A few quick notes before we power down for the weekend. First, we're thrilled we’ll be seeing some of you in Athens next Wednesday, May 27, for our StrictlyVC event — it's going to be both fun and enlightening, with speakers that include VCs Niko Bonatsos and Andreas Stravopolous and founders Anastasis Germanidis and Mati Staniszewski (among others). A giant thank-you to the global entrepreneurship organization Endeavor for welcoming us to town and being such a terrific partner. (We're also pumped about the broader Panathenea Festival happening in the city that week.)

Also! If you missed the San Francisco event, we'd love to see you in Los Angeles next month — Thursday night, June 18 — for our next StrictlyVC event stateside. It's just coming together, but we promise a night of insights and great networking. Thanks to Aerospace Corp. for hosting us at its very cool space in El Segundo.

Last, a quick reminder that we won't be publishing Monday due to Memorial Day here in the U.S. Have a great weekend! - CL

The Trump administration has announced that most temporary visa holders seeking green cards will have to leave the U.S. and apply through American consulates overseas, a shift that could disrupt tech workers on H-1B visas and the companies that employ them by adding new delays and uncertainty to the permanent residency process. The Financial Times has more here.

House Oversight Chair James Comer has opened a congressional probe into potential insider trading on prediction-market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket, seeking information on how the companies verify users, enforce geographic restrictions, and detect suspicious trades tied to elections, political races, and U.S. military actions. The Hill has more here.

Reddit shares fell nearly 6% after Meta began testing Forum, a standalone iOS app for Facebook Groups that analysts say could compete with Reddit by giving casual users another place to find answers and join online discussions. Reddit’s stock is now down nearly 40% this year. CNBC has more here.

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Last month, Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of the legal AI startup Spellbook, took to X in an effort to expose what he called a “huge scam” among AI startups: inflation of the revenue figures that they announce publicly.

“The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric. The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage,” he wrote in his tweet.

Stevenson isn’t the first to claim that annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a metric historically used to sum up annual revenue of active customers under contract — is being manipulated by some AI companies beyond recognition. Certain aspects of ARR shenanigans have been the subject of multiple other news reports and social media posts. 

However, Stevenson’s tweet seemed to have struck a particular nerve within the AI startup community, drawing over 200 reshares and comments from high-profile investors, many founders, and a few headlines. 

“Scott at Spellbook did a great job of highlighting some of what you might describe as bad behavior on the part of some companies,” Jack Newton, co-founder and CEO of legal startup Clio, told TechCrunch, adding that the post brought much-needed awareness to the topic, referring to an explanatory post from YC’s Garry Tan about proper revenue metrics.

TechCrunch spoke with over a dozen founders, investors, and startup finance professionals to assess whether the ARR inflation is as pervasive as Stevenson suggests.

Farther, a seven-year-old New York and San Francisco startup that combines portfolio management, financial planning, risk analysis, and AI-assisted advisory tools into a wealth management platform for financial advisers and high-net-worth clients, raised a $150 million Series D round at a $1+ billion valuation. The deal was led by General Atlantic. Private Banker International has more here.

Fresha, an 11-year-old London company that operates a booking and business management marketplace for beauty and wellness professionals, including appointment scheduling, payments, and customer management tools, raised an $80 million round at a $1+ billion valuation. KKR's growth fund provided the capital. The company has raised a total of $285 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Aboard, a two-year-old startup based in Orange, CA, that develops electric travel trailers with onboard batteries, towing assistance systems, and automated controls designed to improve range, stability, and off-grid power capabilities, raised a $13 million round. Ondine Capital and Llama Ventures co-led the deal. More here.

Oorja Bio, a three-year-old Houston startup that is developing peptide-based therapies for fibrotic and cardiopulmonary diseases, including treatments designed to restore lung cell function in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, raised a $30 million Series A round from Westlake BioPartners. BioPharma Dive has more here.

The Path, a recently launched San Francisco startup co-founded by Tony Robbins that creates AI-guided therapy and coaching applications that use specialized language models to deliver personalized mental health support and behavioral coaching, raised a $14.3 million seed round led by Prime Movers Lab, with Designer Fund also participating. TechCrunch has more here.

REPS, a three-year-old startup based in Mils, Austria, that builds road-mounted energy generation systems that convert the braking force of vehicles into electricity using hydraulic triggers and electromagnetic conversion modules, raised a $23.6 million round from an undisclosed group of investors. Trending Topics has more here.

