☕ DeepSeek may have used Google’s Gemini to train its latest model & Meta signs nuclear power deal.
SpaceX will hit $15.5B in revenue in 2025 & Court documents reveal OpenAI is coming for your iPhone.
That “new car smell” is basically a chemical cocktail. It’s made up of over 200 chemicals, including hydrocarbons like benzene and toluene. S
o, while it smells fancy, you’re basically sniffing a lab experiment on wheels.
Love or hate this intro? Hit reply and tell us why!
📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: MVP test, ICP guide, big problems, funding template, PE drop, fractional execs, 100T tokens, Cursor’s rise, seed tips, legal docs.
Sasha Trower, solo GP raised £11.5M fund.
DeepSeek may have used Google’s Gemini to train its latest model.
Court documents reveal OpenAI is coming for your iPhone.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike finally fix the stupidest problem in cybersecurity.
Meta signs nuclear power deal to support AI energy needs.
Yoshua Bengio launches LawZero, a nonprofit AI safety lab.
Elon Musk says SpaceX will hit $15.5B in revenue in 2025.
Now Deel is accusing Rippling of spying by ‘impersonating’ a customer.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
⏱️ Read Time: 3 minutes
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ What else is brewing
Do this before building an MVP: the Minimum Viable Test.
a16z’s framework for identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Excel template: Early stage startup financial model for fundraising.
Should You “Rent” an Exec for Your Startup? A Fractional COO Weighs In.
100 Trillion Tokens by Tomasz Tunguz.
Mastering the human side of engineering: Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack.
The only startup valuation guide you need as a founder.
The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using.
6000+ European VC Firms Contact Database (LinkedIn Links).
Lulu Meservey’s launch cheat sheet.
Alex Lieberman on ‘seedstrapping'.
Amanda Zhu on what investors are evaluating at pre-seed and seed.
Startup Legal Document Pack – Essential Legal Docs for Founders. Build with the help of startup lawyers and VCs.
Need a pitch deck that gets investor meetings? We’ve opened just 3 slots to help founders craft winning decks—built by experts, reviewed by investors. Don’t leave funding to chance—[schedule a call today →]
FROM OUR PARTNER - AFFINITY
🤝 Where next-gen CRMs meet deal flow intelligence - Affinity.
For dealmakers who rely on relationships, Affinity enables firms to find, manage, and close more deals. By automating relationship insights, Affinity saves time on manual data entry and helps teams act with full confidence, knowing every connection’s history.
Join over 3,000 organizations worldwide transforming their dealmaking.
Start closing more deals today with Affinity →
FEATURED YOUR STARTUP
💪 Get your startup in front of over 95,000+ audience
Our newsletter is read by thousands of tech professionals, founders, investors (VCs / Angel Investors) and managers around the world. Get in touch today.
STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
Matterworks, Inc, a Somerville, MA-based provider generating unstructured molecular data for predictive biology, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding. The round was led by Lewis & Clark Partners and OMX Ventures, with participation from Pillar VC, Germin8 Ventures, Intermountain Ventures, and Tarsadia, among others.
Impulse Space, a Redondo Beach, CA-based in-space mobility company, raised $300M in Series C funding. The round was led by Linse Capital with participation from DFJ Growth, as well as returning investors Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, RTX Ventures, DCVC, Airbus Ventures, Spring Tide, First Principles Group, Balerion Space Ventures, Tamarack Global, and Trousdale Ventures.
dataplor, a Manhattan Beach, CA-based provider of global location intelligence solutions, raised $20.5M in Series B funding. The round was led by F-Prime, with participation from Spark Capital, FFVC, Acronym Venture Capital, Two Lanterns Venture Capital, APA Ventures, dara5, and Alumni Ventures.
Antheia, a Menlo Park, CA-based pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturer, raised $56M in Series C funding. The round wads led by Global Health Investment Corporation. Additional new investors included ATHOS KG and Federov, while existing investors include Viking Global Investors, Sherpalo Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, In-Q-Tel (IQT), and Civilization Ventures.
Deep Sentinel, a Pleasanton, CA-based proactive AI-powered security company, raised $15M in Series B funding. The round was led by Egis Capital Partners with participation from Intel Capital, Shasta Ventures, UP2398, and Slow Launch Fund.
