Hi, welcome back, and a quick housekeeping note: The night of December 3rd in Palo Alto, we're closing out 2025 with a StrictlyVC event -- this time hosted by Pat Gelsinger and the Playground Global team. It's been an amazing year for the series: we've welcomed VCs Kirsten Green and Katie Haun, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie, and even the Prime Minister of Greece. Now, we’re going to bookend it all with more great speakers, spicy winter cocktails, and plenty of holiday cheer. Come join us before everyone scatters for the holidays and pretends they're logging off (not that we ever do this). Nab your spot. More details to come.:) — CL

OpenAI struck a seven-year deal to pay Amazon $38 billion for cloud capacity, another sign it is steadily diversifying away from Microsoft while continuing the round-trip playbook of AI companies funding and supplying one another at massive scale. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Federal prosecutors charged two former ransomware negotiators and a cybersecurity manager with secretly launching their own attacks, allegedly extorting more than $1.2 million from U.S. companies. TechCrunch has more here.

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By Julie Bort

Solo VC investor extraordinaire Elad Gil said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that AI has been one of the least predictable tech booms he’s ever seen.

Gil is on the cap table of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today’s leading AI companies.

Still, he thinks that over the last year, certain AI markets appear to be nearly sewn up by market leaders. Beyond these areas, a vast swath of AI remains anyone’s game.

“I started investing in generative AI in 2021 … [A]t the time, not very many people were paying that much attention to it,” Gil said. But he had seen the massive leap in capability between GPT-2, launched in 2019, and GPT-3,  launched in 2021. “The step between 2 and 3 was so large that if you just extrapolated out the scaling laws, or the curve, then you could really assume that this was going to be incredibly important,” he said.

That convinced him to start backing early-stage startups building products powered by large language models. His bets included both foundational model makers like OpenAI and Mistral, as well as application companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Character.ai, Decagon, and Abridge. Yet throughout 2024 and much of 2025, the capabilities of foundational models leaped with every release, upending AI every few months.

“I used to say at the time that AI was the one market where the more I learn, the less I know. Usually, the more you learn about something, the better you know it, the easier you can predict the future, etc. But AI was just hazy. There’s just too much uncertainty. And I think there’s still markets like that in AI,” he said.

However, he’s also now seeing markets with clear winners. The most obvious example is with foundational models themselves. Even though hundreds of models exist, and some countries like South Korea are still working to develop sovereign models by local companies, leaders have emerged. “Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe xAI, maybe Meta, maybe Mistral — it’s like a handful,” he predicts of the winners.

Hippocratic AI, a two-year-old Palo Alto startup that develops patient-facing healthcare agents, raised a $126 million Series C round at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation. The deal was led by Avenir Growth, with CapitalG, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Premji Invest, John Doerr, Rick Klausner, Universal Health Services, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and WellSpan Health also piling on. The company has raised a total of $404 million. Fierce Healthcare has more here.

Infravision, a seven-year-old Austin startup that develops aerial robotics for power grid construction and maintenance, raised a $91 million Series B round led by GIC, with additional participation from Activate Capital, Hitachi Ventures, and Energy Impact Partners. More here.

Mimic Robotics, a one-year-old Zurich startup that enables robots to handle dexterous tasks in manufacturing and logistics, raised a $16 million seed round. Elaia was the deal lead, with Speedinvest, Founderful, 1st kind, 10X Founders, 2100 Ventures, and Sequoia Scout Fund also stepping up. The startup has raised a total of $20+ million. More here.

Octonomy, a one-year-old startup based in Cologne, Germany, that builds agentic AI to interpret technical documentation and automate complex equipment support tasks, raised a $20 million seed round led by Macquarie Capital, with Capnamic, NRW.Bank, and TechVision Fund also taking part. The company has raised a total of $25 million. Tech Funding News has more here.

Popai, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that turns patient phone calls into structured data for healthcare providers, raised an $11 million round co-led by Team8 and New Enterprise Associates. CTech has more here.

Teleskope, a four-year-old New York startup that identifies sensitive data across cloud and SaaS systems and automatically applies security controls, raised a $25 million Series A round. M13 was the deal lead, with Primary Venture Partners and Lerer Hippeau also contributing. The company has raised a total of $32.2 million. More here.

