Have a great weekend, everyone! More coverage from last night’s event is coming; in the meantime, we’ll be in Los Angeles next week for the Milken Institute conference, where we’re very excited to sit down with a number of execs, including ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet. We’ll have dispatches from that event, too. -CL

GameStop is preparing a potential bid for eBay as part of CEO Ryan Cohen’s plan to transform the retailer into a $100 billion company, even though eBay is several times larger. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

By Connie Loizos

Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate.

At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell?

We also talked about Replit’s net revenue retention — a measure of how much existing customers expand their spending — which Masad says is reaching as high as 300%, his willingness to take Apple to court over what he called outright lies in its App Store battle with Replit, and the possibility of the company beginning to invest in its own customers.

On the question of independence, Masad was firm. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, he argued Replit has the economics to make that path viable — even if he stopped short of ruling out a sale entirely.

The following has been edited for length and clarity:

TC: Cursor’s reported SpaceX deal was the talk of the industry last week. What did you make of it?

AM: It’s kind of hard being an independent, smaller AI company that’s building on foundation models, especially if you’re burning a ton of cash. Part of the reporting suggested Cursor has negative 23% margins, and if you’re also wanting to invest in training models, that makes it incredibly hard to stay independent.

Fun, a four-year-old New York startup that provides infrastructure that processes deposits, withdrawals, and settlement flows across fiat and crypto systems, raised a $72 million Series A round co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire. The company has raised a total of $75.9 million. The Block has more here.

Iterative Health, a nine-year-old startup based in Cambridge, MA, that runs a network of clinical trial sites and uses AI to identify patients, manage studies, and improve enrollment and execution, raised a $77 million Series C round co-led by Intrepid Growth Partners and GV, with EDBI as well as previous investors Insight Partners and Obvious Ventures also participating. More here.

Creati Gen AI, a five-year-old San Francisco startup whose AI video-editing tool called Buzzy that lets users modify and refine videos using text prompts, raised a $20 million round led by Redpoint Ventures. More here.

DISA Technologies, an eight-year-old startup based in Casper, WY, that develops technology that uses high-pressure fluid to extract minerals from ore and recover uranium from contaminated mine sites, raised a $33 million round led by Galvanize, with BHP Ventures as well as previous investors Evok Innovations, Constellation Energy, Halliburton Labs, Valor Equity Partners, and Veriten also taking part. The company has raised a total of $83 million. Pulse 2.0 has more here.

Moleculent, a five-year-old Stockholm startup that is creating tools that measure how cells interact and communicate within human tissue to study disease mechanisms, raised a $26 million round led by Rubicon Healthcare Partners, with Arch Venture Partners and Eir Ventures also contributing. The company has raised a total of $46 million. Pulse 2.0 has more here.

Versana, a five-year-old New York startup that aggregates and standardizes loan data from banks to provide a centralized, real-time view of syndicated loans and private credit positions, raised a $43 million round led by BNP Paribas, with Fitch Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Motive Partners, Apollo, Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, U.S. Bancorp, and Wells Fargo also piling on. The company has raised a total of $125+ million. More here.

Chord, a five-year-old New York startup that aggregates company data, metrics, and operating rules into a system that lets businesses analyze performance and automate decisions across commerce operations, raised a $7 million round led by Equal Ventures, with M13, Chingona Ventures, and CEAS Investments also engaging. The company has raised a total of $45 million. Tech Funding News has more here.

Shiprazor, a four-year-old Cape Town startup that connects online merchants to multiple courier services and routes deliveries based on cost, speed, and reliability to manage e-commerce fulfillment, raised a $2.7 million round led by Norrsken22, with additional support from AAIC, E4E, and Tremis Capital. More here.

StudentCrowd, an 11-year-old UK company based in Loughborough, UK, that provides pricing data, market analytics, and student reviews to help operators and investors manage student housing portfolios, raised a $9.5 million Series A round led by YFM Equity Partners, with the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II also participating. Tech Funding News has more here.

Founders Fund has officially closed the $6 billion growth fund that TechCrunch reported on back in March (saying it was nearly closed). The firm’s senior management and employees (including Peter Thiel) supplied $1.5 billion of the total.

Earlybird Venture Capital has closed its eighth early-stage fund at €360 million — the largest in the Berlin firm's 29-year history — backed by a mix of institutional investors and family offices, many of them repeat backers. The fund brings Earlybird's total assets under management to €2.5 billion across all its strategies. Tech.eu has more here.

Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a one-year-old New York startup developing AI models that help robots understand and adapt to human behavior, as it builds out a humanoid robotics effort inside Meta Superintelligence Labs and Meta Robotics Studio. Terms were not disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

Nebius has agreed to acquire Eigen AI, a two-year-old Palo Alto startup that optimizes AI model performance on chips, for about $615 million in stock and cash to boost its inference business. Bloomberg has more here.

Cerebras, a 10-year-old Sunnyvale-based AI chipmaker that provides cloud access to its processors for running models, is seeking to raise as much as $4 billion in an IPO that could value the AI chipmaker and data center operator at about $40 billion, with marketing set to begin as soon as Monday. Bloomberg has the scoop here.

An IPO expert known as “Mr. IPO” says he would short SpaceX if it goes public at a valuation approaching $2 trillion, arguing the company’s growth may not justify such a lofty price. Business Insider has more here.

Shivon Zilis has emerged as a key behind-the-scenes figure in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, with trial messages showing how she acted as an intermediary between Musk and OpenAI during the company’s early years. Wired has more here.

According to Podcast Index, an open-source podcast directory and database, over the last nine days, 10,871 new podcast feeds have been created, and 39% of them might have been AI-generated. This so-called “podslop” is only increasing. “It’s absurd,” Podcast Index co-founder Dave Jones told Bloomberg. More here.

A newly disclosed Linux flaw dubbed “CopyFail” lets attackers gain root access across most distributions using a single exploit script, prompting warnings that it might be the most severe Linux vulnerability in years. Ars Technica has more here.

The Pentagon has signed deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, and others to deploy AI models on classified networks, expanding its push to build an “AI-first” military and reduce reliance on any single vendor. TechCrunch has more here.

Coatue has launched a new venture called Next Frontier to buy land for AI data centers and could spend tens of billions of dollars on the effort as it expands into the infrastructure powering AI. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

The Oscars will bar fully AI-generated actors and scripts from eligibility under new rules requiring performances and screenplays to be created by humans, but filmmakers can still use AI tools. Reuters has more here.

The first trailer for a documentary about comedian Marty Short just dropped.

The next Spider-Man film will give Peter Parker an AI assistant as his “closest thing to a friend,” sparking backlash from fans who say it replaces the character’s signature inner monologue with a chatbot.

Colleges are pushing applicants into earlier and more binding admissions rounds to boost yield rates, turning the process into a strategic “chess game” as students try to maximize their odds. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Cadillac has unveiled a 26-unit, manual-only version of its CT5-V Blackwing with a 685-horsepower V8, the most powerful engine the brand has ever built.

A Bitcoin gift card.

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