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) [34d]
• OpenAI says it has expanded safety testing around its upcoming model Astra as it "cannot rule out" critical cyber capabilities, potentially delaying launch (Axios) [34d]
• 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]
• Livestream shopping app Whatnot raised a $545M Series G led by Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Avra at a $20B valuation, up from an $11.5B valuation in October 2025 (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) [35d]
• Athens-based Omilia, which builds self-learning AI agents that work across different customer contact points, raised a $67M Series B led by Expedition Growth (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [35d]
• Sources: the US Commerce Department's BIS is reviewing how Chinese AI companies access Nvidia chips overseas, including by legally renting foreign data centers (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [35d]
• The White House imposes a series of price floors and a 15% tariff on products made from polysilicon, a chip raw material primarily produced by China (Reuters) [35d]
• Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes says he will buy $250M of company shares after strong Q4 results eased fears that AI could threaten its business model (Nic Fildes/Financial Times) [35d]
• SK Hynix plans a $38B chipmaking expansion in South Korea, including a new ~$24.7B DRAM facility in Yongin and a ~$13.3B NAND fabrication plant in Cheongju (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [35d]
• Analysis: Google DeepMind has lost frontier-model momentum amid leadership and RL talent departures, with Google Cloud emerging as a winner with more compute (SemiAnalysis) [35d]
• Sources: Google's AI shakeup is a seismic shift in the works for months and cements Sergey Brin's influence, after execs became frustrated with Demis Hassabis (Financial Times) [35d]
• Sources: up to five people tied to US Cyber Command died by suicide from early June to early July 2026, prompting it to flag a potential suicide cluster (Bloomberg) [35d]
• Filing: ex-a16z partner Bryan Kim is forming venture firm Mido Capital; sources: he plans to raise ~$100M for a fund backing early-stage AI and other startups (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [35d]
• Sources: ByteDance is pre-training an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x Kimi K3 and potentially larger than estimates for Anthropic's Mythos 5 (Financial Times) [35d]
• Sources: an addendum to the bipartisan Clarity Act would force President Trump to divest from crypto businesses, letting him defer paying taxes on the gains (Bloomberg) [35d]
• Sydney-based AI data center company Firmus raised $2B in funding from Coatue, Nvidia, and others at a $10.5B post-money valuation, up from $5.5B in April (Nichiket Sunil/Reuters) [35d]
• Naïve, which provides infrastructure for AI agents to handle most business operations, raised a $28.5M Series A led by Nexus, bringing its total funding to $32M (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [35d]
• Sources: Alibaba plans to ask heavy commercial users of its next Qwen open model for a share of revenue; Moonshot's Kimi K3 requires up to a 30% revenue share (Reuters) [35d]
• Security researchers claim Kimi K3 went outside its sandbox during defensive cybersecurity tests, but did not hack anything after accessing the internet (Will Knight/Wired) [35d]
• An interview with Replit CEO Amjad Masad on why "vibe coding" is never about coding, the SaaS apocalypse, building a "self-driving company", and more (Casey Newton/Platformer) [35d]
• A profile of DDN, a managed data storage company whose annual revenue is expected to grow from $300M pre-AI boom to $1B by year's end, fueled by AI partnerships (Iain Martin/Forbes) [35d]