The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Finnish quantum computing company IQM closed up 2% in its Nasdaq debut Thursday after going public via a SPAC merger at a ~$1.9B valuation (Anna Heim/TechCrunch) [9d]
Sources: Crusoe is in active talks to raise ~$3B in a funding round expected to value the company in the ~$30B range, up from a ~$10B valuation in October (Bloomberg) [9d]
At a town hall, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta's AI agent development has not accelerated as expected and its reorganization was not as "clean" as it could have been (Katie Paul/Reuters) [9d]
Source: crypto payments and settlement startup Mesh is raising funding led by Binance at a ~$2B valuation, six months after raising $75M at a $1B valuation (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [9d]
Travel app Hopper agrees to a $35M FTC settlement over allegations the company misled users by imposing hidden fees and misrepresenting the total costs (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [9d]
Internal memo: Tesla plans to impose a $200-per-week limit for staff's AI spending beginning July 6; the tally excludes beta versions of xAI products (Grace Kay/The Information) [9d]
Sources: ElevenLabs held early talks with investors on a secondary share sale for staff that would value the startup at ~$22B; it was valued at $11B in February (Bloomberg) [9d]
UK-based StirlingX, which develops secure data intelligence systems for defense and critical infrastructure, raised a $20M Series A, following a $11M seed (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu) [9d]
Memo: Microsoft is merging the consumer and enterprise versions of its Copilot chatbots into a single app featuring AI agents dubbed AutoPilot and coding tools (The Information) [9d]
Tripo AI, which is developing 3D foundation models and world models for use in games, raised $150M, a month after it said it raised $200M (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) [9d]
Emails disclosed in a court filing detail the uneasy back-and-forth between Dario Amodei and DOD's Emil Michael and how Anthropic's relationship with DOD soured (Wall Street Journal) [9d]
Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor Bank is in talks to raise money at an $8B+ valuation, up from $4.35B in 2025; its deposits grew from $1.1B in March to $4B now (Bloomberg) [9d]
Kling AI, the Kuaishou AI video generator spin-off, raised $2B at a $15B pre-money valuation and says the round could extend to as much as $3B (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg) [9d]
Sources: Anthropic has initiated early-stage development of a custom AI server chip and held preliminary discussions with Samsung about manufacturing the chip (Qianer Liu/The Information) [9d]
Global VC funding hit a record $510B in H1 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic accounting for $217B, or 43% of the total; in Q2, VCs put $205B into 5K+ startups (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News) [10d]
Microsoft establishes an organization with 6,000 staff specializing in engineering, corporate training, and management to support businesses with AI deployments (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [10d]
Sam Altman proposes a "US-led international forum" to establish AI standards, provide analysis of capabilities and risks, and make AI available to allies (Sam Altman/Financial Times) [10d]