June 4th Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
June 05, 2026

As of close on June 4th, 2026

Fresh from this morning, U.S. payrolls rose 172,000 in May, more than double the 80,000 estimate, while unemployment held at 4.3% and wages rose 3.4% YoY, reinforcing a resilient labor market. In markets, AI infrastructure remains the dominant story, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up 69% in two months and on pace for its best quarter ever, while Goldman says AI data centers are dominating leveraged finance as weak M&A shifts lender focus toward data center and power needs. In consumer finance, Coinbase and Better closed the first Fannie Mae-backed mortgage using BTC or USDC collateral, with a $250M waitlist signaling demand for crypto-enabled home financing. In AI policy, Trump’s June 2 security order sets 30–60 day cyber deadlines and up to 30 days of pre-release access for frontier model benchmarking. Lastly, in AI adoption, Kirkland and Palantir pursue a $500M legal AI push and Uber caps Claude Code and Cursor usage at $1,500 per tool per month. 

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] 📝 Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC for a proposed IPO, giving the AI company the option to go public after SEC review, with share count and pricing still unset and timing dependent on market conditions, following its reported $65B Series H at a $965B post-money valuation. More from Anthropic.

[2] 🛡️ Anthropic is expanding Project Glasswing by giving 150 more partners across 15+ countries access to its Mythos cybersecurity AI model, after initial users found 10,000+ high or critical flaws, reinforcing its security ambitions as the company broadens EU access. More from CNBC.

[3] 🚀 SpaceX is seeking a record $75B IPO at a nearly $1.77T valuation to fund AI, launch and satellite expansion, with Musk retaining 84.4% voting power as investors weigh massive growth ambitions against a $4.94B 2025 net loss. More from Bloomberg. 

[4] 📈 SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI could test public-market depth with potential giga-IPOs totaling roughly $200B in capital raised and up to $4T in added market value, but The Economist argues U.S. equities can absorb the listings while warning of longer-term indigestion from rich valuations, lock-up expirations and rising AI concentration. More from The Economist.

[5] 💰Alphabet expanded its equity raise to $84.75B, marking its first new stock sale since 2005 and including a $10B Berkshire Hathaway investment, as it directs most proceeds toward AI infrastructure and compute while setting aside roughly $30B for employee equity tax obligations. More from The Information. 

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] ⚡DeepSeek is set to raise about $7.4B in its first outside funding round at a potential $52B–$59B valuation, with Tencent and CATL expected as the largest external investors, signaling China’s push to back a self-sufficient AI champion despite U.S. chip restrictions and intensifying global compute competition. More from Reuters.

[2] 📈China’s Zhipu AI plans to pursue a Shanghai STAR Board listing by issuing 2%–8% of its share capital, after its January Hong Kong IPO raised HK$4.35B and its shares rose more than 10x to an $83B market cap, underscoring buoyant investor demand for Chinese AI and tech listings. More from Reuters.

[3] 🤖 MiniMax launched its new M3 model, claiming coding performance near Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 at just $0.12 per 1M input tokens versus $5, intensifying the Chinese open-source AI price war as MiniMax also explores a Shanghai STAR Board listing after its January Hong Kong IPO. More from The Information.

Source: Minimax

[4] 🧩Microsoft introduced the open-source Agent Control Specification to help developers set consistent guardrails for AI agents across tools and environments, giving enterprises stronger controls over permissions, approvals, logging and compliance as agentic AI adoption scales. More from TechCrunch.

[5] 🧠 Nvidia unveiled Nemotron 3 Ultra at Computex, a 550B parameter open-weight MoE model with 55B active parameters, scoring 48 on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index and serving 300+ tokens per second, positioning NVIDIA as a stronger challenger in high-performance open AI models against Chinese frontier labs. Separately, Nvidia also expanded its physical AI push with Cosmos 3, an open-world model trained on 20T multimodal tokens to help robots, autonomous vehicles and other machines simulate real-world actions. More on X and Axios.

Founder’s Corner

Valuation is About the Same Across Geographies

Source: X

What We Read This Week

  • Apple is reportedly preparing iPhone-connected smart glasses to challenge Meta’s Ray-Ban lineup, aiming to extend its wearables strategy beyond the Watch as it also advances iOS 27 Siri syncing, iOS 28 work, and updated Apple TV and HomePod mini hardware. (Bloomberg) 

  • Bain says corporate AI savings are falling short of expectations, with 40% of companies measuring AI cost reductions realizing 10% or less, raising concern that executives are funding new AI investments on projected rather than proven returns. (Bloomberg) 

  • Google pledged to replenish more water than its data centers use by 2030 and committed $17M to water stewardship projects, aiming to ease community pushback as AI infrastructure demand accelerates and environmental concerns mount. (The Verge)

  • Nvidia said Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX will be among the first major users of its upcoming Vera CPU, with full production slated for Q3 2026, strengthening Nvidia’s push to expand beyond GPUs and deepen its platform role across AI data centers. (Bloomberg)

