The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Trase, which is building an operating system and infrastructure layer for AI agents in industries like health care and defense, raised a $107M seed led by Arch (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [17d]
• Paris-based digital health insurance startup Alan raised €480M led by Prosus at a €5.5B valuation, and is set for €1B+ in annual recurring revenue by year's end (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [17d]
• Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who championed a huge data center beside the Great Salt Lake, lost his Republican primary on Tuesday after voter backlash (Jack Healy/New York Times) [17d]
• SambaNova Executive Chairman Lip-Bu Tan says the AI chip startup is set to raise $800M to $1B, sources say at a ~$10B valuation, up from $2B in February (The Information) [17d]
• Qualcomm expects $15B in data center chip sales by 2029, raises its non-handset chip revenue forecast to $40B by 2029, up from $22B; QCOM jumps 13%+ after hours (Reuters) [17d]
• Cloudflare partners with Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla on PACT, a protocol to distinguish legitimate human or bot traffic from undesirable network requests (Thomas Claburn/The Register) [17d]
• Micron reports Q3 revenue up 346% YoY to $41.46B, vs. $35.84B est., gross margin above estimates, and forecasts Q4 revenue above est.; MU jumps 14%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC) [18d]
• Sources: in a letter to US officials, Anthropic accused Alibaba of adversarial distillation, accessing Claude 28.8M times from April to June via ~25K accounts (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Qualcomm unveils Dragonfly C1000, a new data center CPU built for agentic AI, and says Meta will use the chip when production starts in 2028 (Kif Leswing/CNBC) [18d]
• Sources: Kalshi is in talks to raise a funding round at a ~$40B valuation that may close as soon as Q3; Kalshi raised $1B at a $22B valuation in May (Financial Times) [18d]
• Documents: Meta's planned prediction markets app will use Meta AI models to generate questions from trending topics, make recommendations, and resolve markets (Bobby Allyn/NPR) [18d]
• Sources: Google AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both viewed internally as key contributors to Gemini, are planning to leave for Anthropic (Bloomberg) [18d]
• Google says computer use is now a built-in tool supported in Gemini 3.5 Flash, available via the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (Mateo Quiros/The Keyword) [18d]
• Binance says it will make a fresh push for permission to operate in the EU after its MiCA license application in Greece failed ahead of the June 30 deadline (Reuters) [18d]
• Runlayer, which provides an infrastructure and control layer for enterprise AI agents, raised a $30M Series A led by Felicis, bringing its total funding to $42M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [18d]
• Seltz, which is building a web search engine that can be used by AI agents, raised a $12.5M seed led by Speedinvest and B Capital (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune) [18d]
• Nature publishes a peer-reviewed paper alleging that Microsoft's 2025 quantum breakthrough claims were based on "basic Python errors" and data cherry-picking (Thomas Claburn/The Register) [18d]
• Sources: the Trump administration has been happier talking to Anthropic lately after Dario Amodei was replaced by cofounder Tom Brown in meetings about Fable 5 (Hugo Lowell/Wired) [18d]
• Ornn, which plans to launch a marketplace for GPU capacity designed to function like an exchange to trade oil contracts, raised a $33M seed led by a16z (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg) [18d]
• XCures, which uses AI to streamline patient data and medical records, raised a $46M Series B at a $127M post-money valuation, bringing its total funding to $76M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [18d]
• RunPod, which rents access to non-Nvidia servers, raised $100M led by Summit Partners at a $1B valuation, a source says up from $100M after its seed in 2024 (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [18d]
• NYC-based Taktile, which helps fintechs build automated decision-making workflows, raised a $110M Series C led by Goldman Sachs, and plans a São Paulo office (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune) [18d]
• Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit says AI helped it link two separate hacking tools, Amadey and StealC, and file a single civil lawsuit to take them down (Lorelei Smillie/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Chinese cybersecurity company 360 unveils new AI tools: Tulongfeng, which it claims is "China's version of Mythos", and Yitianzhen, to automate cyber defense (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters) [18d]
• OpenAI and Broadcom unveil Jalapeño, an LLM-optimized inference chip developed from design to manufacturing tape-out in nine months, aided by OpenAI's models (OpenAI) [18d]
• Google Home Speaker review: the $100 speaker, the company's first such device in six years, works for Gemini power users but has underwhelming music playback (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Amazon plans to expand Amazon Now to 300 Indian cities and towns, up from 100 at present, as CEO Andy Jassy visits India; a source says he is set to meet Modi (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Qualcomm plans to acquire Modular, which builds a chip software platform and has a proprietary coding language, in a nearly $4B deal set to close in H2 2026 (Lauren Goode/Wired) [18d]
