Happy Easter and happy Passover to all who are celebrating this weekend.:) Before we sign off, two quick mentions: our first StrictlyVC evening of the year is coming up Thursday night, April 30, in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. More details coming soon. In the meantime, save a spot — there will be cocktails, good company, and plenty to talk about. (Giant thanks to the supportive team at TDK Ventures, without whom none of this would be possible.)

We also loved talking this week with Craig Piggott, whose company, Halter, just attracted a giant round led by Founders Fund, among others. The New Zealand startup makes a smart collar and app that let farmers create virtual fences, manage grazing from their phones, and monitor every animal around the clock — no dogs, horses, motorbikes or helicopters required. Piggott started the company at 21 after a short stint at Rocket Lab; nine years later, it's worth $2 billion and its collar is now on one million cattle. And there are a billion more in the world. You can listen to that new episode of StrictlyVC Download right here. - CL

SpaceX is now reportedly targeting a $2+ trillion IPO valuation, a level that would make its public offering the largest in history and instantly place the company among the world’s five most valuable public companies. Bloomberg has more here.

By Connie Loizos

Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands.

As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, whose focus includes private securities markets — it facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks — Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-bitingly large moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.

But the storyline is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Anderson’s read on Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg reported earlier this week: demand for the company’s shares has become almost insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, saying that buyers had indicated to his outfit that they had $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic, even as roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares that investors are trying to sell haven’t found takers.

Anderson sees something similar at Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to source in our marketplace is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his Miami home. “There’s just no sellers.”

Part of what turbocharged that demand, Anderson argues, was Anthropic’s very public standoff with the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but has wound up becoming a gift.

“The app got more popular, people rallied around the company as kind of a hero, taking on big government,” he said. “I think it amplified the story and made it even more differentiated from OpenAI.”

Sarvam, a three-year-old Bengaluru startup that builds voice-based AI models and agents for Indian languages, is reportedly raising a $350 million round at a $1.5 billion to $1.55 billion pre-money valuation. The deal lead is purportedly Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nvidia, Amazon.com, and Prosperity7 Ventures expected to join in. Bloomberg has more here.

StairMed, a four-year-old Chinese startup that builds implantable brain-machine interfaces and neuromodulation systems for neurological disorders, raised a $69 million seed round led by Alibaba, with Tencent, Fountainbridge Capital, OrbiMed, Oriza Seed, Qiming Venture Partners, Lilly Asia Ventures, and Source Code Capital also investing. More here.

Daydream, a three-year-old San Francisco startup that combines SEO agents and human experts to manage organic search for businesses, raised a $15 million Series A round led by WndrCo, with First Round Capital and Basis Set Ventures also taking part. The company has raised a total of $21 million. More here.

Noon, a two-year-old San Francisco and Bengaluru startup that uses AI to help designers create products directly from a company’s codebase and design system, raised a $44 million seed round from Chemistry, First Round Capital, Scribble Ventures, Elevation Capital, and Afore Capital. The Economic Times has more here.

Acurion, a five-year-old San Diego startup that extracts cancer biomarkers from routine pathology images for precision oncology, raised a $4.3 million round led by TK & Partners, with Mesa Verde Venture Partners, Bootstrap Ventures, The National Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Asian Fund for Cancer Research also participating. Pulse 2.0 has more here.

Miravoice, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that conducts long-form phone surveys with AI voice agents, raised a $6.3 million seed round led by Unusual Ventures, with Neo and 25madison also contributing. Crunchbase News has more here.

Wearable Robotics, a 12-year-old company based in Pisa, Italy, that develops wearable robotic rehabilitation devices for neuromotor recovery, raised a $5.8 million Series A round led by CDP Venture Capital, with MITO Technology, LIFTT, SIMEST, RoboIT, and Toscana Next also participating. The Next Web has more here.

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Sony Interactive Entertainment has acquired Cinemersive Labs, a four-year-old UK-based startup that develops AI tools to convert 2D photos and videos into immersive 3D volumes, as it looks to advance visual computing and graphics in future PlayStation games. Engadget has more here.

Elon Musk is requiring banks vying to work on SpaceX’s IPO to buy subscriptions to his Grok chatbot, with some spending tens of millions as the price to secure their spot. The New York Times has more here.

Hailo, an eight-year-old Tel Aviv startup that develops processors for running AI workloads on edge devices, is reportedly pursuing a SPAC merger at a valuation of under $500 million, less than half its prior $1.2 billion peak. CTech has more here.

OpenAI is reshuffling its leadership team, moving COO Brad Lightcap to a new “special projects” role focused on deals and investments while Fidji Simo takes medical leave and Kate Rouch steps back to focus on cancer recovery. TechCrunch has more here.

Yesterday, we learned that OpenAI purchased TBPN, an 18-month-old Los Angeles tech talk show company that generated just $5 million in revenue last year, and today, we learned the price: “low hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to the Financial Times. More here.

Mercor, the $10 billion San Francisco startup that pays contractors to evaluate AI model outputs, has been offering workers money for old job materials that may actually belong to former employers, raising fresh concerns about how AI companies are sourcing training data. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Renowned rogue director Werner Herzog once convinced a film crew to haul a steamship over a steep hill in the Amazon, so when he offered a filmmaking workshop in the Azores for $10,000 per person plus airfare, 50 aspiring filmmakers jumped at the chance.

Inside the “Super Bowl of the Watch World.”

Lola is reviving the legendary T70 — a car so cool it practically screams Steve McQueen — with a 16-car run that includes a track-only version capable of hitting 60 mph in just 2.5 seconds.

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