Venture Capital

⚠️ Court filings claim Meta buried internal evidence of social-media harms New U.S. court filings allege that Meta withheld internal research showing Facebook and Instagram could negatively affect teens’ mental health, a claim the company denies. 🖱 A 2020 internal study (“Project Mercury”) allegedly found that users who deactivated Facebook for a week reported lower depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison. 🖱 Plaintiffs say Meta halted or buried the project due to concerns about “media narrative,” rather than methodological issues. 🖱 The lawsuit, filed by U.S. school districts, claims Meta prioritized teen engagement even when internal teams warned it increased exposure to harmful content. 🖱 According to filings, Meta told Congress it lacked clear evidence of harm despite allegedly having research pointing to meaningful negative effects on teenage girls. 🖱 Meta disputes the allegations, calling the study flawed and arguing that documents cited by plaintiffs were improperly filed.

These filings raise the stakes for Meta and could trigger a new wave of regulatory, legal, and public-policy pressure across the entire social-media industry.

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⚡️ Waymo accelerates its robotaxi rollout with 3 new city launches Waymo is expanding its commercial robotaxi network to Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego its fastest multi-city rollout yet as it pushes toward 1 million weekly rides by 2026. 🖱 The company will deploy mixed fleets of Jaguar I-Pace and Zeekr RT vehicles, starting with mapping and safety-operator phases before shifting to fully driverless service. 🖱 Detroit marks Waymo’s first major cold-weather market, leaning on years of winter-testing data to prove reliability in snow and low-visibility conditions. 🖱 Las Vegas and San Diego are strategic high-ridership targets, giving Waymo dense, high-traffic environments to scale autonomous operations. 🖱 The aggressive expansion reflects Waymo’s transition from R&D-heavy moonshot to a commercial mobility operator building a national footprint. 🖱 Leadership says the company is pacing toward 1 million autonomous trips per week by late 2026, a signal of confidence in both demand and operational maturity.

Waymo isn’t just adding cities, it’s laying the groundwork for a nationwide autonomous ride-hailing network.

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👤 Google hires ex–Boston Dynamics CTO to build “Android for robots” Google has brought on former Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Sanders as VP of Hardware, openly signaling its plan to turn Gemini into a universal control layer for robots the same way Android became the standard for smartphones. 🖱 Google wants Gemini to function as open, modular robot firmware that developers worldwide can adopt across form factors echoing Android’s winning recipe of openness, scalability, and hardware flexibility. 🖱 With Sanders steering hardware strategy, Google is positioning itself to unify robotics software and hardware under one ecosystem instead of fragmented, proprietary stacks. 🖱 Competition is intense: Tesla and Figure push closed, vertically integrated systems, while Nvidia champions open tooling but lacks Google’s distribution and Gemini 3 performance edge. 🖱 Google’s last major VLA, Gemini Robotics 1.5, showed strong potential but leadership now hints at a much broader portfolio of robotics-tuned models. 🖱 If Google truly delivers a powerful open VLA adaptable to diverse robots, it could become the de facto platform layer for the robotics industry.

The race is simple: whoever controls the default OS for robots will control the robot economy.

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🔔 OpenAI braces for “rough vibes” as Google surges back A leaked internal memo from Sam Altman shows OpenAI warning employees about temporary economic headwinds and intensifying pressure from Google’s Gemini 3.0 rollout across the Google ecosystem. 🖱 Altman told staff to expect “rough vibes” as OpenAI faces slower revenue momentum and tougher competitive dynamics after Google’s strong model releases. 🖱 Google’s advantage is distribution: Gemini 3.0 is shipping into Search, Android, and Workspace, giving Google an ecosystem-wide moat that a standalone model provider can’t easily match. 🖱 OpenAI is shifting into a “wartime footing,” prioritizing product speed and efficiency as enterprise buyers test alternatives and model performance gaps narrow. 🖱 Internal concerns point to potential near-term economic softness, slower growth, pricing pressure, and rising compute costs as hyperscalers tighten partnerships. 🖱 The biggest risk is strategic: if Google’s ecosystem pull becomes the default interface for AI, OpenAI may need to rethink how it captures distribution, not just build better models.

