August 7th Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
August 07, 2026

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Stepmark Partners is excited to welcome a new cohort of Fall Analysts beginning Mid-August. If you're passionate about the intersection of AI and deal-making, we invite you to apply. To learn more, please email [email protected].

As of close on August 6th, 2026

Corporate earnings and dealmaking offered a counterweight to a week of mounting regulatory and supply-chain pressure. U.S. payrolls unexpectedly fell 23,000 in July, while unemployment dipped to 4.1% and wage growth slowed to 3.2%, pushing Treasury yields lower and reducing near-term Fed hike expectations. Shopify's second-quarter revenue rose 34% to $3.58B as GMV climbed 32%, lifting shares 17%, while Wayfair's 7.5% sales gain pointed to a broader recovery in U.S. furniture demand. The operating environment nevertheless tightened: the EU can now review AI models before release, restrict market access and fine providers under its AI Act, Washington weighed restrictions on Chinese data-center optical transceivers, and HP, Asus and Acer began using CXMT memory amid shortages. Capital kept moving. Unitree Robotics targeted $904M in its Shanghai IPO, and Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $1.28B. At the frontier, U.K. safety tests recorded 19 unsanctioned AI actions, SpaceX announced during its first post-IPO earnings that it will build its AI services exclusively on Nvidia's systems, and OpenAI paid $32M to settle a hiring probe.

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

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] 🔄 Demis Hassabis is stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist, while Jeff Dean and three other Google executives are leaving to launch Discovery Loop, which aims to automate experimental science and engineering across drug discovery, chip design, and other fields. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures led an undisclosed first round, joined by Alphabet, which signed a long-term cloud and compute partnership. Alphabet shares fell more than 4% after the announcement but remain up 45% in 2026 and 163% over the past 12 months. More from Axios, Wired, and Vinod Khosla on X.

[2] 🤖 Google is in talks with AI coding agent startup Mechanize on a potential $1.5B+ deal to hire talent and license its technology, highlighting the escalating value of coding-agent capabilities and the premium attached to scarce AI engineering teams. More from Business Insider.

[3] 🏛️ The White House finalized a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models, adding classified cyber-capability benchmarking while keeping its contents, participants, and rollout private. Its 30-day pre-release review applies only to closed models with state-of-the-art capabilities and national-security risks, explicitly excluding open-weight models. Staffers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other AI companies reviewed the framework Tuesday, moving frontier-model oversight into formal industry consultation. More from Axios and The Information.

[4] 🧠 OpenAI showcased its Astra model family to U.S. policymakers as an internal version solved 10 problems across mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science while improving at long-running tasks; the company also says its models now reach more than 1B active users and 2M+ businesses. More from OpenAI, The Information, and Wall Street Journal.

[5] ☁️ Anthropic signed a six-year, $10B computing-capacity deal in Norway with Nvidia-backed Volta Infra, which separately raised $300M at a $2.4B valuation. Anthropic also named Mariano-Florentino Cuellar its first chief global affairs officer; he previously led the Carnegie Endowment, served on California's Supreme Court, and sat on Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust. More from TechCrunch and Reuters.

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 🧮 Alibaba released its 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max, claiming that it beats Moonshot's Kimi K3 on some benchmarks and will release weights for Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B next week, while pricing its API at $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens, below Kimi K3's rates. More from Bloomberg and The Information.

[2] 💸 DeepSeek launched V4-Flash, a low-cost model priced at $0.14 per 1M input tokens and $0.28 per 1M output tokens—30% and 77% below GPT-5.6 Luna, respectively. The company also resumed fundraising, seeking $8B at a $74B valuation, and invested approximately $20.8M in Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai IPO alongside an agreement to jointly develop humanoid AI models. More from Reuters on V4-Flash, Bloomberg, and Reuters on Unitree.

[3] 🌐 At the U.N. AI for Good summit, a large Chinese delegation argued that Chinese open-source models will serve most of the world, while the muted U.S. presence highlighted a widening contest over AI adoption, standards, and influence beyond the frontier-model race. More from Semafor.

[4] 🚗 NVIDIA released Alpamayo 2 Super, a 32B-parameter open reasoning vision-language-action model designed for L4 robotaxis, with model weights and the broader Alpamayo stack available for commercial use, giving autonomous-driving developers an open foundation for perception and planning. More from NVIDIA.

[5] 🛡️ Nvidia is quietly assembling an AI safety and security engineering team, hiring a founding technical leader plus security research, evaluation, and management roles to assess agents before deployment and build AI tools that patch vulnerabilities. The initiative reflects Nvidia's view that open-weight models, transparency, and broad scientific scrutiny are foundational to U.S. AI leadership and cybersecurity defense. More from Business Insider.

