March 13th Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
March 13, 2026

As of close on March 12th, 2026

Energy prices fell earlier in the week after President Trump signaled de-escalation with Iran and the G7 pointed to reserve readiness, sending Brent down 7.2% to $91.88, on Thursday, the IEA says the Iran war has triggered the largest oil-supply shock ever, disrupting 7.5% of global supply; members approved a record 400 million-barrel emergency release to stabilize markets.  Housing offered a modest bright spot, with February existing-home sales rising 1.7% to a 4.09 million annual pace as sub-6% mortgage rates briefly improved affordability. In Tech, Uber and Zoox struck a multi-year deal to launch driverless rides on Uber in Las Vegas this summer and Los Angeles by mid-2027. AT&T plans to invest $250+ billion in U.S. networks over five years, hiring thousands to expand fiber, 5G, satellite, and FirstNet, positioning against Comcast and Verizon amid AI-driven data demand. With respect to the WBD and Paramount deal, David Ellison made the case for $6 billion in merger synergies to roughly 200 top WBD executives. Lastly, Oracle and OpenAI shelved their plan on the Stargate’s Abilene data center expansion, providing Meta an opening with the help of Nvidia to discuss its own data center plans.

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

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] ⚖️ Anthropic sued to overturn the Pentagon’s “supply-chain risk” blacklist, warning it could cost about $5 billion, including a $150 million hit to expected 2026 public-sector ARR above $500 million, plus $100 million+ in pipeline and roughly $180 million in disrupted financial-sector talks. Separately, Anthropic’s Claude found 100+ Firefox bugs in two weeks, including 14 high-severity flaws, outperforming Mozilla’s typical two-month external bug haul and highlighting AI’s fast-rising cyber capabilities. Details from Reuters, The Wired, and WSJ.

[2] 🤝 OpenAI and Meta made strategic AI acquisitions, with OpenAI buying Promptfoo — used by 25%+ of Fortune 500 companies and last valued at $86 million after raising $23 million — while Meta bought viral OpenClaw-linked social network Moltbook and folded its founders into Meta Superintelligence Labs. More from OpenAI, TechCrunch, and TechCrunch. 

[3] 🚀 AI pioneer Yann LeCun’s stealth startup Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation to build world-model AI for robotics and industry, backed by Nvidia, Samsung, Bezos Expeditions, and others. See more on Bloomberg.

[4] 💸 Nvidia expanded its AI ecosystem investment push with a $2 billion stake in Nebius, sending the stock up 16%. Separately, also agreed with Thinking Machines on a significant new investment plus a multiyear chip deal worth tens of billions, including plans to deploy at least 1 gigawatt of Vera Rubin chips. More from CNBC and TechCrunch.

[5] 🛠️ Meta unveiled four in-house AI chips with plans of shipping in 2027 to diversify beyond Nvidia and AMD, cut costs, and support faster inference deployments, while highlighting hyperscalers’ growing push toward custom silicon amid supply constraints. See more from CNBC.

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 🦞 Nvidia is preparing to launch NemoClaw, an open-source AI agent platform, ahead of its developer conference to shape agent infrastructure and challenge OpenClaw. More from The Wired.

[2] 💸 Nvidia disclosed plans to invest $26 billion over five years in open-weight AI models, signaling a direct challenge to OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek while extending its AI infrastructure dominance. More from The Wired.

[3] 🚀 OpenClaw-linked cloud and software names surged in China, with UCloud Technology, QingCloud Technologies, and Hangzhou Shunwang Technology each jumping at least 9% after Shenzhen proposed subsidies of up to 2 million yuan ($289,050) for OpenClaw app development. Details from Bloomberg.

[4] 🦾 Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.5.0, a major update to its open-source robotics stack, adding Unitree G1 humanoid support, new robot-learning policies, faster dataset tooling, Hub-loaded simulation environments, and a Python 3.12/Transformers v5 upgrade. More from Hugging Face.