MyLaurel, a NYC-based healthcare company delivering home-based acute and transitional care, raised $12M in funding. The round was led by Deerfield Management and GV, with participation from Emerson Collective, Pinta Partners, Ochsner Health, and management.
OatFi, a NYC-based API-first fintech infrastructure company, raised $24M in Series A funding. The round was led by White Star Capital, with continued participation from existing investors Portage and QED.
Projectworks, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of a project intelligence platform for consulting firms, added $12M to its Series A funding. The round was led by Ten Coves Capital with participation from Bridgewest Group and Punakaiki Fund.
Ciroos, a Pleasanton, CA-based company which specializes in AI-powered solutions for SREs, DevOps and operations teams, raised $21M in funding. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners.
Veris AI, a NYC-based platform that lets companies safely train and test AI agents through new fidelity simulated experiences, raised $8.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Decibel Ventures and Acrew Capital, with participation from angel investors Ian Livingstone, The House Fund, Idris Mokhtarzada, Dorothy Chang, and others.
Voxel, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of AI workplace safety and risk solutions, raised $44M in Series B funding. The round was led by NewRoad Capital Partners with participation from current investors Eclipse, Rite Hite, Tokio Marine, and MTech as well as HG Ventures and Whitestone.
GridFree AI, a Houston, TX-based provider of an end-to-end data center infrastructure solution, raised $5M in funding. The round was led by Giant Ventures, with participation from Amplo.
Labrys, a London, UK-based company providing an infrastructure service platform to manage globally distributed teams, raised $20M in funding. The round was led by Plural. AlbionVC and Superangel also participated, alongside previous investors Project A, MDOne, Expeditions Fund and Marque Ventures.
Nomupay, a Dublin, Ireland-based payments management company, raised $40M, at a $290M valuation. The round was led by SB Payment Service Corp (SBPS), a SoftBank Corp Group company.
pWin.ai, a Tysons, WA-based provider of an AI proposal-writing copilot service built with Shipley practices inside, raised $120M in Seed funding. The round was led by Sanju Bansal, and other Government Contracting (GovCon) industry investors.
Freeplay, a Boulder, CO-based provider of a platform for AI teams to build products and agents, raised $5.6M in funding. The round was led by Renegade Partners, with participation from existing investors Conviction and Matchstick Ventures, as well as new investors Next Frontier Capital, PWV, Vermillion Cliffs Ventures, and a group of operators at companies like GitHub, Atlassian, Dropbox, Roblox, Scale AI and more.
Archil, a San Francisco, CA-based instant, shareable volume storage startup, raised $6.7M in seed funding. The round was led by Felicis, with participation from great investors like Y Combinator, Peak XV, Wayfinder, General Catalyst, Lombardstreet Ventures, and Twenty Two Ventures, as well as angels including Theo Browne (T3 chat), Wayne Duso (formerly Amazon), Erik Bernhardsson (Modal Labs), Ryan Worl (Warpstream), and Amit Gupta (formerly Benchling).
Treefera, a London, UK-based AI-enabled data fabric company for supply chain resilience, raised $30M in Series B funding. The round was led by Notion Capital with participation from Albion VC, Triple Point, Twin Path Ventures and Endeit Capital.
FOUNDER’S DAILY TOOL
🧰 Your fundraising story needs numbers.
Most investors will ask for your financial model even at pre-seed. Our Early Stage Startup Financial Model Template gives you a plug-and-play Excel sheet to build a clean, credible model, even if you're not a finance expert.
Inside you'll find:
Revenue, expense, and headcount projections
CAC, LTV, and burn rate calculators
3–5 year forecasting logic built for fundraising decks
Designed specifically for pre-seed to Series A founders
Don’t wait until a VC asks for it. Build it now.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
Circle & Co, a London, UK-based venture firm focused on early-stage consumer tech, raised £11.5M for its solo GP fund led by Sasha Trower. The fund will invest in marketplaces, consumer platforms, and consumerized SaaS across Europe and the U.S. Trower previously backed Runna, recently acquired by Strava, and has already made five investments from the new fund. LPs include exited founders and operators from leading consumer startups.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
DeepSeek may have used Google’s Gemini to train its latest model:
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released a new model, R1-0528, that closely mimics Google’s Gemini outputs, leading to speculation it may have been trained on Gemini data.
