June 26th Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
June 26, 2026

As of close on June 25th, 2026

Geopolitical risk eased this week as US-Iran talks made “encouraging progress” toward a 60-day roadmap that could reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Core PCE inflation rose to 3.4% in May, the highest since October 2023, reinforcing Fed rate-hike expectations. Public-market activity also accelerated across indexes, IPOs, and listing vehicles, with Alphabet set to replace Verizon in the Dow before next Monday’s open. Meanwhile, Lime is targeting a $1.8B IPO valuation, Bending Spoons is seeking up to $1.62B at a potential $19B valuation. Furthermore, in the public market, SK Hynix plans to raise up to $29.4B through a Nasdaq ADR listing, and Agility Robotics is pursuing a Churchill Capital SPAC merger at a roughly $2.5B valuation with over $600M in proceeds. Separately this week, Lucid will cut 18% of its U.S. workforce, and Oracle disclosed 21,000 AI-related layoffs, nearly 13% of its employees. Meta is building Arena, a points-based prediction-markets app that mainstream coverage said pressured Robinhood and DraftKings shares, with Robinhood closing down 5.87% and DraftKings down 2.47%. Anthropic launched Claude Tag for Slack-based enterprise workflows. Lastly, The White House asked OpenAI on Thursday to limit GPT 5.6 access to government-approved partners, after Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models faced export controls in recent weeks.

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] 📉 SpaceX’s stock price slipped again on Wednesday after pricing a upsized $25B bond offering across five senior note tranches due 2031–2056, with coupons from 5.35% to 6.65% and nearly $90B of reported demand, highlighting strong credit appetite even as SpaceX trades near its $150 debut level and market cap retreats toward $2T. More from Yahoo Finance.

[2] 🌶️ OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom AI inference processor built with Broadcom, aiming to reduce Nvidia GPU reliance and improve server efficiency for ChatGPT-style workloads, with deployment expected by year-end 2026 and early tests showing substantially better performance per watt versus current state-of-the-art chips. More from The Verge.

[3] 🕵️ Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting Claude capabilities through a large-scale distillation campaign involving 28.8M exchanges across nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts, escalating U.S.-China AI IP and national security tensions as regulators tighten scrutiny of frontier models. Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA) shares slid 3% on Wednesday following this report. More from Reuters.

[4] 💾 Qualcomm will acquire AI chip software startup Modular for nearly $4B in stock, just nine months after its $1.6B valuation, adding a 150-person team and developer platform that could help Qualcomm expand beyond mobile chips into data centers and challenge Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, with Reuters separately reporting Qualcomm is also in talks to provide custom chip-design services to TikTok parent ByteDance. More from WIRED and Reuters.

[5] ⚡Chevron signed a 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for Project Kilby, a 2.67 GW co-located West Texas natural gas power facility supporting a Microsoft data center, with first power expected in 2028, FID targeted by year-end 2026, and more than $10B in projected state and local tax revenue as AI power demand accelerates. Business Wire.

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 🧠 Open-source AI startup Reflection signed a compute deal with SpaceX, worth up to $6.3B, with Reflection paying $150M per month from July 1 for access to Nvidia GB300 chips at Colossus 2, underscoring SpaceX’s push to monetize scarce AI infrastructure beyond rockets and Starlink. More from CNBC. 

[2] 🧩 OpenAI launched Patch the Planet with Trail of Bits to use AI-assisted vulnerability research and human review to find, validate, and patch flaws across major open-source projects, including Python, Go, cURL, and Sigstore, aiming to reduce software supply-chain risk after Log4Shell and XZ-style incidents while giving CISOs a faster but governance-heavy remediation pipeline. More from CSO.

[3] 📈 Zhipu is weighing a multibillion-dollar Hong Kong share sale after a roughly 2,000% post-IPO surge, with the potential raise gaining extra momentum from its newly released GLM-5.2 model, which Z.ai says is the top open-source coding model and sits within a few points of Claude Opus 4.8 on Terminal-Bench 2.1. More from Bloomberg.

[4] 🌐 The European Commission selected Domyn-led EUROPA as the winner of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge to build a 400B+ parameter open-source frontier AI model across all 24 official EU languages, reinforcing Europe’s push for AI sovereignty, broader access to advanced AI, and strategic autonomy in global AI infrastructure. More from the European Commission. 

[5] 🌍 Just a couple of days before Anthropic’s reported distillation allegation against Alibaba, Alibaba’s Qwen team has open-sourced Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B, a language world model for agent environments across seven domains. Instead of simply generating responses, it learns to simulate entire environments and predict what will happen after an agent performs an action. This represents a major shift in how AI agents can be trained and improved. More from Qwen.

Founder’s Corner

Over 60% of Capital Investment on Carta in Q1’26 Went to AI

Source: Carta

What We Read This Week

  • Getty Images saw its shares climb roughly 120% after announcing a multi-year display partnership with OpenAI to bring licensed Getty content into ChatGPT search and discovery experiences, reinforcing Getty’s strategy to monetize permissioned visual libraries as AI platforms seek more trusted, rights-cleared content. (Getty Images).

  • Google faces another AI talent drain as core Gemini contributors Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel reportedly leave for Anthropic, adding to recent exits by Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, intensifying investor concern over Big Tech’s ability to retain elite AI talent amid startup IPO incentives. (Yahoo Finance)

  • Instagram is expanding its TV app beyond Reels with longer form, episodic, and live formats, Samsung TV rollout, channels, casting, horizontal video support, and Stories, signaling Meta’s push to compete for living room attention against Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. (TechCrunch)

  • President Trump signed two executive orders to accelerate U.S. quantum computing research and post-quantum cybersecurity migration, targeting a quantum-ready federal strategy and completion of cryptography upgrades by 2031 as Washington pairs AI-era innovation with protections for financial systems, critical infrastructure, and sensitive data. (The Hill).

