April 3rd Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
April 03, 2026

As of close on April 2nd, 2026

Markets moved sharply on Thursday after President Trump said in a nationally televised address on Wednesday night that the U.S. would hit Iran “extremely hard” within the next two to three weeks, pushing oil sharply higher, with Brent settling up 7.8% at $109.03 and WTI rising 11.4% to $111.54, and reigniting stagflation and delayed rate-cut concerns. Offsetting some of that macro anxiety, U.S. payrolls rose by 178,000 in March, ahead of expectations, while unemployment edged down to 4.3%. In tech, Microsoft posted its worst Wall Street quarter since 2008, with shares falling 23% on AI-related concerns, while Oracle began cutting thousands of jobs as rising debt and heavy AI infrastructure spending pressured the business despite strong demand and a $300B OpenAI deal. DeepSeek also faced scrutiny after its chatbot suffered a 7-hour, 13-minute outage, its longest disruption since its 2025 breakout. Meanwhile, SpaceX reportedly filed for an IPO this week while targeting a valuation above $2T, coinciding with the day NASA launched a historic mission around the moon. Elsewhere in consumer and investment news, Whoop raised $575M at a $10.1B valuation, and SoftBank secured a $40B bridge loan to deepen its OpenAI investment.

We’ve published our Monthly AI Deck for March 2026. Check it out here.

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] 💰 OpenAI raised $122B at an $852B post-money valuation, including its first-ever $3B tranche from retail investors. The financing was upsized by $10B from the previously announced $110B, with the additional capital coming from a16z, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and other investors. Separately, they also announced the acquisition of TBPN, a technology-focused talk show popular in Silicon Valley, for a low hundred million dollars. Read more on OpenAI and FT.

[2] 🤝 Anthropic bought biotech AI startup Coefficient Bio for about $400 million, bolstering its life-sciences push with drug discovery, regulatory, and clinical workflow tools while deepening vertical AI expansion. Details from The Information.

[3] 📈 CoreWeave secured an $8.5 billion Meta-backed GPU loan, its largest such deal, extending maturity to 2032, and fueling AI infrastructure expansion despite a $21.6 billion debt load. More from Bloomberg.

[4] 🧑‍⚖️ Perplexity is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging it secretly used tracking tools to share users’ private chatbot conversations with Meta and Google on the Perplexity AI Machine, even in incognito mode, potentially violating California privacy laws. See details on Bloomberg.

[5] 💸 Global startup funding hit a record $297 billion in Q1 2026, driven by four mega-rounds totaling $188 billion by OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo, underscoring AI’s outsized influence on venture markets. More from TechCrunch.

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 🔓 Google unveiled Gemma 4, an Apache 2.0-licensed open-model family spanning edge to workstation deployments, touting frontier reasoning, multimodal audio-vision support, 128K–256K context, agentic features, and strong efficiency-per-parameter for developers worldwide. You can download the model from Google AI Edge for iPhones. More from Google and Link to the App Store.

[2] 🦞 Within hours of the Claude Code leak, Claw Code launched an open-source AI agent framework rewrite of Anthropic’s software (Python/Rust), targeting “harness layer” transparency for task orchestration, tool integration, and workflow management; the repository was the fastest to reach 50k stars in GitHub history. Info is on FinancialContent and WaveSpeed.

[3] 💰 Mistral, an open-source model developer, raised $830 million in debt to build a Paris-area data center with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, accelerating Europe’s AI infrastructure push and targeting 200 MW capacity by 2027. Details from CNBC.

[4] 🦙 Ollama added support for the Apple MLX framework and the NVIDIA NVFP4 model format, improving speed and memory efficiency for running larger open-weight AI models locally on Macs and developer machines. Details on The New Stack.

[5] 🔑 Portkey open-sourced its AI Gateway and MCP Gateway after processing ~2 trillion tokens daily, positioning the platform as an enterprise control plane for governance, observability, cost control, and policy enforcement in large-scale AI deployments. Read more on The New Stack.

Founder’s Corner

Startups Are Growing at a Record Pace with Unprecedented Efficiency

Source: X

What We Read This Week

  • Morgan Stanley says AI-driven demand is fueling a record $1.3T of M&A in Q1, despite geopolitical and energy risks; data-center buildouts are accelerating deals while software valuations are facing disruption. (Bloomberg)

  • Microsoft added Critique and Council to 365 Copilot Researcher, combining OpenAI and Anthropic models to improve deep-research quality; Critique scored +7 DRACO points, topping Perplexity, and is now broadly available. (MSFT)

  • Microsoft plans to invest $5.5B in Singapore through 2029 to expand cloud and AI infrastructure, supporting rising demand for computing power, AI skills, and ongoing regional operations. (WSJ)

  • Starcloud raised a $170 million Series A at a $1.1 billion valuation to advance orbital data centers, betting that falling launch costs and space-based compute demand can justify risky infrastructure economics. (TechCunch)

  • Stanford researchers found AI chatbots sided with users 49% more than humans in a 2,405-person study; people felt more justified, less willing to apologize, and more likely to trust the bot. (Science)

  • Anthropic accidentally leaked ~2,000 files (500k lines) of Claude Code via an update error; related leaked content on GitHub spread rapidly, prompting takedowns and raising security concerns despite no customer data exposure. Read more on The Guardian.

