June 18th Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
June 18, 2026

As of close on June 17th, 2026, WoW changes were compared with figures from June 10th, 2026

U.S. stocks recovered from a Fed-driven selloff, with the S&P 500 rising 0.8% and the Nasdaq gaining 1.1% as Intel’s 7% rally lifted chip stocks after Trump said Apple would partner with Intel on U.S. chip design. The rebound came as the Fed rate cut stayed at the center of the policy conversation and the Fed held rates steady at 3.5%–3.75%, with energy-driven inflation from the Iran war continuing to pressure new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. Oil fell after President Donald Trump signed an initial agreement to end the U.S.-Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. In markets and media, Nvidia will raise $25 billion in its first U.S. bond sale since 2021, and the DOJ cleared Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal. Additionally, in Media, Fox agreed to buy Roku for $22 billion. Smartbird (formerly Allbirds) surged 30% after rebranding into an AI infrastructure provider, naming ex-AWS executive Nadia Carlsten CEO, and expanding convertible financing to $100M. Robinhood will cut about 10% of its workforce, roughly 290 jobs. Lastly, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel took to the stage at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) event in Long Beach to reveal the new Snap Specs.

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

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] 🏛️ Anthropic executives are reportedly negotiating with the Trump administration in Washington after a 90-minute White House ultimatum and subsequent export-control order forced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline, escalating regulatory risk for frontier AI companies amid concerns over jailbreaks and alleged access by a China-linked group. More from Anthropic and Gizmodo.

[2] 🚀 SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock transaction to build the world’s most useful AI models for $60B, give Cursor investors SpaceX stock and target a Q3 close. Separately, SpaceX will disclose quarterly results and material news only via its website and X, bypassing standard wire services, as shares rose 19% after its IPO proceeds increased to $85.7B with the greenshoe option. More from Bloomberg and Reuters. 

[3] 📊 OpenAI’s leaked 2025 financials reportedly show $13.07B in revenue against a $20.92B operating loss, as surging R&D ($19.18B) and sales/marketing ($5.73B) spend highlight the scale of AI investment pressure ahead of a potential IPO. Separately, OpenAI launched the OpenAI Partner Network, investing $150M to help global consulting, systems integration, technology, and data partners build, sell, and deploy AI solutions, with a goal to train 300,000 certified consultants by end-2026. More from Fortune and OpenAI.

[4] 💶 Mistral AI is reportedly seeking roughly €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation, up from €11.7 billion in September, as Europe’s flagship AI startup funds costly compute expansion and positions itself as a sovereign alternative for governments, banks, and industrial groups despite trailing OpenAI and Anthropic in commercial adoption. More from Bloomberg.

[5] 🚫 U.S. communities blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects worth roughly $130 billion in Q1 2026, matching nearly all of 2025’s total as opposition groups more than doubled to 833 and lawmakers in 14 states pursued moratoriums, signaling rising regulatory and execution risk for AI infrastructure investment. More from NBC News.

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 💰 DeepSeek raised over $7.4B at a $50B-plus valuation in its first outside funding round, using an unusual limited-partnership structure managed by CEO Liang Wenfeng that preserves founder control, imposes five-year investor lockups and gives China’s national AI fund the only direct voting stake. More from The Information.

[2] 🤖 Microsoft is reportedly considering a modified, self-hosted DeepSeek-V4 model for Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork to lower agentic AI costs as Anthropic and OpenAI pricing rises, a move that could ease enterprise AI economics but draw Trump administration scrutiny over Chinese AI security concerns. More from Gizmodo.

[3] 💻 Z.ai launched GLM-5.2, an MIT-licensed open-source flagship model with solid 1M-token context, 2.9× lower per-token FLOPs via IndexShare and up to 20% better speculative decoding acceptance length, positioning it as the top open-source long-horizon coding model and narrowing the gap with closed frontier systems like Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. More from Z.ai.

[4] 📊 Moonshot AI’s open-source Kimi K2.7-Code claims 30% fewer thinking tokens and benchmark gains of 11%–31.5%, offering enterprises a lower-cost drop-in upgrade for agentic coding, but weak independent results and reliance on proprietary tests raise doubts about whether the efficiency gains translate into stronger real-world performance. More from VentureBeat. 

[5] 🧪 Ai2 released olmo-eval, an open-source LLM evaluation workbench designed to speed model development with reproducible checkpoint comparisons, modular task/suite/harness workflows, agentic and multi-turn eval support, and per-question analysis that helps separate real gains from benchmark noise. More from Hugging Face.

Founder’s Corner

M&A Deal Volume Has Exceeded 2021 heights

Source: PitchBook

What We Read This Week

  • Manus’ Chinese backers are moving to buy the AI agent startup back from Meta at the original $2B acquisition price after a Beijing reversal order, potentially creating a windfall as Manus’ annualized revenue run rate has reportedly jumped from $100M in December to $400M–$500M, with investors eyeing a China JV structure and future Hong Kong IPO. More from The Information.