  • Anthropic may require a small subset of Claude users flagged for potential fraud or compliance issues to upload government ID, selfie video, and biometric face-geometry data starting July 8, adding privacy scrutiny as the AI firm navigates age-verification rules, platform integrity checks, and tensions with the Trump administration over access to its cybersecurity models. (TechCrunch).

  • Groq confirmed a $650M raise as it rebuilds after Nvidia’s IP licensing and talent deal, pivoting harder into its inference neocloud business with 13 data centers, 5M+ developers, and trillions of weekly tokens processed as demand for AI inference infrastructure accelerates. (TechCrunch).

  • Walmart is buying French ad-tech firm Vibe.co for $1.4B, its biggest deal since the $2.3B Vizio acquisition in 2024, strengthening its connected-TV advertising platform as it pushes to close the retail media gap with Amazon and capture more high-margin ad revenue. (WSJ).

  • Menlo Ventures raised $3B for its largest-ever fund haul to back AI startups, powered by an Anthropic bet that has grown to nearly $14B as the AI company’s valuation tops $900B, boosting Menlo’s clout and appetite for larger late-stage deals. (Bloomberg). 

  • Kalshi is in talks to raise fresh capital at a roughly $40B valuation, nearly doubling from its $22B round last month, as $17B+ in monthly trading volume, sports-driven growth, and regulatory battles position the prediction market operator as a fast-rising challenger to CME and gambling incumbents. (FT).  

  • Apple raised Mac prices by roughly 15%–20% and iPad prices by 15%–25%, including a $200 hike on the base MacBook Air to $1,299, as surging DRAM and NAND costs tied to AI hyperscaler demand pressure consumer hardware margins and raise the risk of broader device price inflation. More from WSJ. 

  • Om Malik, famed tech journalist, Gigaom founder, and longtime True Ventures partner, passed away at 59 after a long heart-related health journey, marking the loss of a major voice in tech media and venture investing who helped shape startup coverage and advised generations of founders. (Inc).

AI Fundraising News (June 18 — June 25)

  • Aether AI: AI robotic world models company, raised a $20M seed round

  • Alan: AI health insurance company, raised $545.2M

  • Anchorbase: AI payment operations company, raised a $2M pre-seed round

  • Assort Health: AI patient journey agent company, raised a $120M Series C round

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

  • CentSight: AI financial insights company, raised a $1.5M pre-seed round

  • ChemT: AI biomanufacturing company, raised a $4M seed round

  • Coval: AI voice agent testing company, raised a $28M Series A round

  • Engram: AI enterprise memory layer company, raised $98M

  • Fika Jobs: AI video hiring company, raised a $4M pre-seed round

  • General Intuition: AI spatial reasoning agent company, raised $320M

  • Hang Ten Systems: AI software automation company, raised a $32M seed round

  • HyperLight: AI photonics chips company, raised an $80M Series C round

  • Isometric: AI carbon certification company, raised a $40M Series A round

  • Jarvie AI: AI group chat coordination company, raised an $8.3M seed round

  • Jupus: AI legal secretarial company, raised a $13M Series A round

  • Kinoa: AI mobile app ops company, raised $10M

  • Kyrok: AI pharma supply chain company, raised a $3.5M pre-seed round

  • Mirendil: AI scientific model development company, raised a $200M seed round

  • NaukNauk: AI fandom content creation company, raised $20M

  • Nearfield Instruments: AI chipmaking microscope company, raised a $380M Series D round

  • Netris: AI cloud network automation company, raised a $15M Series A round

  • Orderful: AI supply chain data management company, raised a $35M Series C round

  • Ornn: AI GPU capacity marketplace company, raised a $33M seed round

  • Orthogonal: AI agent payments infrastructure company, raised a $4.3M seed round

  • Partly: AI automotive repair supply chain company, raised a $50M Series B round

  • Patronus AI: AI agent testing company, raised a $50M Series B round

  • Ploy: AI marketing agent company, raised a $27M seed round

  • Probook: AI home services operating system company, raised $40M, which includes a $34M Series A and a $6M seed.

  • Prosper AI: AI healthcare workflow agent company, raised a $30M Series A round

  • Ralo: AI mortgage broker company, raised a $2.9M seed round

  • Runlayer: AI agent infrastructure company, raised a $30M Series A round

  • RunPod: AI cloud infrastructure company, raised $100M

  • Sail Research: AI agent inference infrastructure company, raised an $80M seed and Series A round

  • Scaled Cognition: AI enterprise hallucination reduction company, raised a $100M Series A round

  • Seltz: AI agent web search company, raised a $12.5M seed round

  • Taktile: AI decision automation company, raised a $110M Series C round

  • Tomo: AI personal improvement company, raised a $5M seed round

  • Trase: AI clinical workflow automation company, raised a $107M seed round

  • Tsuga: AI observability company, raised a $35M Series A round

  • Upscale AI: AI networking infrastructure company, raised a $190M Series A-1 round

  • Upside: AI housing insights company, raised a $20M Series A round

  • Valence AI: AI speech emotion analytics company, raised a $5M seed round

  • Wakeline: AI operational learning systems company, raised a $2.4M pre-seed round

  • Warp: AI HR automation company, raised a $60M Series B round

  • XCures: AI patient data automation company, raised a $46M Series B round