Top News | European Union regulators have fined Google $1 billion for favoring its own shopping, travel, gaming, and translation services in search and restricting developers on Google Play, escalating trans-Atlantic tensions ahead of potential new U.S. tariffs. The New York Times has more here. | A bipartisan House bill would give the Department of Homeland Security authority to shut down or throttle dangerous frontier AI models and fine companies up to $20 million a day following OpenAI’s disclosure that its models escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face. Politico has more here. | | |
Every top-decile VC fund has a silent differentiator: operational excellence. | As funds scale, a patchwork of tools becomes a liability. Critical insights get trapped in inboxes, gaps appear in portfolio data, and quarterly reporting turns into a fire drill. | Get your act (and data) together, like the top VCs with PortfolioIQ. | | Meta Launched a New AI Optimism Ad Set to a Song About Human Extinction |  | Image Credits: Creative Images Lab / Getty Images |
| By Amanda Silberling | Meta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis. | “Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover says. “We couldn’t disagree more.” | Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart. | “Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the voiceover says. “The future is for everyone.” | That’s a nice sentiment — as well as pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song “Five Years.” | If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about. | | | Massive Fundings | Corgi, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that offers business insurance for startups and other companies, has reportedly closed an undisclosed Series B2 extension at a $4 billion valuation. TechCrunch takes a look here. | Crystalys Therapeutics, a four-year-old San Diego startup that is developing dotinurad, an oral second-line gout therapy aimed at reducing uric acid, gout flares, and tophi, raised a $130 million Series B round led by Frazier Life Sciences, with Wellington Management, HBM Healthcare Investments, Soleus Capital, Cormorant Asset Management, Trails Edge Capital Partners, Pivotal bioVenture Partners, and KCap Biotechnology Fund as well as previous investors Novo Holdings, SR One, Catalys Pacific, Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Funds, Lightstone Ventures, AN Venture Partners, abrdn, KB Investments, Pontifax, Longwood Fund, Alexandria Venture Investments, Wedbush Healthcare Partners, and Prebys Ventures Fund also piling on. Fierce Biotech has more here. | Etched, a four-year-old chip startup based in San Jose, CA, that makes rack-scale inference clusters for frontier AI workloads, raised a $300 million Series C round at a $10.3 billion valuation led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion, and SK Hynix also participating. The company has raised a total of $1+ billion. TechCrunch talks with its COO here. | Revolut, an 11-year-old London company that offers app-based banking, payments, trading, loans, and other financial services, launched a secondary share sale at a $115 billion valuation, up from $75 billion late last year. The Wall Street Journal has more here. | | Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings | Abstract Security, a three-year-old Palo Alto startup that helps security teams route data across existing tools and detect threats while that data is still moving, raised a $25 million Series A extension co-led by Cheyenne Ventures and Atlantic Vantage Point, with previous investors Crosslink Capital and Rally Ventures also participating. The company has raised a total of nearly $50 million. SiliconANGLE has more here. | AegisAI, a one-year-old New York startup that analyzes corporate emails to stop spear phishing, malware, and business-email-compromise attacks before they reach inboxes, raised a $36 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures, with previous investors Accel and Foundation Capital also reupping. The company has raised a total of $49 million. TechCrunch has more here. | Asuene, a seven-year-old Tokyo startup that helps companies measure, reduce, and report emissions, manage supply chain sustainability, obtain third-party assurance, buy carbon credits, and cut energy use, raised a $43.8 million Series D round led by Decarbonization Partners (a BlackRock and Temasek JV), with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation also participating. ESG Today has more here. | BusinessNext, a 24-year-old Indian company that helps banks manage customer-facing workflows and automate lending, servicing, and other financial-services operations, raised a $40 million strategic investment from ServiceNow at a $700 million valuation. The company has raised a total of $60+ million. TechCrunch has more here. | Neon Commerce, a four-year-old San Francisco startup that gives game publishers storefronts; a payment layer for checkouts, tax, and fraud management; and loyalty programs for selling directly to players, raised a $13 million Series A round. Investors included KRAFTON, Andreessen Horowitz, and Renegade Partners. The company has raised a total of $27 million. More here. | | Smaller Fundings | Coverwatch, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that charges businesses a flat fee to analyze commercial insurance needs, solicit bids from 50+ carriers, close coverage gaps, and lower premiums, raised a $4.5 million pre-seed round co-led by CoFound and Restive, with KFund and liquid2 ventures also participating. More here. | Digital Asset, a 12-year-old New York company that operates Canton Network, a public blockchain that lets financial institutions tokenize assets and run regulated workflows while controlling access to transaction information, raised a $10 million extension round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Shinhan Financial Group and Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures also buying in. Pulse 2.0 has more here. | Ossprey, a two-year-old London startup that detects malicious code hidden in open-source software packages before it reaches production environments, raised a $2.7 million pre-seed round led by Episode 1 Ventures, with Osney Capital and Octopus Ventures also chipping in. Tech.eu has more here. | Petra Labs, a one-year-old New York startup that helps enterprise brands measure and improve how often they appear in AI assistant answers and tie that visibility to traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue, raised a $5.2 million seed round led by Work-Bench, with Afore and Pathlight also digging in. More here. | Plantopia, an eight-year-old startup based in Caesarea, Israel, that grows casein proteins in sprouted oats for use in animal-free dairy products, raised a $9 million round co-led by Schreiber Foods and Siddhi Capital, with Yotvata Dairy, Arkin Capital, and Fresh Start FoodTech Incubator also engaging. The company has raised a total of $16+ million. Green Queen Media has more here. | StrongestLayer, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that reads emails to determine whether a message is legitimate or intended to deceive, raised a $4.1 million seed round led by Inovia Capital, with LaunchPod, Alumni Ventures Group, and Chris Key as well as previous investor Sorenson Capital also opting in. The company has raised a total of $9.3 million. SiliconANGLE has more here. | Tikva Allocell, a three-year-old Singapore startup that develops donor-derived engineered T-cell therapies for solid tumors, raised an $8 million Series A round led by Kantharos Capital. More here. | | |
General Compute raised $15 million to build the world's first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. And because ASIC silicon is far more energy efficient, it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making expansion dramatically easier. Learn more at generalcompute.com. | | Exits | Stripe is reportedly in talks to acquire three-year-old New York AI-model marketplace OpenRouter, which lets developers access, compare, and switch among hundreds of models, in a deal that could value it at around $10 billion, up from the $1.3 billion valuation it secured in May. The Wall Street Journal has more here. | Three-year-old San Francisco startup Sierra, which builds AI customer-service agents for businesses, acquired one-year-old San Francisco startup Takeoff, whose autonomous agents complete multi-step jobs across phone, text, email, and software systems over days or weeks. Terms were not disclosed. RuntimeWire has more here. | | |
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