year with multiple GPUs and a bitcoin mining computer on board. It’s all paving the way for Starcloud 3, a three-ton spacecraft the company hopes to launch with SpaceX’s reusable Starship rocket once it’s ready for commercial use in 2028-2029.

• Americans continue to distrust AI: Another day, another poll demonstrating Americans’ negative views toward AI technology. The latest data comes from Quinnipiac, which found that 55% of Americans say AI will do them more harm than good; that’s an 11% jump since they polled the same question around one year ago. Additionally, 70% of Americans now believe AI advancements will reduce job opportunities, a 14% increase over last year, while only 7% believe that AI will increase their chances of getting a good job. And it’s not just their employment prospects that concerned respondents. Only 27% think AI technology will improve schools, while nearly 2/3rds suspect it will harm our education system, and only 3% of respondents said they would trust AI to give them medical or health advice without keeping a human professional in the loop.

• Uber grabs Berlin chaffeur app: The ubiquitous rideshare company announced plans to acquire Blackline, a Berlin-based app aimed at helping high-end customers book personal drivers and chauffeured rides. This is a segment that is really heating up. London’s Wheely, a similar offering, recently announced plans to expand to the US for the first time (aiming at New York City, specifically), while Uber introduced its own chauffeur option — Uber Elite — earlier this year. Lyft also made a move into the same market back in October, acquiring the luxury car service TBR Global Chauffeuring. Blackline provides an immediate boost to Uber Elite’s inventory; the app already operates in 500 cities across 60 countries.

TWiST 500

I figured the Starcloud news would be our T500 highlight of the day but it’s just one of several stories impacting our collection of the 500 best private companies in the world. There’s a lot going on this week!

• Mistral: The French AI connoisseurs raised $830 million in debt for a new data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel, close to Paris, which will run Nvidia chips. The hope is for the facility to become operational in Q2 of this year. Mistral is also investing $1.4 billion in multiple new data centers in Sweden, as part of an overall boost to European AI infrastructure. CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC: “Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe.”

• Rebellions: The South Korean chip makers raised $400 million this week, on top of a $250 million Series C round that closed in November. They’re expanding “aggressively” according to TechCrunch ahead of a planned IPO later this year. The company develops and designs inference AI chips, and then outsources their actual production. They plan to use the fresh funds to expand across Asia, the Middle East, and the US. Rebellions also announced two new hardware products: RebelPOD, a self-contained cluster for running inference AI tasks, and RebelRack, which takes multiple POD units and organizes them into a larger cluster for heavier workloads.

• Qodo: With so much focus on AI tools that help you write code, we’re going to need a separate layer that aids developers in testing, governing, and verifying that code to ensure it’s working properly. Enter Qodo, which raised a $70 million Series B to continue producing exactly these kinds of AI agents. While the majority of coding tools focus on tracking changes over generations, Qodo looks specifically at how individual code updates impacted entire systems, to give enterprises a clearer and more holistic idea of what’s working and what needs improvement. Founder Itamar Friedman tells TechCrunch that, because code quality remains so subjective, LLMs aren’t enough of a governance layer, and it takes a specialized agent with a better understanding of context - like organizational standards - to truly make AI-generated code as reliable as the conventional version.

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This Week in Startups

E2268: Jason and Lon welcome AstroForge founder and CEO Matt Gialich to the show. The space mining company hopes to refine platinum group metals (PGMs) from asteroids. Their last two missions have failed, but there’s still hope for the DeepSpace-2 project, piggybacking on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later on this year. Plus we’ve got Sam Dare from Templar (Subnet 3) to explain how he trained a 72 billion parameter AI model across a decentralized network of computers, and a demo of open-source Granola rival OpenOats from creator Yazin Alirhayim.

E2267: We’ve caught Subnet Fever on TWiST, so Lon and Alex welcome three sets of subnet founders to take a look at what they’re building on the TAO blockchain. The list includes MetaNova, which runs developer competitions to uncover molecular candidates that could one day lead to new drug treatments for major diseases. Plus there’s the Bitcast Network, which uses Bittensor to create a marketplace between brands and YouTube content creators. Finally, we’ve got Score, which uses a subnet model to generate small but highly specialized computer vision models.

E2266: Jason’s exploring the controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve with special guests Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund and Ryan Mahdavi from Ceel (another compliance startup, and a Delve competitor). Is Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture to blame? And why did Ryan always have deep suspicions about the once promising Y Combinator-backed company? PLUS two more demos from data center energy savers Brick and Bittensor Subnet 71, lead generation service LeadPoet.

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