The fight now is less about raw model quality and more about who owns the user’s daily workflow.

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⚡️ Investors pile into data centers despite uncertain exits A new PitchBook analysis shows investors are pouring record amounts into data-center development even as traditional exit paths remain weak or nonexistent. 🖱 Capital is shifting toward ground-up builds, with investors chasing AI-ready, high-density facilities instead of buying existing centers. 🖱 Demand from hyperscalers and AI labs is driving the surge long-term leases with Big Tech are now seen as the strongest de-risking mechanism. 🖱 Despite a frozen secondary market, developers are relying on structured debt (ABS/CMBS) and recapitalizations to extract liquidity. 🖱 Some funds expect a future exit wave in 2027–2028, once today’s projects stabilize, though buyers remain scarce for now. 🖱 Power constraints, regulatory bottlenecks, and bond-like yields on stabilized assets remain the biggest risks for investors piling in.

The bet is clear: compute demand will keep compounding and liquidity will eventually catch up.

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🔔 Genspark hits unicorn status with massive $275M series B raise Genspark, a Palo Alto–based AI startup, has raised $275 million in a Series B round, catapulting its valuation to $1.25 billion. 🖱 The funding was backed by major players: Emergence Capital Partners, SBI Investment, LG Technology Ventures, Pavilion Capital, and UpHonest Capital. 🖱 Genspark’s platform automates routine knowledge-work tasks from building slide decks and taking meeting notes to doing research and compiling reports. 🖱 Just five months after launching its AI agent suite, the company hit $50 million in annualized revenue. 🖱 The startup aims to compete with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Gemini by offering a unified workspace of specialized AI agents. 🖱 Co-founders include Eric Jing, a former Microsoft exec, and Wen Sang, an MIT PhD who previously built a SaaS business.

Genspark’s rapid growth and deep investor support mark it as a major contender in the enterprise AI agent space.

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🧮 A simple framework to allocate costs and calculate true P&L for each client or business line Entrepreneurs often struggle to understand whether a side service or specific client is actually profitable mostly because costs aren’t allocated correctly. A framework from the Looking for Leverage blog offers a clean way to break this down. 🖱 Direct costs are assigned 1:1, anything tied explicitly to a client or product (labor hours, materials, usage-based fees) should be allocated directly with no averaging. 🖱 Shared operational costs can be allocated by usage or complexity, for example: time spent, number of tickets handled, amount of compute used, or customer-specific workflows. 🖱 Fixed overhead (rent, admin, leadership) should be allocated using a stable driver, usually revenue share, headcount share, or workload share across business lines. 🖱 Variable costs should follow activity, allocate them based on units processed, volume handled, or the intensity of service required for each client. 🖱 Strategic costs (R&D, long-term bets) require judgment, either leave them unallocated or assign them only to the product lines that directly benefit.

This structure can help you see which clients and services truly make money and which ones quietly drain margin.

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📈 Startup M&A is heating up again, Carta reports a record 200 acquisitions in Q3 2025 Carta just logged the highest acquisition volume in its history, with 200 startup M&A deals in the third quarter, a clear sign the market has snapped back from the 2023 freeze. 🖱 Deal-making is alive again, with buyers ranging from other startups to Big Tech and private funds. 🖱 Early-stage dominates ~50% of all acquisitions are pre-seed/seed, and another 25–30% land at Series A. 🖱 Series B hits an all-time high, with 26 acquisitions in Q3 alone, real strategic buys, not acquihires. 🖱 Exits aren’t guaranteed paydays, many deals clear below liquidation prefs, leaving some shareholders with nothing. 🖱 AI leads the wave, accounting for at least 30% of all acquired startups this year, with the share rising each quarter.

