Pulled IPOs Signal Wall Street Losing Faith in Data Center Boom

Great seeing so many new faces at Shack15 tonight for an event welcoming Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to the Bay Area, where we learned he also met with another powerful Mediterranean native this morning: Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital.

We'll have more from our sit-down with the PM soon. In the meantime, we're off to Elevate in Toronto (let us know if you'll be there too) to talk with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs, among others, and we're getting more excited by the day about Disrupt in San Francisco, which will be stacked with interesting speakers and ideas (plus plenty of VCs, including the entire Benchmark team). If you haven’t grabbed a pass yet, now’s a good time; it’s coming up October 13-15.

Top News

Wall Street’s enthusiasm for the data-center boom is showing cracks, with SB Energy delaying its IPO amid resistance to a $50 billion-plus valuation, Holtec pausing its offering indefinitely, and Aggreko slowing its plans as investors grow more skeptical of the sector’s growth assumptions and execution risks. The New York Times has more here.

Paramount settled an antitrust suit brought by 12 states, clearing the way for David Ellison’s $81 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover in exchange for concessions including $1.5 billion in additional U.S. production spending, 30 films annually, and an editorial-independence board for CNN and CBS News. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse AI agent from shopping on its site, saying the assistant browses without identifying itself and could expose customer credentials and account data, escalating a broader fight over whether outside AI agents can transact on retailers’ sites without permission. TechCrunch has more here.

More on Muse: Meta’s AI agent overtook ChatGPT as the top free iPhone app in the U.S., logging 730,000 downloads in roughly five days and outpacing ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok over comparable post-launch windows, although staggered platform releases complicate the comparison. TechCrunch has more here.

A Small but Growing Number of Founders Are Betting on Bringing People Together Offline

Image Credits: TechCrunch / StrictlyVC

By Connie Loizos

Brynn Putnam and Tristan Walker have already done something that most founders only dream about: created companies so compelling that bigger outfits bought them. Putnam, a trained ballerina with a small chain of boutique studios, built the connected-fitness company Mirror and sold it to Lululemon for $500 million in cash less than three years later. Walker, who interned at Twitter while at Stanford business school, built the popular men’s grooming brand Walker & Company Brands, selling it five years later to Procter & Gamble for undisclosed terms (reportedly in the range of $20 million to $40 million).

That both of them are at it again is less surprising than the fact that their dramatically different new startups share the same north star: bringing people together, offline, in the same room.

Putnam’s new company, Board, which makes a 24-inch touchscreen table that recognizes physical game pieces as well as gestures, was built explicitly for a group sitting around it together rather than one person alone with a screen.

Walker’s Heirloom Craft is buying up and scaling fine-craft trade schools, starting with a leatherworking school in San Francisco founded by Hermès’ first American artisan-ambassador. (Walker is also running Collaborative Holdings, a fund carved out by the venture firm Collaborative Fund built to give founders more time to build their businesses.)

On the surface, a game console and a leathercraft school don’t appear to have much in common. But both founders think there’s money in fostering the kind of connection that technology has eroded over the last couple of decades.

The timing isn’t accidental. In June of last year, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection formally classified loneliness as a defining global health challenge, estimating that one in six people worldwide are affected and linking the condition to roughly 870,000 deaths a year.

Massive Fundings

Kairos Power, a 10-year-old company based in Alameda, CA, that develops fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature nuclear reactors, received a $70 million equity investment from Samsung C&T as part of a broader deal that also includes in-kind engineering services, with the combined value totaling up to $100 million, according to the company. TechCrunch has more here.

Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings

Corridor, a New York startup founded this year that brokers health benefits for small businesses, using AI agents to handle insurance administration alongside human advisers, raised a $16 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with BoxGroup, Definition Capital, and Constellation also chiming in. TechCrunch has more here.

Feldera, a three-year-old San Francisco startup that helps enterprises keep database query results current by recomputing only changed data, raised $21.5 million across seed and Series A rounds. The Series A was led by Inovia Capital, with Costanoa Ventures and Battery Ventures also participating; and the seed round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with Ion Stoica also investing. More here.

Kheops, a five-year-old Paris startup that centralizes direct purchasing between retailers and suppliers, handling product listings, orders, deliveries, invoicing, and payments, raised a $17.2 million round co-led by Odyssée Venture, ISAI, and Elaia. More here.

Spott, a two-year-old startup based in Leuven, Belgium, that helps recruitment agencies manage candidates, clients, search, outreach, and other workflows with AI, raised a $21 million Series A round led by Balderton Capital, with Base10 Partners, Y Combinator, and Fortino also participating. More here.

Unit1 Studio, a one-year-old London startup that produces movable avatar concerts that use computer-generated images to depict artists performing with live staging, raised a $20 million equity and production financing led by Balderton Capital, also including Mercuri, Gilston Music, and Paul McGuinness. Tech Funding News has more here.

Smaller Fundings

Aristotle, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that provides voice-based AI tutoring for students ages 13 to 18 across academic subjects and standardized tests, raised a $5 million seed round led by True Ventures, with Wicklow Capital also buying in. More here.

Benford, a London startup founded this year that uses proprietary software to conduct statutory financial audits end to end, raised a $5.7 million pre-seed round led by firstminute capital, with Global Founders Capital and Sondo also investing. More here.

Lightspring, a startup founded this year based in Besançon, France, that uses 3D lithography to manufacture optical coupling structures directly on photonic chips, raised a $3.6 million seed round co-led by Atlantic and OVNI Capital, with Concept Ventures, Ixcore, and Plug and Play Ventures also participating. The company has secured more than $4 million in dilutive and non-dilutive financing. More here.

Exits

Wander, the vacation-home booking platform and property-management software company, acquired Polarity, an applied AI research lab focused on agents and model post-training, to bring specialized AI agents and custom-trained models into Wander’s engineering stack and operator software. Terms were not disclosed. More here.

Going Public

Oura officially launched its IPO after updating its filing to offer 50 million shares at $40 to $44 apiece, potentially raising $2.2 billion. Existing shareholders account for nearly two-thirds of the shares being sold, with Forerunner Ventures planning to cash out its entire 9.3% stake. TechCrunch has more here.

Nscale, a British data-center developer that builds AI computing infrastructure, has amassed $103 billion in contracts ahead of its IPO, but 85% comes from Microsoft and Anthropic, with the $44.6 billion Anthropic deal still lacking committed financing. Bloomberg has more here.

People

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said AI developers should not expect a federal “liability shield,” arguing that “humans are responsible, not the AI,” even as the Trump administration opposes a broader regulatory crackdown on the industry. CNBC has more here.

Along these lines, President Donald Trump said the Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies could “rein” in AI if necessary, even as he reiterated that his administration would avoid slowing the technology’s development and would continue to encourage AI and “super intelligence.” Business Insider has more here.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills regulating data centers, requiring greater disclosure of electricity and water use and giving communities more oversight, while seeking to prevent the cost of grid upgrades needed for AI infrastructure from being shifted onto other ratepayers. Reuters has more here.

Post-Its

Essential Reads

The New York Times examines the widening gap between China’s AI ambitions and its weakening domestic economy, as Beijing prepares a $295 billion data-center buildout while youth unemployment reaches 18.9% and Chinese economists warn that heavy AI investment could worsen weak consumer demand rather than revive jobs and spending. More here.

More on China: apparently, young people in China are increasingly launching one-person AI startups to escape layoffs and punishing corporate jobs, with more than seven million solo businesses created last year, up 42% from 2024 to 2025, although more than half make less than $1,000 a month. The Wall Street Journal has