• Rockstar says physical copies of GTA 6 will contain a digital download code, not a disc; physical copies release on November 12, ahead of the November 19 launch (Tom Phillips/IGN) [18d]
• The US FDA drops an enforcement complaint against Whoop over its blood pressure tracking tool, reversing a July 2025 warning letter; Whoop is updating the tool (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [18d]
• An analysis of GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.3, Gab's Arya, and other AI models: most chatbots frequently provide left-leaning responses to political prompts (Kevin Schaul/Washington Post) [18d]
• How Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park, home to TSMC, became its wealthiest hub; one neighborhood reported 2023 average household incomes of $146K, 5x the average (New York Times) [18d]
• Rockstar sets the release date for GTA VI for November 19 and says it will cost $79.99, or $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition; pre-orders start at midnight tonight (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) [18d]
• How Chicago is betting on quantum computing, including turning the site of the former US Steel mill into a campus, after largely missing the digital revolution (Jeanne Whalen/Wall Street Journal) [18d]
• Q&A with AWS CEO Matt Garman on the parallels between early AWS and AI, Quick, AI coding, Amazon's $200B capex in 2026, hiring entry-level staff, and more (Casey Newton/Platformer) [18d]
• Humanoid robot maker Agility plans to go public via a merger with Michael Klein's SPAC, in a deal valuing it at ~$2.5B and listing under ticker symbol AGLT (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal) [18d]
• SK Hynix says it is seeking to raise ~$29.4B in a US listing, expects trading to start on July 10, and intends to use the funds for building additional capacity (Bloomberg) [18d]
• An interview with Bob Iger on stepping down as Disney's CEO, his legacy, new CEO Josh D'Amaro, Bob Chapek, Apple, Disney+, purchasing Pixar, AI, and more (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) [18d]
• Sources: Qualcomm is in talks to design custom chips for ByteDance, based partly on connectivity tech from Alphawave Semi, which Qualcomm acquired in 2025 (Reuters) [18d]
• SK Hynix overtaking Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company is the culmination of 14 years of bets on HBM, which paid off as the AI boom took off (Reuters) [18d]
• Sources: India drives 50%+ of WhatsApp's revenue, generating $1B+ annually, largely via business messaging, likely helping Kunal Shah get WhatsApp's top job (Moneycontrol) [18d]
• London-based Isometric, which develops AI agents that work with human verifiers to automate industrial certification, raised a €34M Series A led by AVP (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups) [18d]
• New York-based Probook, which is building an AI operating system for home service businesses, raised a $34M Series A led by a16z and a $6M seed led by Sequoia (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [18d]
• AI creative tools startup Krea, which has raised $83M and claims to have 30M users, releases the open weights for its image model Krea 2 under a custom license (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [18d]
• Sources: Zhipu is considering a multibillion-dollar Hong Kong share sale after its stock surged 2,000% since its January IPO, pushing its market cap above $128B (Dong Cao/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Customer engagement service MoEngage acquires Aampe, whose AI agents help brands personalize messaging, for "tens of millions", per a source; Aampe raised ~$28M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [18d]
• Sources: prices for Nvidia's AI chips on China's black market have more than doubled amid a US export crackdown; its flagship DGX B300 server has risen to $1.1M (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times) [18d]
• Flipkart says it plans to expand its network of micro-fulfillment centers in India to 1,500 by the end of 2026, as it also claims orders have grown ~400% YoY (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [18d]
• Superhuman acquires AI detection startup GPTZero, which has 19M+ registered users and $30M in annual recurring revenue; PitchBook: GPTZero is valued at $88M+ (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider) [18d]
• Alex Bores, a NY congressional candidate at the center of a proxy war over AI regulation involving millions in AI PAC spending, was defeated by Micah Lasher (Ben Kamisar/NBC News) [18d]
• The NSA was red-teaming Mythos 5 before losing access amid the Anthropic dispute; the tests showed Mythos identified cybersecurity flaws in classified systems (New York Times) [18d]
• Orderful, which offers AI-powered tools to automate supply chain data management, raised a $35M Series C led by KDT, bringing its total funding to $85M (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE) [18d]
• xLight, a startup developing advanced lasers for EUV machines, told investors that it is in talks to raise $350M led by Boardman Bay and Bain Capital (The Information) [18d]