With volumes surging and buyers returning, 2025 is shaping up to be one of the best moments in years for founders looking to sell.

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🔔 Adobe is buying Semrush in a $1.9B push into AI-first marketing Adobe has announced a $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush, marking its biggest deal since the failed Figma takeover and signaling a major move to dominate AI-driven search and brand visibility. 🖱 Semrush brings both classic SEO and next-gen GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), giving Adobe a direct pipeline into how brands appear across LLMs, AI assistants, and traditional search. 🖱 Adobe will fold Semrush into Experience Cloud, integrating GEO data into AEM, Analytics, and its new Brand Concierge to power smarter AI-native marketing workflows. 🖱 The acquisition also reflects Adobe’s return to large-scale M&A, with the company betting that AI-mediated discovery will become as important as traditional search ranking. 🖱 With Semrush’s massive dataset, Adobe gains the ability to optimize how brands surface inside AI chatbots, answer engines, and agentic shopping flows, a channel growing 1,200% YoY.

Adobe isn’t just buying an SEO tool, it’s securing the discovery stack for an AI-first internet.

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💰 Anthropic lands a massive $45B deal with Microsoft and Nvidia Anthropic has signed a record-scale investment and infrastructure agreement with Microsoft and Nvidia worth $45 billion, instantly pushing the company’s valuation to $350B up from $183B just two months ago. 🖱 Anthropic will commit $30B to buying Azure compute roughly 1GW of capacity locking in long-term infrastructure for Claude’s next-generation models. 🖱 Nvidia is investing $10B and Microsoft $5B, giving both deeper strategic ties to one of the fastest-growing AI labs in the world. 🖱 Nvidia and Anthropic will co-develop new optimization methods for both models and chips, aiming to boost performance and efficiency across the stack. 🖱 Jensen Huang called the partnership a “dream come true,” underscoring Nvidia’s plan to shape the architecture behind frontier AI systems.

With this structure, Anthropic isn’t just raising capital, it’s locking in the full-stack infrastructure to compete at the absolute top of the AI race.

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✅ Suno hits a $2.45B valuation as investors double down on AI-generated music Suno has raised a new round valuing the AI-music startup at $2.45 billion, a sharp jump that comes as the company faces both explosive demand and mounting legal pressure from major record labels. 🖱 The company is generating more than $200M in annual revenue, driven largely by paid subscribers using its AI to produce fully-finished songs. 🖱 Investors include Menlo Ventures, NVentures (Nvidia), Lightspeed, and Matrix, a lineup signaling strong confidence in Suno’s claim that its music is original, not derivative. 🖱 The valuation arrives as Suno fights lawsuits from Universal, Warner, and Sony, who argue the model was trained on copyrighted tracks without permission. 🖱 Suno is rolling out new pro-grade tools like Suno Studio, betting that AI-first music creation will shift from novelty to mainstream workflow.

If Suno wins the legal battles, it won’t just be a top AI-music app, it could redefine how the entire music industry thinks about creation, ownership, and compensation.

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🔔 Meta wins major antitrust case as judge rules it’s not a monopoly A federal judge has rejected the FTC’s long-running attempt to force Meta to unwind Instagram and WhatsApp, ruling that the agency failed to prove Meta currently holds monopoly power. 🖱 The court said the social market has shifted, with TikTok, YouTube, and others weakening the FTC’s “personal social networking” monopoly claim. 🖱 Internal Zuckerberg emails about buying Instagram to “buy time” surfaced, but the judge said historic intent doesn’t equal present-day monopoly status. 🖱 The decision means no breakup, no divestitures, and a major relief for Meta after five years of litigation. 🖱 Regulators now face a tougher path, as the ruling signals courts want broader, updated definitions for tech competition.

This outcome doesn’t just protect Instagram and WhatsApp , it reshapes how future antitrust fights against Big Tech will be argued.

