The Brutalist Report

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Helcim, a payments processor for SMBs, raised a CA$53M Series C led by Business Development Bank of Canada's Growth Venture Fund at a CA$250M valuation (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit) [20d]
OpenAI says California should amend SB 53 to expand safeguards, including requiring monitoring of frontier models under training, following AI agent hacks (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico) [20d]
Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [20d]
Nvidia makes a minority investment in Cloverleaf, which works with utilities and energy providers to secure infrastructure for data center sites (Rashika Singh/Reuters) [20d]
OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol's API and credit prices by over 20% for the next three months, to $4/1M input tokens and $20/1M output tokens (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) [20d]
Sources: Devoted Health, which uses AI to help coordinate medical care for those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, is raising new funding at a $25B valuation (Katie Roof/Business Insider) [20d]
Nvidia says its general-purpose coding agent system AVO scored 100% across all 25 environments in the ARC-AGI-3 public set, completing all 183 levels (Terry Chen/NVIDIA Technical Blog) [20d]
Anthropic hires Amir Salek, who ran Google's TPU business until 2022, to join its compute team as part of a push to develop its own chips (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [20d]
DHH launches Omacom Foundation, a non-profit supporting his Omarchy Linux distro, with $8M in funding from Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, others (Omarchy News) [20d]
Source: OpenAI's VP of sales in the Americas, Kaylin Voss, resigned a week after Denise Dresser left, prompting others on the sales team to consider resigning (Laura Bratton/The Information) [20d]
The US DOJ and TikTok reach a $400M settlement to resolve allegations TikTok violated COPPA; the DOJ filed the lawsuit in 2024 (Ashley Gold/Axios) [20d]
Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [20d]
Anthropic says Mythos 5 is now in public beta in Claude Security for Enterprise users, and it is working with providers to embed Mythos 5 in defensive tools (Claude) [20d]
Sources: London-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale is seeking to raise as much as $3B in its US IPO, which could take place as soon as September (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg) [20d]
Sources: US Department of Energy is investigating whether Chinese lidar sensors might pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the US (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [20d]
Walmart, which has long resisted contactless Tap to Pay payments, says it will soon start rolling out the tech, which supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [20d]
Filings: Apple paid Ireland $17B in taxes last year, after an EU court ordered it to pay €13B in back taxes; Apple paid $43B in corporate income taxes globally (Jamie John/Financial Times) [20d]
Uber is set to be fined €825M by the Dutch data watchdog over its use of automated systems to deactivate driver accounts, in the second largest fine under GDPR (Financial Times) [20d]
Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $250M extension, at a $2.3B valuation, to its March $170M Series A; source: Nvidia invested $25M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [20d]
Kakao plans to spin off its chat app-based platform business into a new company tentatively named KakaoAI, which it expects to relist in Korea in 2027 (Reuters) [20d]
Filings: China-based chipmaker YMTC's application to list its shares on Shanghai's STAR Market has been accepted, setting the stage for a $4.9B share sale (Reuters) [21d]
DeepSeek unveils an experimental version of its V4 Flash model that can understand visual prompts, saying it nears the performance of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 (Bloomberg) [21d]
Patreon announces new and overhauled features, including changes to its recommendation system to make it easier for smaller creators to get discovered (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [21d]
A look at London cab drivers' concerns and pushback against robotaxis, as Waymo and Wayve race to make London their European launch pad for driverless services (Financial Times) [21d]
CBRE: NYC becomes the top tech talent market for the first time with ~394K jobs, beating the Bay Area's ~375K, amid SF job cuts and finance sector tech hiring (Diana Olick/CNBC) [21d]
Samsung unveils a $65.1B-$79.5B shareholder return package for 2026, combining dividends and share buybacks, calling it "the largest ever by a Korean company" (Jenny Lee/CNBC) [21d]
Sources: Nvidia is in early talks with South Korean AI chip maker Rebellions for a potential deal, including a partnership, an investment, or an acquisition (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [21d]
China grants Geely a two-year permit for the country's first private satellite IoT trial, letting Geely offer connectivity to sectors like transport and energy (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post) [21d]
How the memory boom is reshaping Micron's hometown of Boise, Idaho, with new millionaires, job growth, rising housing costs, and uneven wealth distribution (CNBC) [21d]
How crypto, AI, and online betting companies emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 US midterm races, as corporate spending reaches a record $517M (Dawn Kopecki/Reuters) [21d]
Brazil announces ~$444.2M in AI investments split between US and Chinese companies, including ~$250.3M for a supercomputing project with Huawei and iFlytek (Marcela Ayres/Reuters) [21d]
Source: AI training data startup Micro1's gross annual run rate grew from $100M to $500M in the past eight months, putting net annual run rate at $150M-$200M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [21d]
Nevada approves permits letting Tesla deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis in the Las Vegas area over the next year, while Waymo and Uber are each allowed up to 1,000 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [21d]
A NJ teenager drops her lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap over alleged social media addiction, without any payment; TikTok previously settled her claims (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [21d]
A US judge tosses part of the conviction of ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding, who was found guilty of stealing AI trade secrets to benefit two Chinese companies (Tom Hals/Reuters) [21d]