July 31st Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
July 31, 2026

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As of close on July 30th, 2026

The U.S. economy grew at a 1.5% annualized pace in Q2, down from 2.1%, as weaker spending and inventories offset consumption. Policymakers held rates at 3.5%–3.75% despite three votes for a hike, while the Dow fell 1,153 points and oil rebounded as U.S.-Iran hostilities resumed. NYSE parent, ICE, agreed to acquire MarketAxess for about $6B, creating an integrated fixed-income marketplace. Tech markets wobbled: Situational Awareness exited public equities after losses, chip stocks slid on SK Hynix’s earnings missing analysts’ expectations, and Apple reclaimed the market-cap crown at $4.95T. Platform earnings diverged: Reddit’s revenue rose 61%, but shares fell 11% on choppy search referrals; Stripe highlighted more million-dollar one-person businesses. Samsung and Broadcom advanced a $200B chip deal, Washington barred Chinese robots and power inverters, and OpenAI cut 5.6-Luna prices by 80% and 5.6-Terra prices by 20% while granting 100,000 researchers Sol Pro access through 2027.

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] ⏸️ More than 1,100 current and former employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and other AI organizations signed a petition urging the U.S. government to support international tools that could "deliberately pace" automated frontier AI development, reflecting concern that recursive model improvement may outstrip society's ability to understand or control it. More from Bloomberg.

[2] 🌐 Mark Zuckerberg argued that superintelligence should be broadly distributed rather than controlled by a few institutions, framing open access as a safeguard for individual agency and innovation; David Sacks called concentrated AI power the greater risk, while Satya Nadella endorsed a frontier ecosystem that empowers people and organizations. More from the Wall Street Journal, David Sacks on X, and Satya Nadella on X.

[3] 📉 Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness sold its public-equities portfolio after steep losses on AI stocks and a mistimed short bet against software companies, marking a sharp reversal for a firm that recently reported roughly $20B in assets under management. More from CNBC.

[4] 🧠 Nvidia broadened its AI infrastructure and security push, reportedly exploring a roughly $250B guarantee for OpenAI's planned 10GW Ohio data center hub and also investing $5B in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence while supplying Vera Rubin systems to expand SSI's compute tenfold. More from Bloomberg and Nvidia.

[5] 🔄 Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Lilian Weng is returning to OpenAI after a couple of days of announcing her departure earlier this week due to health, where she will work on recursive self-improvement research using AI models to develop new models, marking another high-profile talent reversal for Mira Murati's startup. More from The Information.

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 🌐 Moonshot AI released Kimi K3's weights and technical report, opening a 2.8T-parameter MoE model with native vision and a 1M-token context window while claiming 2.5x more intelligence per unit of compute; separately, it closed a $3.5B round at a $35B valuation and is targeting a Hong Kong IPO as soon as 2026. More from Kimi.ai and Bloomberg.

[2] 🔓 Jensen Huang used his first-ever X post to share an industry letter signed by Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, AMD, Mistral, and others urging U.S. policymakers to protect open-weight AI, arguing that open access strengthens competition, security, innovation, and national AI sovereignty while warning against premature restrictions. More from X.

[3] ⚖️ Anthropic said it supports open-weight AI's benefits for access, competition, and customer control but warned openness does not automatically improve safety, urging stronger chip-export enforcement, legal action against industrial-scale model distillation, and mandatory cyber, biological, and alignment testing for sufficiently capable open or closed models. More from Anthropic.

[4] 🧩 Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling-Small, a 276B-parameter open-weight model with 12B active parameters that it says delivers comparable performance to Inkling, offering a smaller option for efficient deployment and customization. More from Thinking Machines Lab.

[5] 🏗️ DeepSeek plans to build a 1GW AI data center in Inner Mongolia, with at least part of the capacity expected online by late 2027 or early 2028, underscoring its push to secure large-scale computing infrastructure for future model development. More from Bloomberg.

Founder’s Corner

Number of $100M Rounds on the Rise

Source: X

What We Read This Week

  • Prentis, a computer-use AI lab co-founded by Ritankar Das, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Pincus, is reportedly in talks to raise $100M at a $1B valuation after signing contracts worth up to $50M, betting that lower-cost agents trained on office workflows can automate routine enterprise tasks. (TechCrunch)

  • OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly pressing the Trump administration to ensure slower-moving competitors face the same government model reviews, a bid to prevent rivals from gaining a compliance advantage as frontier AI oversight becomes a growing factor in product speed and market positioning. (The Information)

  • AI safety startup Runlayer sued Rippling for allegedly stealing trade secrets to build a near-clone of its governance platform, escalating competition and legal risk in the fast-growing market for enterprise AI controls. (New York Post)

  • OpenRouter was reportedly generating about $140M in annualized revenue, or $12M per month, nearly tripling since April; the growth helps explain Stripe's interest but suggests its reported $10B offer still carries a substantial strategic premium. (The Information)

  • PwC published Middle East "thought leadership" reports containing AI-generated errors and misattributed or unverifiable citations, according to GPTZero research verified by the FT, exposing a quality-control failure at a firm selling AI consulting services and extending a run of hallucination scandals across major professional-services firms. (Financial Times)

  • Elon Musk's Boring Company is reportedly in talks to raise about $4B at a roughly $20B valuation, though the round has not closed and terms may change, signaling renewed investor appetite for the tunneling startup's capital-intensive infrastructure ambitions. (Wall Street Journal)

