The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Benchmark raised $2B across two new funds, including a $1.25B fund for late-stage bets, its first growth fund after decades focusing on new startups (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) [40d]
Sources: Lila Sciences, which uses AI tools to speed up the rate of scientific discovery, is in talks to raise a $2B Series B at an expected valuation of ~$8.5B (Bloomberg) [40d]
Internal documents: Meta is considering tiered pricing for "Hatch", its planned OpenClaw-like AI agent tool, including a $200-per-month premium subscription (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [40d]
Nvidia acquired Kumo, which sells predictive AI software to enterprises, a source says for $400M+; PitchBook: Kumo raised $37M at a $250M valuation in 2022 (The Information) [40d]
Google introduces Gemma 4 12B, a unified, encoder-free open multimodal model that can run locally on devices with 16GB of VRAM or unified memory (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [40d]
CrowdStrike reports Q1 revenue up 26% YoY to $1.39B, vs. $1.36B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue of about $1.44B, vs. $1.43B est.; CRWD drops 9%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [40d]
Broadcom reports Q2 revenue up 48% YoY to $22.19B, vs. $22.27B est., and forecasts Q3 semiconductor revenue from AI below estimates; AVGO drops 12%+ after hours (Reuters) [40d]
Filing: SpaceX aims to raise $75B in its IPO, selling 555.6M shares at $135 each, which would value the company at ~$1.77T (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg) [40d]
The US and other Five Eyes nations warn that China is flooding online job platforms with fake profiles and offers targeting government and military personnel (Greg Miller/Washington Post) [40d]
In a report, UK lawmakers call on the government to end a £330M NHS deal with Palantir and disclose more details of a military contract with the company (Bloomberg) [40d]
Security firm Calif says it used OpenAI's Codex to discover HTTP/2 Bomb, a remote DoS exploit affecting web servers like Nginx, Apache HTTPD, and Microsoft IIS (The Hacker News) [40d]
OpenAI diverges from Trump's AI EO in a new policy paper, proposing cyber risk evaluations for advanced AI systems be mandatory and led by CAISI, not the NSA (Brendan Bordelon/Politico) [40d]
Nearly 40% of Alphabet's planned ~$85B in equity offerings for AI will go toward covering tax obligations tied to employee equity awards, amid the AI talent war (Cory Weinberg/The Information) [40d]
Collate, whose AI tools automate paperwork for life sciences companies, raised $95M led by Redpoint at a ~$1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $125M (Amy Feldman/Forbes) [40d]
Amazon announces new visual search features, including displaying AI-generated images of products within its app based on users' search queries (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [40d]
Leading the Future, the pro-AI super PAC backed by Greg Brockman, appears to be linked to multiple sockpuppet accounts, including a purported anti-AI activist (@themidasproj) [40d]
Terra AI, which develops AI models for mining companies to better map underground resources, raised a $20M Series A led by Khosla Ventures (Katie Fehrenbacher/Axios) [40d]
Town, which is developing personalized AI assistants that connect to users' email and calendar, raised a $55M Series A led by a16z (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [40d]
Forage, a payments processor that helps retailers and food-delivery companies accept EBT cards, raised a $40M Series B led by Mouro Capital at a $225M valuation (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [40d]
Wordsmith, whose AI tools help in-house lawyers draft contracts, handle legal questions, and more, raised a $70M Series B, bringing its total funding to $100M (Melia Russell/Business Insider) [40d]
Lassie, whose AI agent helps dental practices automate admin work, raised a $35M Series A led by a16z, a source says, at a ~$250M valuation (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media) [40d]
Meta is spinning off Supernatural into an independent company, Supernatural Health, after earlier saying the VR fitness game would stop getting new content (Victoria Song/The Verge) [40d]
Digital i: YouTube overtakes Netflix in average daily viewing globally, rising from 87.2 minutes in 2024 to 99.1 in 2025, while Netflix fell from 100.5 to 93.4 (Michael Savage/The Guardian) [40d]
Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft aims to become "one of the top four labs in the world", and "the pivotal moment was renegotiating our contract with OpenAI" (The Verge) [40d]
Anthropic unveils a Services Track for its Claude Partner Network, a ranking based on what companies built with Claude, and releases a Claude Partner Hub portal (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) [40d]
Meta launches Meta Business Agent globally on WhatsApp and Instagram DMs, after a two-year pilot of the customer support AI bot in India, Mexico, and others (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [40d]
Google sold $35B in stock in its equity raise this week, up from its planned $30B and taking its total funding to $85B; a source says it contacted 75 investors (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal) [40d]
Apple plans to open an Apple Developer Center in Berlin in 2026, its first center in Europe and fifth globally, offering in-person developer access and sessions (David Phelan/Forbes) [40d]
Boston-based software monitoring startup Coralogix raised a $200M Series F at a $1.6B post-money valuation, up from $1B+ after a $115M Series E in June 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [40d]
Analysis: 10 Trump officials, including special envoy Steve Witkoff, reported holding stakes in SpaceX or xAI collectively worth $9.9M+, ahead of SpaceX's IPO (Bloomberg) [40d]
The EU's Cloud and AI Development Act aims to triple data center capacity in the next 5-7 years, and introduce the Chips Act 2.0 to allow direct EU investment (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) [40d]
The EU Commission unveils its proposed tech sovereignty package, including the Cloud and AI Development Act, in a bid to cut its reliance on US tech companies (Mathieu Pollet/Politico) [40d]
Baidu CFO Henry He says the company expects to spin off and list its chip unit Kunlunxin in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2026, making it a "neutral player" (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal) [40d]