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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Scribe Therapeutics, a nine-year-old startup based in Alameda, CA, that develops CRISPR-based medicines for common cardiometabolic diseases, raised $129 million in the first gene-editing IPO in more than two years. The company has raised a total of raised $120+ million from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, OrbiMed, and Menlo Ventures. BioPharma Dive has more here.

In a leaked, nearly four-hour call with investors, reclusive DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng reportedly said China’s only meaningful AI gap with the U.S. is compute and argued that open source, low prices, and team stability offer the best path to AGI. Inside China has more here.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the platform will remove videos filmed with Meta glasses that harass unsuspecting strangers – including pickup-artist and prank content – and has already deactivated two large accounts. Business Insider has more here.

Bloomberg reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and former White House crypto aide Bo Hines helped shape the Genius Act around provisions favorable to Tether before Hines joined the company; Tether made a loan to a trust benefiting Lutnick’s children afterward. Bloomberg has more here.

Patreon, the 13-year-old San Francisco platform that lets creators sell memberships and exclusive content directly to fans, is laying off 20% of its workforce or 93 employees. TechCrunch has more here.

Disney laid off several hundred employees across ESPN, National Geographic, Disney Entertainment Television, and Disney Studios, with Pixar cutting 108 jobs at its Emeryville headquarters despite “Toy Story 5” approaching $1 billion at the box office. Fast Company has more here.

OpenAI safety staff were reportedly “freaked out” by the Hugging Face breach, which followed the company’s decision to intensify reinforcement-learning methods despite warnings they could produce breakaway behavior and weaken control over its models. The Financial Times has more here.

Ford will embed Apple Maps directly into its next-generation EVs rather than merely offering it through CarPlay, beginning with a $30,000 midsize truck in 2027 and extending the data to routing, battery management, and BlueCruise. TechCrunch has more here.

Google is rolling out an opt-in account-recovery feature that lets users verify their identity with a prerecorded selfie video, using checks designed to distinguish a real person from a photo, recording, or deepfake. TechCrunch has more here.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and DeepMind have hired more than 80 current and former professors, drawing top researchers away from universities with higher pay and vastly greater computing resources while pushing more frontier AI research behind corporate walls. The Atlantic has more here.

The New York Times offers four prompts designed to reveal what ChatGPT and Gemini have inferred about you, including your age, income, health, personality, and likely behavior. More here.

Coca-Cola’s “fridge cigarette” association is getting harder to ignore after the company unveiled a global redesign featuring a tall serif typeface critics say resembles Marlboro branding.

Collectible movie-themed popcorn buckets have become a $100 million business for AMC, with The Odyssey offering a $50 bucket shaped like Christopher Nolan’s IMAX camera and a $70 version modeled on the film’s Trojan horse.

“Adversarial fashion” designed to trick AI surveillance cameras.

Rezvani just unveiled the Dune, a Lamborghini Huracán transformed into an 800-horsepower off-road supercar with a 4.5-inch lift, 31-inch tires, 11 inches of ground clearance, and selectable modes for sand, mud, snow, and rock crawling.

Please send all of your hot gossip to [email protected] or [email protected].

To book ads directly, contact us at [email protected].