☕ Meta to acquire 49% of Scale AI for $15 billion & A ChatGPT query uses 'one fifteenth of a teaspoon' of water.
What's new in Apple Intelligence, Mistral releases a pair of AI reasoning models & OpenAI releases o3-pro.
Starfish are all head, no body. Biologically, they don’t have a torso or a tail, just a brainless, five-armed structure that somehow still thrives.
Nature really said, “Who needs organs when you’ve got determination?”
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📬 What’s in store:
Today’s Picks: Where to find early users, $60K/mo “fake live” app, a16z AI startup benchmarks, buyer’s pyramid, Super Mario marketing, founder tools: valuation, legal, financial model, data room, investor lists.
Meta to acquire 49% of Scale AI for $14.8 billion.
Apple Intelligence: Everything you need to know about Apple’s AI model.
OpenAI releases o3-pro, a souped-up version of its o3 AI reasoning model.
Mistral releases a pair of AI reasoning models.
Sam Altman says a ChatGPT query uses “one fifteenth of a teaspoon” of water.
IBM plans world's first large error-corrected quantum computer by 2028.
Google’s AI search features are killing traffic to publishers.
Nvidia and HPE to build Germany’s next-gen supercomputer.
VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.
⏱️ Read Time: 3 minutes
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ What else is brewing
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup funding updates
Shovels, a San Francisco, CA-based AI-powered building insights and analytics platform, closed a $5M seed funding round. The round, which brought total funding to $6.5M, was led by Base10 Partners.
Trustible, a Washington, DC-based provider of an AI governance platform enabling safe and compliant AI adoption, raised $4.6M in funding. The round was led by Lookout Ventures, with participation from the Office of Eric Schmidt, Tau Ventures, Inner Loop Capital, Alumni Ventures, FoundersX, former Deloitte CIO Larry Quinlan, former Relativity CEO Mike Gamson, and former Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, alongside existing investors Harlem Capital, Vamos Ventures, and JHH VC.
Tebi, an Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based startup developing a financial operating system for hospitality, raised €30M in funding. The round was led by Alphabet independent growth fund CapitalG, with participation from existing investor Index Ventures.
Somnee, a Berkeley, CA-based sleep technology company, raised $10M in Seed funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, LEAD VC (founded by the Adidas family), the NBA’s Orlando Magic ownership group (DeVos family), Seaside Ventures, Nelstone Ventures, and Metalab, among others.
Hypernative, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based provider of real-time threat prevention in Web3, raised $40M in Series B funding. The round was led by Ten Eleven Ventures and Ballistic Ventures, with participation from StepStone Group, and existing investors boldstart ventures and IBI Tech Fund.
VODA.ai, a Boston, MA-based provider of a platform that helps utilities to manage aging water infrastructure, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding. The round was led by CRH Ventures with participation from L-Stone Capital.
Maze, a London, UK-based provider of a platform that uses AI agents for cloud security, raised $25M in Series A funding. The round was led by Theory Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cherry Ventures and Tapestry VC.
ai.work, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based provider of an AI worker platform, raised $10M in Seed funding. The round was led by A* and lool ventures with participation from Firstminute Capital, FirsthandVC, Timeless Partners, SV Angel, Eckstein Capital, Liquid2, Crossover VC, and other angel investors.
Noah, a London, UK-based provider of a platform developing API, low-code, and no-code integrations, raised $22M in Seed funding. Backers included LocalGlobe, Felix Capital, FJ Labs, plus angel investors Joe Lonsdale (Palantir), David Helgason (Unity), Alexander Matthey (former Adyen CTO) and Tom Stafford (DST Global).
Definely, a London, UK-based AI-powered legal tech company, has raised $30M in Series B funding. The round was led by Revaia, alongside Alumni Ventures, Beacon Capital, and Clio. Early investors, including Octopus Ventures, Zrosk Investment Management, The Raine Group, and Cornerstone VC also participated.
Iost, a Singapore-based provider of a modular blockchain platform for tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs), raised $21M in funding. Backers included DWF Labs, Presto, and Rollman Management Group.
Octaura, a NYC-based provider of electronic trading, data, and analytics solutions, raised $46.5M in funding. The round was led by Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Moody’s. New investors included Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Apollo and Motive Partners, MassMutual Ventures, and OMERS Ventures.
FinanceKey, a Helsinki, Finland-based fintech company connecting banking, ERP, and treasury systems, raised €3M in funding. The round was led by Maki.vc, with participation from existing investor First Fellow Partners.
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NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital updates
Plug and Play , Sunnyvale, CA-based fund closed its $50M Fintech & AI Fund with nine institutional investors including EXL. The fund, the largest industry-themed fund the company has raised to date, invests in companies globally.