Founder’s Corner

Fund Raised vs. Valuation Range

Source: X

What We Read This Week

  • Microsoft recorded $24.1B in OpenAI revenue in the year through June 2026, indicating the partnership generated roughly 50%–70% of Microsoft's AI sales and highlighting its reliance on OpenAI for AI growth. (Bloomberg)

  • Former OpenAI Exec, Fidji Simo, is building ChronicleBio, an AI-driven biotech startup targeting POTS and related chronic diseases; it has raised $15M, collected 3,500+ blood tubes from 709 patients, and generated 153TB of biological data to identify drug targets. (Yahoo Finance)

  • Anthropic is retaining AI talent by emphasizing mission, research quality, and employee loyalty as rivals escalate compensation, with reported retention around 80% compared with 67% at OpenAI and 78% at Google DeepMind. (The Next Web)

  • Amazon completed its $50B investment in OpenAI, taking a roughly 5% stake, while accelerating AWS growth sent shares up 15.32%, their biggest one-day gain since April 2012 and a signal investors support its cloud and AI spending. (Financial Times and Bloomberg)

  • AMD beat Q2 estimates with $11.54B of revenue, up 50% YoY, and adjusted EPS of $1.66 versus $1.62 expected; data-center revenue rose 107% to $6.7B on EPYC CPU and Instinct GPU demand, while Q3 revenue guidance of about $13B topped $12.52B estimates. (CNBC)

  • AMD agreed to acquire Toronto-based AI inference chip startup Taalas, adding specialized silicon designed to reduce compute and memory bottlenecks and integrating the technology with Instinct GPUs and its broader full-stack AI platform, strengthening AMD’s push into the rapidly growing inference market as it competes for more AI accelerator workloads. (AMD)

  • SpaceX's first post-IPO quarter beat estimates as Q2 revenue rose 92% YoY to $7.81B and Starlink revenue climbed 66% to $4.29B; subscribers doubled to 12M, net loss narrowed to $541M, capital expenditures reached $18.4B, and AI investment totaled $15.8B. (CNBC and Axios)

  • SpaceX and Tesla plan an initial $16.8B investment in the Terafab complex in Grimes County, Texas, with combined demand forecast above 1TW, while SpaceXAI will remove 69 Memphis gas turbines by July 2027 as Colossus shifts to a 1.2GW gas plant amid local opposition. (Reuters, TechCrunch, and Futurism)

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott paused new data-center grid interconnections pending audits by the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT, as more than 1,800 projects, roughly 90% of them data centers, seek 474GW of capacity, more than five times the state's peak demand. (Axios)

  • Disney announced a global deal with TikTok to bring “thoughtfully curated” fan-created short-form videos based on Disney IP to Disney+'s vertical Verts feed, extending the streaming platform's short-video strategy. (New York Times)

  • Electronic Arts was taken private after a Saudi-led consortium including the Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners completed its $55B leveraged buyout, one of the largest such deals on record. (AP)

  • Roblox shares fell roughly 27%, their worst daily percentage decline on record, after the company forecast falling bookings and slowing revenue growth; the stock is now down more than 40% year to date. (Barron's Online)

AI Fundraising News (July 31 — August 6)

  • Actualyze AI: AI enterprise use management company, raised a $7M seed.

  • Cantina: AI vulnerability management company, raised an $8M round led by Framework Ventures, taking total funding to $16.5M.

  • Convex: AI-optimized application backend company, raised a $57M Series B led by Insight Partners, taking total funding to $110.5M.

  • DeepX: AI chip design company, raised a ~$29M Series D at a ~$2.2B valuation and is in talks to raise ~$209M at a ~$2.4B valuation.

  • Decade: AI wealth advisory company, raised an $85M seed round from Greenoaks, Benchmark, and Diffusion.

  • Faye: AI-enabled travel insurance company, raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona, taking total funding to $100M.

  • Foundational Industries: AI-run factory company, raised a $25M seed.

  • HappyRobot: AI workforce management company, raised a $150M Series C at a $1.2B valuation led by Prysm Capital and Eurazeo.

  • Harmony: AI enterprise software company, raised a $34M seed led by Lightspeed.

  • Horizon3: AI penetration testing company, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation.

  • Intelligence (dba Design Arena): AI design benchmark company, raised a $7.9M seed led by Index Ventures.

  • June: AI enterprise deployment company, emerged from stealth with $20M led by Time Ventures.

  • Obsidian Security: AI agent security company, raised an $85M Series D at a $1.1B post-money valuation led by Crescent Cove Advisors.

  • Olix: AI chip company, raised $312M led by Fundomo with participation from Arm at a $3.3B valuation.

  • P-1 AI: AI engineering software company, raised a $50M Series A led by NEA.

  • Pathos AI: AI drug development company, is raising up to $300M in a Series E at a ~$3B valuation.

  • Perceptron: AI data network company, raised $6.5M.

  • Proxy Foods AI: AI food and beverage R&D company, raised a $6M seed led by Ted Leonsis, with Robert Hisaoka and Swan & Legend Venture Partners participating.

  • RevealDx: AI lung nodule characterization company, raised $3.4M from 4DMedical.

  • Sapiom: AI agent infrastructure and token-routing company, raised a $35M Series A led by Dragonfly, taking total funding to $50M.

  • Smallest: Voice AI company, raised a $13M Series A led by Seligman Ventures, taking total funding to $21M+.

  • Throne Science: AI toilet sensor company, raised a $10M Series A led by Will Ventures, with Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, and Accomplice participating.

  • Valar: AI data center nuclear power company, raised a $1B Series B led by Sequoia at a $6B post-money valuation.

  • Volta Infra: AI cloud company, raised a $300M round at a $2.4B valuation and secured an additional $5B in financing, led by a16z and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia, Michael Dell, and Azora participating.

  • Vector Legal: AI legal services company, raised a $5.2M seed led by Base10 Partners.

  • Wordsmith AI: AI legal platform company, raised a $14M Series B extension from Intact Private Capital and FT Ventures, with Highland Europe and Index Ventures participating.

  • Zenity: AI agent security company, raised a $125M Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners, taking total funding to ~$185M.