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🔔 Anthony Pompliano could secure a huge performance payout as ProCap heads toward a public listing Unchained Crypto reports that Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano may earn up to $400M through a results-based compensation plan tied to ProCap’s upcoming SPAC listing, a striking move for a firm that only recently closed $750M in fresh capital. 🖱 ProCap is positioning itself as a bitcoin-first investment company, already accumulating over 3,700 BTC and signaling plans to expand its holdings toward the $1B mark. 🖱 Pompliano’s potential reward isn’t guaranteed, it’s modeled as a high-risk, high-upside package that only unlocks if the public company hits ambitious performance and asset-growth milestones. 🖱 The structure reflects a broader shift in finance: founder compensation increasingly mirrors tech-style incentive models where massive upside is tied to extreme execution.

ProCap isn’t just going public, it’s making a bold bet that a bitcoin-centric balance-sheet strategy can become a mainstream, institutional investment model.

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📚 Why you should read investing books, even before you start investing Money is losing value faster than ever, and most people wait too long to learn how to manage it. But capital management is one of the few skills that compounds for life and the easiest way to build it early is by reading the right investing books. Here are the TOP-5 beginner-friendly picks for 2024–2025: 🖱 Just Keep Buying — Nick Maggiulli: A motivating guide to long-term, systematic investing and why short-term fear kills returns. 🖱 Investing 101 — Michelle Cagan: A clear breakdown of stocks, bonds, ETFs, IPOs great for anyone starting from zero. 🖱 Stock Market 101 — Michelle Cagan: A practical intro to buying stocks, understanding markets, and avoiding rookie mistakes. 🖱 Rule No. 1 Investing — Phil Town: A simple framework for value investing using fundamentals without needing hours each week. 🖱 The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing: A modern classic on passive, low-cost index investing and building a long-term portfolio. New additions worth reading too: • The Algebra of Wealth — Scott Galloway (2024): a formula for financial security built on focus, time, stoicism, and diversification. • Mango Millionaire — Radhika Gupta: a personal finance guide rooted in daily habits, budgeting, and realistic money management.

Investing begins long before the first dollar hits the market, it starts with learning how money actually works.

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🤖 Will artificial womb robots become the next frontier of human reproduction? A growing debate online has erupted after a Chinese robotics company revealed plans for a humanoid machine designed to carry a human embryo to term using a synthetic uterus, engineered amniotic fluid, and a plastic umbilical cord. 🖱 Early claims suggest the first consumer version could appear as soon as next year, priced around mid-range appliance levels. The company says the vision isn’t to assist pregnancy it’s to replace it entirely, shifting gestation from humans to machines. 🖱 Scientists and bioethicists are raising alarms: we don’t know how a synthetic womb replicates hormonal signaling, whether brain development is safe in an artificial environment, or what psychological consequences might emerge for children born from a device rather than a human body. 🖱 The ethical stakes are enormous. If robotic gestation becomes real, who holds parental responsibility? What rights does a child have when the “mother” was a machine? And does this technology open the door to industrialized reproduction?

As biology, robotics, and ethics collide, the question hangs in the air: is this a breakthrough in human freedom or a line civilization isn’t ready to cross?

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Will artificial womb robots become the next frontier of human reproduction? A growing debate online has erupted after a Chinese robotics company revealed plans for a humanoid machine designed to carry a human embryo to term using a synthetic uterus, engineered amniotic fluid, and a plastic umbilical cord. 🤖 Early claims suggest the first consumer version could appear as soon as next year, priced around mid-range appliance levels. The company says the vision isn’t to assist pregnancy — it’s to replace it entirely, shifting gestation from humans to machines. 🧪 Scientists and bioethicists are raising alarms: we don’t know how a synthetic womb replicates hormonal signaling, whether brain development is safe in an artificial environment, or what psychological consequences might emerge for children born from a device rather than a human body. ⚖️ The ethical stakes are enormous. If robotic gestation becomes real, who holds parental responsibility? What rights does a child have when the “mother” was a machine? And does this technology open the door to industrialized reproduction? As biology, robotics, and ethics collide, the question hangs in the air: is this a breakthrough in human freedom — or a line civilization isn’t ready to cross?