Developers have noted similarities in phrasing and internal "thought traces," echoing past accusations that DeepSeek used outputs from OpenAI’s ChatGPT for training.
Amid rising concerns over AI model distillation, OpenAI and Google have strengthened security and trace protections to prevent unauthorized data usage by competitors like DeepSeek.
Court documents reveal OpenAI is coming for your iPhone:
An internal OpenAI document outlines a strategy for ChatGPT to evolve into a "super-assistant" accessible on third-party surfaces including Apple's Siri.
This envisioned "super-assistant" aims for T-shaped skills for daily tasks and deep expertise, becoming personalized and available to users anywhere they go.
OpenAI's strategy involves new agentic tools for device control, positioning it to challenge "powerful incumbents" and expand beyond its current Siri integration.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike finally fix the stupidest problem in cybersecurity:
Microsoft and CrowdStrike are tackling cybersecurity's confusing issue where threat actors like Midnight Blizzard or Cozy Bear have multiple names, hindering defenders.
Their new joint effort provides a map, a cheat sheet to translate between each company's threat actor naming systems and the many aliases.
This collaboration aims for faster analysis by security professionals, with Google’s Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 expected to join this mapping project.
Meta signs nuclear power deal to support AI energy needs:
Meta has agreed to buy power from Constellation Energy’s Clinton nuclear plant in Illinois for 20 years, helping keep the reactor running beyond 2027.
The deal supports Meta’s rising energy demand from AI and data centers, and could become a model for Big Tech backing existing nuclear infrastructure.
While financial terms weren’t disclosed, such long-term agreements typically run into billions; Constellation’s stock rose 5.7% following the announcement.
Yoshua Bengio launches LawZero, a nonprofit AI safety lab:
Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio has launched LawZero, a nonprofit lab focused on building safer AI systems, backed by $30 million from donors like Jaan Tallinn, Eric Schmidt, and Open Philanthropy.
The lab's name references the "Zeroth Law of Robotics," emphasizing the protection of humanity as its guiding principle.
Bengio, a leading voice in AI safety, said he lacks confidence in companies like OpenAI and Google to prioritize safety in their AI development.
Elon Musk says SpaceX will hit $15.5B in revenue in 2025:
Elon Musk projects SpaceX will generate around $15.5 billion in revenue this year, surpassing NASA’s $1.1 billion commercial space budget.
The bulk of the revenue comes from Starlink’s satellite internet service and a record pace of rocket launches, with 170 targeted for 2025.
SpaceX’s growing commercial dominance is driven by demand for low-cost launches and satellite deployments, as well as ambitions for Mars missions via its Starship rocket system.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕Other news
Now Deel is accusing Rippling of spying by ‘impersonating’ a customer:
Deel claims a Rippling employee posed as a customer for six months to secretly analyze and copy its products, escalating their ongoing legal feud.
The amended lawsuit also accuses Rippling CEO Parker Conrad of targeting Deel out of personal vendettas, including alleged misinformation campaigns to regulators and media.
Rippling denies unethical conduct but says it’s investigating; meanwhile, Deel asserts it’s profitable with over $1 billion in revenue as the court drama intensifies.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
💼 Today’s VC & startup job opportunities
Investment Trainee - Hashkey Capital | USA - Apply Here
Senior Associate - M12 | USA - Apply Here
Startup Scouting Partner - 8state venture | UAE - Aplpy Here
Staff Accountant - Energy Impact Partner | USA - Apply Here
Writer - First Round Capital | USA - Apply Here
Partner 32 - a16z | USA - Apply Here
Senior Operations Manager - Unusual Venture | USA - Apply Here
Associate - Omerse Venture | USA - Apply Here
Investor Relationship Associate - Bauken Capital | USA - Apply Here
All-In-One VC Interview Preparation Guide: With a leading investors group, we have created an all-in-one VC interview preparation guide for aspiring VCs. Don’t miss this. (Access Here)
WHEN YOU’RE READY, HERE’S HOW I CAN HELP:
💁 You might need our help!
Reach 92,500+ Founders & Investors: Partner with our newsletter to reach a highly engaged audience.
Build Your Pitch Deck: We write, design and model your pitch deck into a storyteller book within 4-5 days.
Do you have any news to share about your Startup or VC fund? Please email us.
We’ll be back in your inbox on Tomorrow.