Vammo, a three-year-old São Paulo startup that rents electric motorcycles supported by battery-swapping stations, raised a $45 million round led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund, with 2150, Qualcomm Ventures, Construct Capital, Monashees, Maniv Mobility, and Endeavor Catalyst also investing. Bloomberg has more here.

Cephia, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that develops multimodal sensing products using metasurface technology, raised a $4 million seed round co-led by Radiant Opto-Electronics Corporation and Incharge Capital, with MetaVC Partners, NRM Partners, and SOSV also participating. More here.

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Alphabet is increasingly spinning X moonshot projects into independent companies backed by a $500 million Series X Capital fund, betting that looser ties will speed commercialization while keeping strategic alignment with the mothership. TechCrunch has more here.

Animoca Brands, an 11-year-old Hong Kong-based company that backs crypto tokens, builds blockchain games, and advises web3 startups, plans to go public on Nasdaq via a reverse merger that will give its shareholders about 95% of the combined entity. Bloomberg has more here.

Xanadu, a nine-year-old Toronto startup that builds photonic quantum computers for ultra-fast complex computation, plans to go public via a SPAC that could raise up to $500 million and value the business at $3.6 billion. BetaKit has more here.

Pine Labs, a 27-year-old Indian company backed by PayPal and Mastercard that enables digital payments and merchant services, is going public in India at a $2.9 billion valuation, nearly 40% below its last private valuation. TechCrunch has more here.

Testifying in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, former OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever stated that he sent OpenAI’s board a 52-page memo in an effort to oust CEO Sam Altman and even explored a merger between OpenAI and Anthropic that would have put Anthropic in charge of the company. Gizmodo has more here.

Michael Grimes, the longtime Silicon Valley rainmaker who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter, is now trying to steer hundreds of billions from allies like Japan and South Korea into a U.S. investment program amid legal scrutiny and concerns he is bypassing Congress. Politico has more here.

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI chief, argued that only biological beings can be conscious and urged the industry to stop pursuing seemingly sentient AI, underscoring a growing ethical divide as tech races toward more human-like systems. CNBC has more here.

Sam Altman sounded exasperated as he brushed off questions about funding massive compute bets, saying revenue is “well more” than $13 billion and snapping “if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer” while hinting at $100 billion in sales as soon as 2027. TechCrunch has more here.

Digg co-founder and True Ventures partner Kevin Rose says his rule for backing AI hardware is simple: “If you feel like you should punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.” TechCrunch has more here.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella say the real AI bottleneck is power, not chips, warning that data centers are outpacing energy supply as demand soars and hinting some operators could end up with idle plants if cheaper energy arrives fast. TechCrunch has more here.

Cybercriminals are teaming up with organized crime to hijack freight by infiltrating carriers, brokers, and load boards to the tune of $35 billion a year. Bloomberg has more here.

Palantir is encouraging 22 high school graduates to skip college and enroll in a four-month fellowship that blends a Western-civilization seminar with real client work, signaling a push to reshape tech’s talent pipeline and challenge traditional hiring paths. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Facebook Dating, the free match service inside the Facebook app, has quietly hit more than 21 million daily users and outpaced Hinge as Meta leans on Marketplace-style utilities to keep people engaged and monetize time on its aging social network. TechCrunch has more here.

Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its TxO program that backed more than 60 underserved founders with $175,000 checks and training and laying off its staff. TechCrunch has more here.

A Düsseldorf museum’s “grumpy guide” tour, in which a performance artist berates visitors and mocks curators, has become a sellout hit as European museums test provocative formats to draw younger and more diverse crowds.

A Bangkok pet expo is drawing crowds with competitive eating contests for cats and dogs as Thailand’s fast-growing $1.8 billion pet economy spawns ever more elaborate events and owners lavish time and money on “fur babies.”

Top-100 ranked tennis pro Danielle Collins is going viral for a dating-app profile that demands tall partners who can fund her stay-at-home lifestyle, reinforcing her heel persona and hinting she might pivot to reality TV if the price is right.

Navier has just gone into production on a 30-foot-long, $875,000 hybrid-electric foiling yacht that tops out at 30 knots and delivers 700+ miles of range at a 20-knot cruising speed in seas up to 4 feet.

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