SignalPlus, a five-year-old Hong Kong startup that develops institutional infrastructure for crypto derivatives trading, including options trading systems, automated market-making, and structured product services, raised a $40 million round. HashKey Capital and Hashkey Group provided the funding. Pulse 2.0 has more here.

Cycles, a two-year-old startup based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that builds private clearing infrastructure for crypto markets that nets obligations between counterparties to reduce liquidity requirements and settlement risk, raised a $6.4 million round led by Blockchange Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, and Primitive Ventures also participating. The company has raised a total of $8.7 million. Tech Funding News has more here.

Foundation, a six-year-old Boston startup that builds hardware security devices for Bitcoin custody, identity verification, multi-factor authentication, and AI agent authorization, raised a $6.4 million round led by Fulgur Ventures, with Arche Capital also participating. The company has raised a total of $16.5 million. Bitcoin Magazine has more here.

Vêtir, a three-year-old New York startup that creates AI-powered styling and wardrobe management applications that let luxury consumers organize clothing purchases, receive personalized styling recommendations, and shop directly from brands, raised a $5.5 million Series A round at a $150 million valuation. Investors included Laidlaw & Company and a consortium of family offices. More here.

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Huxe, an AI audio-generation app founded by former NotebookLM developers, is shutting down after raising $4.6 million, becoming the latest consumer AI startup to struggle as podcast-generation tools are rapidly copied by larger companies including Spotify, Google, Adobe, Amazon, ElevenLabs, and Meta. TechCrunch has more here.

SpaceX’s expected $80 billion IPO may be built around rockets, satellites, AI data centers, and Mars ambitions, but the offering itself will rely on an old-school Wall Street process in which bankers manually court investors, set allocations by phone, and try to manage what could be the largest and most complicated stock-market debut ever. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

It now appears that David Sacks, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg spoke directly with President Trump in order to derail a planned AI executive order by warning that even a voluntary system for previewing frontier models with the government could become a de facto approval regime that might slow U.S. AI development. The Washington Post has more here.

Business Insider digs into Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s efforts to dismantle the company’s long-standing senior leadership structure and replace it with smaller, flatter teams and a new inner circle focused on speeding up engineering, product decisions, and Copilot development. More here.

Cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who previously commanded SpaceX’s Fram2 civilian spaceflight, is reportedly set to lead SpaceX’s first crewed Mars mission, a Starship flyby of the Moon and Mars that could become the world’s first interplanetary human spaceflight. Gizmodo has more here.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that billions of dollars in crypto transactions tied to Iranian regime financing networks flowed through Binance, including activity as recently as this month, despite repeated internal red flags and Binance’s earlier guilty plea over anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations. More here.

The White House has approved a secret $9 billion request to help U.S. spy agencies acquire the cutting-edge chips needed to run the latest AI models on classified systems after chip shortages left agencies like the CIA and NSA struggling to fully test and deploy tools from companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. The New York Times has more here.

Google is drawing criticism for its new AI-heavy search experience after users noticed that searching for simple terms like “disregard” can now return a mostly empty AI summary box ahead of basic dictionary results, making Microsoft’s Bing look more useful by comparison. TechCrunch has more here.

Speaking of Google, New York Times columnist Brian X. Chen argues that the search giant is starting to win the AI race, citing Gemini’s rapid growth to 900 million regular users, Google’s ability to make money from AI through advertising, and the company’s plan to weave Gemini into Search, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Android, and eventually Apple’s Siri. More here.

Companies pushing employees to use more AI are starting to hit a cost wall, with Microsoft reportedly canceling most internal Claude Code licenses and Uber blowing through its 2026 AI coding-tools budget in just four months, underscoring a broader problem: for some teams, the cost of AI compute may already exceed the cost of the employees using it. Fortune has more here.

The Peter Thiel-backed Enhanced Games (better known as the “Steroid Olympics”) takes place this weekend in Las Vegas featuring 42 juiced athletes competing in sports such as swimming, weightlifting, and running.

In case you missed it, Stephen Colbert’s final “Late Show” ended with a star-packed farewell featuring Paul McCartney, Jon Stewart, Elvis Costello, fellow late-night hosts, and an absurdist wormhole bit that swallowed the show before turning the Ed Sullivan Theater into a musical snow globe.

On and Loewe have teamed up on the Cloudtilt Hi, a $650 pair of high-tops.

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