The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Filings: Moonshot restructured its China-based entity from a limited liability company to a joint stock company in its first visible step toward a Hong Kong IPO (Financial Times) [34d]
• The US OCC denies Dutch fintech Bunq's application for a national bank charter, citing the need for more clarity on its business plan to expand in the US (Bloomberg) [34d]
• Sources: Situational Awareness invested $500M, including $400M this week, into Source Foundry, a startup that plans to develop new AI chip manufacturing tools (Wall Street Journal) [34d]
• The Clarity Act faces uncertainty after Senate Republicans delayed a vote until after their August recess, pushing it to September, just weeks before midterms (Jasper Goodman/Politico) [34d]
• Sources: data center operator Switch filed confidentially for a US IPO, and a listing could take place as soon as November; Ben Horowitz is joining its board (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg) [34d]
• Retailers are updating their websites to rank highly in chatbot results, while making sure purchases are done on their own sites to collect customer data (Arriana McLymore/Reuters) [34d]
• TMTG interim CEO Kevin McGurn says the company is pulling back from a pair of Crypto.com deals to focus on its media arm and its pending merger with TAE (Sara Fischer/Axios) [34d]
• Sources: Cursor told staff Thursday that SpaceX could complete its $60B acquisition as soon as next week and the Cursor brand name will likely be phased out (Grace Kay/The Information) [34d]
• The US Treasury sanctions Dubai-based unlicensed crypto exchange Shelbit, alleging it processed millions in crypto for IRGC and other Iran-linked groups (Reuters) [34d]
• Microsoft plans to end support for Manifest V2 extensions in Edge starting this month, following Google Chrome, and for enterprise users in early 2027 (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) [34d]
• Munich-based NavVis, which provides enterprises with spatial data on factories, plants, buildings, and more, raised an $85M Series D led by The Jordan Company (Rahul Raj/EU-Startups) [34d]
• Sources: legal AI startup Harvey is in talks to raise $500M+ at a $15.5B valuation, up from $11B in March, and is generating $350M+ in annualized revenue (The Information) [34d]
• Cloudflare introduces Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser for AI agents built on top of its Workers serverless service, available for free while in beta (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [35d]
• OpenAI says it has expanded safety testing around its upcoming model Astra as it "cannot rule out" critical cyber capabilities, potentially delaying launch (Axios) [35d]
• Singapore-based Multiplier, which acquires accounting firms to boost their growth with AI tools, raised a $35M Series B led by TheGP at a $300M valuation (Maria Armental/Wall Street Journal) [35d]
• Nielsen agrees to acquire DoubleVerify and take it private in an all-cash deal with an enterprise value of around $2.15B, expected to close by Q1 2027 (Brian Steinberg/Variety) [35d]
• Singapore-based AI infrastructure startup Acrab raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to more than $480M (Mars W. Mosqueda Jr/DealStreetAsia) [35d]
• Ad measurement company VideoAmp laid off ~20% of staff this week, citing AI as a "major platform shift"; sources: 50-60 employees were cut, including its CTO (Nat Ives/Wall Street Journal) [35d]
• Anthropic updates Claude Fable 5's biology safeguards to reduce false positives, cutting biology-related "fallbacks" by ~85% in testing across product surfaces (Anthropic) [35d]
• At Black Hat, OpenAI reconstructs the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and examines its implications for AI security, cyber resilience, and alignment (Black Hat on YouTube) [35d]
• Take-Two reports Q1 bookings down 3% YoY to $1.39B, vs. $1.38B est., forecasts Q2 and FY 2027 bookings below est., reiterates GTA VI's November 19 launch date (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [35d]