🔬 Sam Altman launches Episteme, a “new kind of R&D lab” for long-horizon science Sam Altman and Lewis Andre have founded Episteme, an organization built to attract top researchers and give them full freedom to pursue high-impact scientific breakthroughs without academic bureaucracy or corporate pressures. 🖱 Episteme plans to hire exceptional scientists across physics, biology, computation, and energy fields where long-term research is often underfunded but can unlock massive breakthroughs. 🖱 Researchers get infrastructure, resources, and support, plus equity in the company, positioning them more like founders than employees. 🖱 The pitch: industry demands fast results, academia lacks funding Episteme fills the gap by backing bold, high-risk scientific ideas that could redefine entire sectors. 🖱 While the mission emphasizes “impact for humanity,” the focus areas also align with domains that could generate enormous economic value if successful.

If Episteme can actually attract world-class talent and keep its promise of true freedom, it may become the place where the next generation of deep-tech breakthroughs are born.

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📌 Bezos returns to the trenches as co-CEO of $6.2B AI startup Project Prometheus According to The New York Times, Jeff Bezos is taking on his first operational role since leaving Amazon, becoming co-CEO of Project Prometheus, an AI startup that has already secured a massive $6.2B in early funding. 🖱 Bezos will lead the company alongside Vik Bajaj, a physicist and former Google X executive, signaling that Prometheus aims to fuse deep science with frontier-model engineering. 🖱 The startup focuses on “AI for the physical economy,” building systems for aerospace, manufacturing, automotive, and advanced computing, areas tied tightly to Bezos’s long-term industrial and space ambitions. 🖱 Prometheus has quietly hired top talent from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, assembling a 100-person team before even launching a product, an unusual scale that mirrors its outsized funding. 🖱 The company’s backers see industrial AI as the next trillion-dollar frontier, where software isn’t just generating text but redesigning machines, factories, and physical infrastructure.

Bezos isn’t merely backing another AI lab, he’s positioning Prometheus as a deep-tech powerhouse that could reshape how the physical world itself gets engineered.

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🔔 Peter Thiel dumps all his Nvidia shares as “AI bubble” fears intensify Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has sold his entire Nvidia position, roughly 537,000 shares that made up 40% of his fund shifting capital into Microsoft, Apple, and partially Tesla. 🖱 Thiel has repeatedly warned that the current AI boom lacks real economic fundamentals, comparing Nvidia’s surge to the late-90s dot-com bubble. 🖱 SoftBank is also exiting its Nvidia stake, signaling growing caution among major institutions watching valuations stretch to extremes. 🖱 Michael Burry, famous for predicting the 2008 crisis, is shorting Nvidia with 14% of his portfolio, one of his largest macro bets in years.

When heavyweight investors start stepping back at the same time, it may be the first real sign that the AI trade is entering its “late-cycle psychology” phase.

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🚐 Global EV market: Chinese manufacturers tighten their grip on worldwide sales Here’s the latest snapshot of the global electric-vehicle market by manufacturer, counting both BEVs and PHEVs and for Chinese brands, including both domestic and global deliveries. 🖱 BYD dominates with more than 3.8M EVs delivered last year, giving it over 22% of the global market, fueled by massive PHEV volume and fast-growing exports. 🖱 Tesla holds the BEV crown, but its overall EV share continues to slide as Chinese brands scale aggressively across both pure electric and hybrid segments. 🖱 GAC Aion, SAIC-GM-Wuling, Geely, and MG now sit firmly in the global top tier, collectively capturing double-digit market share and reshaping the competitive landscape. 🖱 Chinese automakers benefit from extreme manufacturing scale, vertically integrated supply chains, and lower battery costs giving them a pricing edge global rivals can’t match.

The center of gravity in the EV world has shifted decisively: China isn’t just competing in electric mobility, it’s setting the tempo for the entire global market.

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