Vijay Pande, founding partner of Andreessen Horowitz’s Bio + Health strategy, is stepping down from his role. Since launching in 2014, the team has raised nearly $3B across four funds, but is now reportedly targeting a smaller $750M fifth fund. Pande helped back companies like Devoted Health, Function Health, and Freenome. He will be succeeded by partners Jorge Conde, Julie Yoo, and Vineeta Agarwala.
Right Side Capital Management, a San Francisco, CA-based venture capital firm, raised $55m for its sixth VC fund. The firm backs capital efficient tech startups at $1.5M – $4M valuations and $5k – $30k+ MRR.
DataTribe, a Fulton, MD-based venture capital firm, closed a $41m fund. The new vehicle aims to bring government-led cybersecurity innovation to the private sector.
Geodesic Capital, a San Francisco, CA-based venture capital firm focused on bridging Silicon Valley and Asia through strategic technology investments, held the first close of the Geodesic Alliance Fund, at $250m. Limited Partners include Japanese corporations and Japanese governmental institutions that are aligned with Geodesic’s mission of advancing the U.S.-Japan relationship through technological innovation, while generating returns for investors.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest in tech
Meta to acquire 49% of Scale AI for $14.8 billion:
Meta has reportedly agreed to buy a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.8 billion, giving the data-labeling startup a massive valuation boost from its previous $13.8B round.
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang is expected to join Meta to lead its new “superintelligence” lab as part of the deal, which could help Meta catch up in the AI race.
The deal structure is reportedly crafted to avoid antitrust scrutiny, as Meta faces regulatory pressure over past acquisitions like Instagram and WhatsApp.
Apple Intelligence: Everything you need to know about Apple’s AI model:
Apple Intelligence integrates AI features like Writing Tools, Genmoji, Visual Intelligence, and an upgraded Siri into native apps, launching on iOS 18.1+ and macOS Sequoia 15.1+.
It uses on-device models for privacy and speed, with complex tasks offloaded to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute; ChatGPT is integrated for broader queries.
Developers can build offline AI-powered features using Apple’s Foundation Models framework, extending Apple Intelligence into third-party apps.
OpenAI releases o3-pro, a souped-up version of its o3 AI reasoning model:
OpenAI launched o3-pro, its most advanced reasoning model yet, designed to outperform in science, education, coding, and writing tasks.
O3-pro is now available for ChatGPT Pro and Team users, priced at $20 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens via API.
The model outperforms Claude 4 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro in internal benchmarks but has limitations like slower response times and lack of image generation.
Mistral releases a pair of AI reasoning models:
French AI lab Mistral unveiled Magistral, a new family of reasoning models built for multi-step logic and enterprise use cases like structured calculations and decision trees.
Magistral comes in two versions: Small (24B parameters, open source via Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face) and Medium (available via API and Le Chat platform).
While Magistral Medium lags behind rivals like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Opus in key benchmarks, Mistral claims it delivers faster answers and supports multiple languages.
Sam Altman says a ChatGPT query uses “one fifteenth of a teaspoon” of water:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that the average ChatGPT query uses 0.000085 gallons of water roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon and about 0.34 watt-hours of energy.
He shared this in a blog post discussing AI's global impact, noting the cost of intelligence may one day align with electricity costs.
Altman’s figures were unsourced, and OpenAI hasn’t explained their methodology, amid broader concerns about AI's energy and water consumption.
IBM plans world's first large error-corrected quantum computer by 2028:
IBM announced plans to build Starling, its first large error-corrected quantum computer with more computational capability, by 2028, making it cloud-accessible for users by 2029.
Starling aims to have 200 logical qubits and perform 100 million logical operations accurately, demonstrating error correction on a much larger scale than previously achieved.
IBM's roadmap to Starling involves precursor machines like Kookaburra and Cockatoo, using a modular approach by networking around 100 modules for the machine.
Google’s AI search features are killing traffic to publishers:
Google's AI Overviews tool directly answers queries, so people don't click on publisher links, causing a reported drop in traffic to news websites.
Because chatbots provide information, sometimes sourced from news content without publisher knowledge, referrals to news sites are plummeting, impacting their sustainability.
The New York Times experienced a notable fall in its organic search traffic share, while Google stated its AI Overviews actually increased search traffic.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕Other news
Nvidia and HPE to build Germany’s next-gen supercomputer:
Nvidia and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are building “Blue Lion,” a new supercomputer for Germany’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, powered by Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin chips and slated for 2027.
The announcement comes as Nvidia deepens its push into scientific computing, unveiling an AI model called “Climate in a Bottle” to forecast long-term climate trends using hybrid physics-AI techniques.
Nvidia’s chips also power Jupiter, now Europe’s fastest supercomputer, reflecting the continent’s efforts to stay competitive in high-performance scientific computing.
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