  • For its 50th anniversary celebration, Apple invited The Wall Street Journal's Ben Cohen to Apple Park to meet up with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Sequoia, in celebration, shared the original Apple investment memo from 1977. (WSJ) (Memo)

  • Apple launched Apple Intelligence in China by mistake. See details below (X)

  • Apple is testing a major Siri upgrade that enables multi-command processing in one prompt, aiming to modernize its AI assistant and close the gap with rivals like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. (Bloomberg)

  • A WSJ investigation revealed chaos behind OpenAI’s Sora shutdown: The video generator was burning about $1 million a day, post-shutdown, its compute was reassigned to “Spud,” an enterprise coding model; Disney was blindsided less than an hour before public announcement, abruptly stopping a planned Spring 2026 Launch of a Disney pilot with marketing and VFX work. (WSJ)

  • Amazon will add a 3.5% seller surcharge from April 17 across the U.S. and Canada as Iran-war-driven oil spikes lift logistics costs, pressuring marketplace margins and potentially consumer prices. (CNBC)

  • Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire Globalstar, valued at about $8.81 billion, though Apple’s 20% stake from a $1.5 billion investment in 2024 complicates negotiations. (Quartz)

  • Rivian spinoff, Also, will build autonomous delivery vehicles with DoorDash, which joined its $200 million Series C. The startup is valued at $1 billion and has raised $305 million total. (TechCrunch)

  • Unilever is nearing a transformative sale of most of its food business to McCormick for $15.7 billion in cash plus equity, reshaping Unilever toward beauty and personal care. (Bloomberg)

AI Fundraising News (Mar 27 — Apr 2)

  • 9fin: AI debt market analytics company, raised a $170M Series C

  • Adonis: AI revenue cycle automation company, raised a $40M Series C

  • Blossom Health: AI psychiatry copilot company, raised a $20M Series A

  • Cara: AI insurance brokerage company, raised an $8M seed

  • Coder: AI development infrastructure company, raised a $90M Series C

  • Cognichip: AI chip design company, raised $60M

  • Conntour: AI security video search company, raised a $7M seed

  • CoreWeave: AI cloud infrastructure company, raised $8.5B

  • Crosby: AI legal agent company, raised a $60M Series B

  • Deccan AI: AI post-training data company, raised a $25M Series A

  • Deeplify: AI industrial inspection company, raised a $2M pre-seed

  • Depthfirst: AI application security company, raised an $80M Series B

  • EPG: AI data center infrastructure company, raised a $100M Series B

  • Entrix: AI battery storage trading company, raised $49.6M

  • Huskeys: AI edge security monitoring company, raised an $8M seed

  • Isara: AI multi-agent coordination company, raised $94M

  • Jimini Health: AI behavioral health infrastructure company, raised a $17M seed

  • Kestra: AI workflow orchestration company, raised a $25M Series A

  • Linecook: AI recipe creation company, raised a $2.3M pre-seed

  • Mandel AI: AI procurement automation company, raised a $3.9M seed

  • Mistral AI: AI foundation model company, raised an $830M debt financing

  • Nomadic: AI AV data infrastructure company, raised an $8.4M seed

  • Numos: AI finance software company, raised a $4.25M seed

  • OpenAI: Frontier AI company, raised $122B at a $852B post-money valuation

  • Pinnacle Medicines: AI peptide drug design company, raised an $89M Series B

  • PrismML: AI model compression company, raised a $16.25M SAFE and seed round

  • Qodo: AI code review company, raised a $70M Series B

  • Rebellions: AI chip company, raised $400M

  • Riplo: AI consulting workflow company, raised a $3M pre-seed

  • Rowan: AI small-business succession company, raised a $3.3M seed

  • ScaleOps: AI cloud infrastructure optimization company, raised a $130M Series C

  • Sett: AI gaming agent company, raised a $30M Series B

  • Shield AI: AI autonomous defense company, raised $2B

  • Sona: AI workforce operations company, raised a $45M Series B

  • Sycamore Labs: AI agent operating system company, raised a $65M seed

  • Tenex.ai: AI cybersecurity company, raised a $250M Series B

  • Thesis Care: AI care operations company, raised a $45M Series A

  • ThinkLabs AI: AI grid optimization company, raised $28M

  • Treeline: AI corporate IT systems company, raised a $25M Series A

  • Triangle Health: AI treatment research company, raised a $4M pre-seed

  • Variance: AI risk investigation company, raised a $21.5M Series A

  • Whirl AI: AI enterprise systems mapping company, raised an $8.9M seed