  • Bernie Sanders unveiled legislation that would tax 50% of stock from AI companies with at least $200M in annual AI sales to create an estimated $7T sovereign wealth fund. (AP News) 

  • OpenAI has hired star Google DeepMind researcher Noam Shazeer, a key author of the original transformer paper and former Character.AI co-founder. (The Information)

  • Anthropic, Google, Salesforce and other Frontier buyers are committing an additional $915M to carbon-removal credits, lifting Frontier’s pledge above $1.9B as tech companies try to scale direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering and bioenergy carbon capture. (WSJ) 

  • Former DOGE engineers Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, and Jack Stein are reportedly raising $130 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia for an AI cybersecurity startup targeting government systems, highlighting the fast-growing DOGE-to-defense contracting pipeline but also raising conflict-of-interest. (Vanity Fair). 

  • Niantic Spatial used roughly 30B real-world images, many sourced from optional Pokémon Go player scans, to train visual positioning AI now being tested for delivery robots and GPS-denied drone/vehicle navigation, raising consent and defense-use concerns as its technology links consumer gaming data to potential military applications. (Ars Technica). 

  • The UK plans to ban under-16s from major social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook and X from spring 2027, pairing the restriction with tougher age verification and limits on livestreaming and stranger contact, a move backed by 77% of parents but facing enforcement, privacy and evidence concerns. (TechRadar)

  • Meta is rolling out Facebook “AI Mode,” using Meta AI to synthesize answers from public posts across Facebook, Groups, and Reels, as the company pushes more AI search, creator, editing, and subscription features to boost engagement, though reliability concerns remain. (TechCrunch) 

  • Nvidia is pitching its standalone Vera CPUs to Chinese customers for delivery as early as August, targeting $20 billion in fiscal-year sales and a foothold in agentic AI infrastructure as H200 GPU shipments remain stalled. More from Reuters.

  • Oracle warned that an unauthenticated critical zero-day in PeopleSoft has been exploited by ShinyHunters to target more than 100 organizations, including many universities, exposing sensitive HR and student data. More from TechCrunch 

AI Fundraising News (June 12 — June 18)

  • Andera: AI audit compliance company, raised a $37M Series A

  • Arcade.dev: AI agent authorization company, raised a $60M Series A

  • Architect Labs: AI custom chip design company, raised a $24M seed

  • AttoTude: AI data center connectivity company, raised a $52M Series C

  • Baseten: AI inference infrastructure company, raised $1.5B

  • Bland: AI voice agent company, raised a $50M Series C

  • ChatSee.ai: AI agent failure intelligence company, raised a $6.5M seed

  • Clario: AI enterprise file cleanup company, raised a $6M seed

  • Comand AI: AI military command software company, raised a €32M Series A

  • Conduct: AI legacy IT modernization company, raised a $60M Series A

  • Convey: AI workflow automation company, raised a $38M Series A

  • Copia: AI industrial code management company, raised $26M

  • Cortea: AI audit review company, raised a $13.9M seed

  • CNTXT AI: UAE-based AI company, raised a $60M Series A

  • CuspAI: AI materials design company, raised $400M

  • DeepSeek: AI open-source models company, raised $7.4B

  • Dream: AI cyber defense company, raised $260M

  • Enera: AI EV support agents company, raised a $2M pre-seed

  • EngineAI: AI humanoid robotics company, raised $200M

  • Ent Security: AI agent security company, raised a $100M seed

  • Equal AI: AI phone screening company, raised a $30M Series B

  • Everlab: AI preventive healthcare company, raised an AU$65M Series A

  • Fin (formerly known as Intercom): AI customer service platform company, acquired by Salesforce for $3.6B

  • Flagright: AI financial crime compliance company, raised a $12.5M Series A

  • Frontier Health: AI healthcare agents company, raised £9.7M

  • Genspark: AI workplace automation company, raised a $100M Series B extension

  • Guardrails Alliance: AI safety advocacy company, raised $5M

  • Hydra Host: AI compute marketplace company, raised a $100M Series A

  • Kling AI: AI video generation company, is in talks to raise $2B

  • Lightbringer: AI patent management company, raised a $10M Series A

  • Limitless Labs: AI manufacturing automation company, raised a $20M Series A

  • Magnitude: AI third-party risk management company, raised a $10M seed

  • Mistral: AI generative models company, is in talks to raise $3.5B

  • Nauk Nauk: AI video animation company, raised $20M

  • NeuralTrust: AI agent security company, raised a $20M seed

  • NewCore: AI identity security company, raised $66M

  • Odyssey: AI world models company, raised $310M

  • Orbio: AI frontline workforce management company, raised a $21M Series A

  • Pramaana Labs: AI verification layer company, raised a $27M seed

  • Prem AI: AI private infrastructure company, raised a $100M Series A

  • Probably: AI hallucination reduction company, raised a $9M seed

  • Radical Numerics: AI biological data research company, raised a $50M seed

  • Rainbow Crops: AI crop genetics company, raised an $11.3M seed

  • Respond.io: AI customer conversation company, raised a $62.5M Series B

  • Sandstone: AI legal workflow automation company, raised a $30M Series A

  • Sarvam AI: AI model infrastructure company, raised a $234M Series B

  • Twenty: AI military cyber operations company, raised a $100M Series B

  • Undo: AI debugging platform company, raised $37M

  • Vali Health: AI home care agents company, raised a $6M seed

  • Waniwani: AI financial distribution company, raised an $8M seed