  • Tesla advisers are weighing a spinoff, sale, or closure of its China business, centered on the company's largest and most productive factory in its second-largest market, to ease geopolitical and national-security barriers to a potential SpaceX merger, even as Elon Musk moves to cool deal speculation. (Wall Street Journal and Barron's)

  • DoorDash received FAA Part 135 air-carrier certification to operate drone deliveries and plans to launch the service in the fall, giving it regulatory clearance to expand beyond human couriers even as most orders will continue to rely on conventional delivery. (Bloomberg)

Special Coverage on Tech Earnings

  • Microsoft reported fiscal Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $90B and Microsoft Cloud revenue up 27% to $59.3B. In a noteworthy first disclosure of its stake in top AI labs, it booked a $3.2B quarterly gain on Anthropic; OpenAI was marked down $600M for the quarter but still generated a $5B full-year gain. Microsoft shares closed up 15.5% Thursday, adding ~$450B in market value, the largest one-day increase on record. (Microsoft, TechCrunch, and Bloomberg)

  • Meta reported Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $60.8B and family DAP up 3% to 3.6B on average in June, but forecast Q3 revenue below estimates; shares fell more than 8% after hours as investors weighed strong growth against a softer outlook. (Meta)

  • Apple reported Q3 revenue up 16% to $109.42B, iPhone sales up 22% to $54.25B, and Services revenue up 12% to $30.74B; shares fell more than 4% in after-hours trading Thursday. (Apple and Reuters)

  • Amazon reported Q2 revenue up 20% to $200.6B, net income up 245% to $62.6B, and AWS revenue up 37% to $42.2B; shares jumped more than 8% in after-hours trading Thursday. (Amazon and Reuters)

AI Fundraising News (July 24 — July 30)

  • 5U AI: AI freight operations automation company, raised a $3.2M pre-seed

  • Agon: AI sovereign defense training infrastructure company, raised a $30M in pre-seed and seed

  • Antares Labs: AI real estate intelligence company, raised a $7.3M seed

  • Anyscale: AI workload infrastructure company, acquired by Nscale for ~$1.65B

  • Axis Robotics: AI physical robotics data engine company, raised a $12M seed

  • Beelzebub: AI cybersecurity defense company, raised a $3.4M seed

  • ChipAgents: AI semiconductor design automation company, raised a $60M Series A2

  • CopySight: AI intellectual property governance company, raised a $3M seed

  • Credible Data: AI structured data governance company, raised a $10M seed

  • CXMT: AI memory chip company, raised $8.6B in a Shanghai IPO

  • Dwelly: AI property-management automation company, raised a $95M Series B and $75M in debt

  • Elio: AI adaptive optical sensing company, raised $21M

  • Eliyan: AI chip interconnect technology company, raised a $145M Series C

  • Encore AI: AI voice agent training company, raised a $30M Series A

  • Enigma: AI robotics foundation model company, raised a $71M seed

  • Fish Audio: AI voice model company, raised a $52M seed

  • Freehand: AI supply chain operations company, raised a $75M seed

  • Freight Hero: AI freight operations automation company, raised $5M

  • Function: AI preventive health monitoring company, raised $450M

  • Genesis AI: AI general-purpose robotics company, is in talks to raise $500M at a $3B pre-money valuation

  • Groundcover: AI agent observability software company, raised a $100M Series C

  • Harmony: AI employee support platform company, raised a $34M seed

  • Henry AI: AI commercial real estate back-office automation company, raised a $16.5M Series A

  • Hush Security: AI agent security governance company, raised a $30M Series A

  • Imagi: AI and coding education company, raised a $4.5M seed

  • Inforcer: AI security management platform company, raised a $50M Series C

  • Kausable: AI adaptive learning model company, raised a $13.6M seed

  • LearnVector: AI personalized tutoring agent company, raised $100M through a strategic investment from Coursera

  • Mate: AI autonomous threat hunting company, raised a $35M Series A

  • Mirae: AI autoimmune care data company, raised $5.4M

  • Modus: AI agent context platform company, raised a $10M seed

  • Moonshot AI: AI LLM development company, raised $3.5B

  • Multiverse Computing: AI model compression company, raised a $570M Series C

  • P-1 AI: AI industrial engineering automation company, raised a $50M Series A

  • Pangram: AI content detection company, raised $9M

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

  • Permiso: AI identity threat detection company, acquired by Okta for ~$200M

  • Pilot Protocol: AI agent interoperability company, raised a $4.5M seed

  • Prentis: AI computer-use model research company, is in talks to raise $100M at a $1B valuation

  • Quartr: AI investor relations data infrastructure company, raised $15M

  • Safe Superintelligence: AI safe-superintelligence research company, raised $5B through an equity investment from Nvidia

  • Simile: AI simulation company, raised a $200M Series B

  • Smallest: AI enterprise voice model company, raised a $13M Series A

  • Telli: AI customer operations automation company, raised a $15M seed

  • ThreatLocker: AI endpoint and cloud security company, raised a $190M Series F

  • Unit AI: AI warehouse automation company, raised a $12M seed

  • Weave: AI engineering intelligence company, raised a $13.5M Series A

  • Xsight Labs: AI data center networking company, raised $300M+