Happy weekend, all. 🍻

Meta is in talks to lease AI computing power to Anthropic in a deal worth up to $10 billion over two years, potentially giving Meta a new way to monetize its massive data-center buildout as Anthropic scrambles for scarce capacity. The New York Times has more here.

Apple has reportedly sent legal letters to roughly 40 former employees now working at OpenAI, asking them to preserve documents and meet with Apple’s lawyers as it escalates a trade-secrets lawsuit that could complicate OpenAI’s push into consumer hardware. Gizmodo has more here.

San Francisco’s attorney general ordered Apple and Google to remove 13 nudification apps from their app stores, accusing the companies of enabling tools that create nonconsensual deepfake pornography and estimating they likely made millions in fees from the apps. TechCrunch has more here.

SpaceX is reportedly in talks to sell the Defense Department billions of dollars’ worth of AI computing capacity. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Public markets cratered. Private markets held on. 

Among high-growth public cloud companies, the number clearing the Rule of 40 fell from 14 to just 1 between 2021 and 2024. Across private markets, the same fast-growing group only slipped from 38% to 25% of companies. Public signals aren't private signals. See what held up. Read the report. 

By Connie Loizos

In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”

Coming from most people, that would sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.

Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and these days spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He turned up to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that mark so many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz reportedly netted Index roughly $9 billion.

Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and two brothers gave $13 million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now the Rimer Building, and found a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.

In the meantime, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, for giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, per a New York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech.

Crypto.com, a 10-year-old Singapore company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange where retail and institutional users trade digital assets, tokenized securities, derivatives, and prediction markets, raised a $400 million round from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation. CoinDesk has more here.

Databricks, a 13-year-old San Francisco company that provides data analytics and AI infrastructure software, signed a term sheet for a strategic funding round led by previous investor Coatue at a $188 billion post-money valuation, with new and existing investors also participating. The Wall Street Journal reported that the size of the round was $3 billion. TechCrunch has more here.

Valar Atomics, a three-year-old startup based in El Segundo, CA, that is developing small modular nuclear reactors to power AI data centers, is reportedly in talks to raise a $1 billion round led by Sequoia at about a $6 billion valuation. TechCrunch has more here.

DeweyLearn, a two-year-old Brooklyn startup that uses AI to assess learners’ practical skills from audio, video, and learning data for education and workforce programs, raised a $5 million Series A round led by SJF Ventures, with Catalysis Capital, Morningside, and Owl Ventures also buying in. More here.

Hyperion Robotics, a seven-year-old startup based in Espoo, Finland, that operates robotic microfactories that produce concrete infrastructure parts near project sites for utilities, energy, water, and carbon capture projects, raised a $7.4 million round co-led by Course Corrected and the European Innovation Council Fund, with RE Ventures as well as previous investors Lifeline Ventures, Übermorgen Ventures, and PC Rettig Impact & Co also chiming in. The company has raised a total of close to $20 million. Tech Funding News has more here.

Kind Designs, a four-year-old Miami startup that builds 3D-printed seawalls and shoreline structures that protect coastlines while creating habitat for marine life, raised a $10 million Series A round at a $70 million valuation. Investors included Kyle Kuzma as well as previous investors Mark Cuban and Adrian Fenty. The company has raised a total of $21.5 million. Refresh Miami has more here.

Mandrake Bio, a one-year-old Bengaluru startup that designs programmable gene editing enzymes for seed companies and therapy developers to improve crops and treat genetic diseases, raised a $1.7 million pre-seed round co-led by Activate and Antler, with Spectrum Impact and DeVC also digging in. More here.

General Compute is making a $300 million bet against GPUs. 

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. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier. Learn more here. 

Shein has reportedly secured Hong Kong stock exchange listing-committee approval for an IPO that could launch as soon as late August, targeting a $40 billion to $50 billion valuation after earlier New York and London listing efforts stalled under regulatory scrutiny. Reuters has more here.

SpaceX shares fell another 5% today, deepening a slide that has pushed the stock below its $135 IPO price just 5 weeks after the company’s record-setting public debut and wiped out roughly $1 trillion in market value from its June peak. Business Insider has more here.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called for more open-source AI and global AI governance at a Shanghai conference, contrasting China’s increasingly open model strategy with the closed systems favored by OpenAI and Anthropic. Business Insider has more here.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized Anthropic’s Fable model as too “editorially controlled,” telling engineers its tendency to block some user requests makes little sense. CNBC has more here.

Meta plans to hire longtime AWS executive Dave Brown to help lead its data-center buildout as the company weighs renting excess AI computing capacity to Anthropic and potentially turning its massive infrastructure spending into a cloud business. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

VC Eric Bahn tells The Wall Street Journal he now assumes founder meetings will be recorded, part of a broader AI note-taking boom that has some investors changing their Zoom names, warning about legal risks, and questioning whether every conversation really needs to become searchable. TechCrunch has more here.

Apple is reportedly in early settlement talks with the U.S. Department of Justice over a 2024 antitrust lawsuit accusing the company of monopolizing the smartphone market, suppressing rival technologies, and driving up prices. Reuters has more here.

Kalshi launched prediction markets for pharmaceutical trials and FDA approvals, letting users bet on late-stage drug outcomes despite concerns from bioethicists and researchers that the markets could encourage insider trading, manipulation, or interference with clinical studies. Forbes has more here.

AI inference cloud startup General Compute has secured a $400 million loan from Upper90 backed by inference chips, a first-of-its-kind financing that reflects growing demand for cheaper alternatives to Nvidia GPUs as open-source models become more competitive. TechCrunch has more here.

Major League Baseball has banned teams from using custom apps on league-provided dugout iPads after finding that some clubs were feeding live data into generative AI tools to guide substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions. The Athletic has more here.

President Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is reportedly on unpaid leave after Kalshi flagged and referred trades to federal regulators over allegations that he used inside knowledge to win more than $100,000 by betting on phrases Trump would use in public speeches. Fast Company has more here.

The market for dinosaur fossils has become a billionaire free-for-all, with a T. rex fetching a record $50.1 million even as replica bones and murky provenance derail auctions and museum exhibits.

Inside the making of The Odyssey.

Tesla launched a $225 pedal-less balance bike for children ages two to five, adding to a kid-focused lineup that already includes a $1,500 battery-powered mini Cybertruck and a $1,650 child-sized electric Cyberquad bike. Meanwhile, adult toys like Tesla’s long-promised Roadster remain conspicuously absent.

TechCrunch reviews reMarkable’s new $399 Paper Pure, calling the monochrome writing tablet a strong distraction-free tool for notes, drafts, and document markup though still limited as a PDF reader, e-reader, or all-purpose productivity device.

Dyson’s $499 Hot+Cool HF1 is a bladeless 2-in-1 smart appliance that works as both a space heater and high-powered fan, with TechCrunch praising its app controls, quiet operation, easy cleaning, and year-round usefulness despite its premium price.

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