  • Box is leaning into AI as a hiring catalyst rather than a layoff driver, creating 13 new AI-related roles and expecting headcount to exceed 3,000 by early 2027 from 2,900, as 11% quarterly revenue growth supports Levie’s bet that AI will boost productivity, product demand and customer integration needs. (New York Times)

  • Amazon is developing an AI-upgraded Proteus warehouse robot that workers can direct with spoken language instead of software, expanding its ability to move carts across fulfillment sites as Amazon pushes deeper into automation while saying robots will support, not replace, employees. (The Verge) 

  • NVIDIA and Microsoft unveiled RTX Spark, a 1-petaflop Windows PC superchip with up to 128GB unified memory for local AI agents, 120B-parameter LLMs, 12K video editing and AAA gaming, positioning NVIDIA to extend its AI platform deeper into consumer PCs this fall through partners including ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Surface and MSI. (Nvidia)

  • Salesforce is acquiring Contentful for a reported $1B–$1.5B, a steep discount to its $3B 2021 valuation, as Salesforce pushes Headless 360 to make customer data and marketing content more accessible to third-party AI agents. More from The Information. Emoji options: 🤖 🧩 ☁️

  • Chinese AI and autonomous-vehicle players are accelerating Nvidia alternatives as Zelostech uses 25,000+ vehicles across 20+ countries to scale on lower-cost chips, while BYD, Nio, Xpeng, MiniMax, Kimi and DeepSeek expand domestic semiconductor support, signaling rising pressure on Nvidia’s China growth outlook. (CNBC)

  • Cloudflare is acquiring VoidZero, the company behind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+, expanding its developer platform while keeping the JavaScript toolchain open source and vendor-neutral for AI apps (Cloudflare) 

AI M&A and Fundraising News (May 29 — June 4)

  • AethexAI: AI voice support company, raised a $3M pre-seed round

  • Airspeed: AI revenue operations company, raised a $20M Series A round

  • Allen Control Systems: AI drone defense company, raised a $200M Series B round

  • AlphaSense: AI business intelligence company, raised a $350M Series G round

  • Apoha: AI materials discovery company, raised $36M

  • Archestra: AI enterprise data access company, raised $10M

  • Collate: AI life sciences documentation company, raised $95M

  • Cyera: AI data security company, raised $300M

  • DeepSeek: AI open-source model company, set to raise $7.4B

  • Drafted: AI home design company, raised a $16M seed round

  • DriveNets: AI infrastructure scaling company, raised $410M

  • Endra: AI building design automation company, raised $50M

  • Flok Health: AI physiotherapy company, raised a $12.5M Series A round

  • Flourish: AI energy-efficient cognition company, raised $500M

  • Garner Health: AI healthcare navigation company, raised a $100M Series E round

  • Generalist AI: AI robotics foundation model company, raised $400M

  • Gigaton: AI industrial automation company, raised a $26M Series A round

  • Gradient Labs: AI fintech operations company, raised a $13M Series A extension

  • Honeycomb: AI residential insurance company, raised $40M

  • INXM: AI enterprise workflow automation company, raised a $6.6M pre-seed round

  • Innefu Labs: AI defense security software company, raised a $30M Series B round

  • Kumo: AI predictive analytics company, acquired by Nvidia for more than $400M

  • Lassie: AI dental administration company, raised a $35M Series A round

  • Lila Sciences: AI scientific discovery company, raised $2B

  • Mecka: AI robotics movement data company, raised $35M

  • Modiqo: AI agent workflow automation company, raised a $3M pre-seed round

  • NP Co.: AI simulation company, raised a $6M seed round

  • Offroad: AI identity security company, raised a $7M seed round

  • Oplane: AI threat modeling company, raised a $5.2M seed round

  • Rep AI: AI ecommerce engagement company, raised $6.2M

  • Return Helper: AI ecommerce returns company, raised a $4M Series A round

  • Scotch: AI liquor payments company, raised a $20M Series A round

  • Sekai: AI mini app creation company, raised a $20M Series A round

  • SewerAI: AI infrastructure inspection company, raised an undisclosed amount from JMI Equity

  • Solstice: AI pharma ad compliance company, raised a $21M Series A round

  • StratusGrid: AI cloud cost optimization company, raised a $3M seed round

  • Suno: AI music generation company, raised a $400M Series D round

  • Supabase: AI app backend platform company, raised $500M

  • Terra AI: AI geological modeling company, raised a $20M Series A round

  • Town: AI personal assistant company, raised a $55M Series A round

  • Tripo AI: AI 3D asset generation company, raised $200M

  • Utilidata: AI energy orchestration company, raised a $40M Series C round

  • Wordsmith AI: AI legal workflow company, raised a $70M Series B round

  • XCENA: AI inference chip company, raised a $135M Series B round

  • ZeroDrift: AI compliance company, raised a $10M seed round

  • ZutaCore: AI data center cooling company, raised a $100M Series C round