[5] 🗣️ IBM released Granite 4.0 1B Speech, a compact open multilingual speech model for edge and enterprise use, delivering stronger English ASR, faster inference, six-language support, and Apache 2.0 licensing. More on Hugging Face.

Founder’s Corner

Hiring & Funding in Startups from 2023 to 2025

Source: X

What We Read This Week

  • The Guardian says the UK’s AI push rests on shaky claims, including £1bn from CoreWeave, $2.5bn from Nscale, £47bn in promised annual economic upside, and a Loughton “supercomputer” site still functioning as a scaffolding yard. (The Guardian)

  • xAI is seeking permits for a massive gas-fired plant in Southaven to power data centers just 15 minutes from Memphis, facing NAACP backlash, a 200-mile hearing location fight, and protests from roughly 200 residents over pollution, noise, and transparency. (CNBC)

  • Read Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang’s latest blog, “AI is a 5-layer cake”: Jensen Huang argues AI is foundational infrastructure, not software: a five-layer stack—energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications—driving trillion-dollar investment, job creation, and broad economic transformation as models reach scalable usefulness. (Nvidia)

  • Nielsen’s Gracenote sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT copied copyrighted entertainment metadata and its proprietary relational framework, potentially setting a precedent for protecting structured datasets, not just raw content. (Axios)

  • Google is broadening Gemini’s reach from workplace productivity into government, rolling out AI agents across the Pentagon’s unclassified networks while embedding context-aware drafting, spreadsheet, slide, and search tools across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive (Bloomberg and TechCrunch)

  • Google officially completed its $32B all-cash acquisition of Wiz, its largest ever, adding a multi-cloud cybersecurity platform (>$1B ARR in 2025) to strengthen enterprise security across AWS, Azure, Oracle, and Google Cloud. (TechCrunch)

  • Zoom unveiled an AI office suite (Docs, Slides, Sheets), customizable AI agents, and a voice translator, while launching photorealistic meeting avatars and deepfake detection, expanding its AI-driven workplace productivity ecosystem. (TechCrunch)

  • Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen will step down after 18 years as the company searches for an AI-era CEO; shares fell more than 6% despite Q1 beats, highlighting investor skepticism about monetizing AI. (WSJ)

  • Salesforce plans a $20 billion to $25 billion bond sale to fund buybacks after authorizing $50 billion repurchases, signaling a more debt-tolerant capital strategy amid AI-era investor pressure. (Bloomberg)

  • A federal judge ordered settlement talks between Live Nation and 27 states plus DC after DOJ’s Ticketmaster-saving antitrust deal, keeping a jury trial alive next week if negotiations fail. (Bloomberg)

AI Fundraising News (Mar 6 — Mar 12)

  • AMI Labs: AI world models company, raised a $1.03B seed

  • AgentMail: AI email platform for AI agents company, raised a $6M seed

  • Amigo AI: AI patient interaction agents company, raised an $11M Series A

  • Anchr: AI wholesale food distribution automation company, raised a $5.8M seed

  • Another Earth: AI synthetic satellite imagery company, raised $4M

  • Armadin: AI cybersecurity red teaming company, raised $190M from seed and Series A

  • Augur: AI critical infrastructure security platform company, raised a $15M seed

  • Aviomatic: AI enterprise transformation control plane company, raised $54M

  • Avvoka: AI legal document drafting infrastructure company, raised an $18.7M growth round

  • Axiomatic AI: AI engineering verification platform company, raised an $18M seed

  • Axiom Math: AI code verification company, raised $200M

  • Axiom Trust: AI trust document processing company, raised an $11.8M pre-seed

  • BackOps: AI supply chain automation company, raised a $26M Series A

  • Bold Security: AI endpoint security company, raised a $28M Series A

  • Captur: AI photo verification software company, raised a $6M seed round

  • Chowbus: AI restaurant operations software company, raised an $81M Series E round

  • City Detect: AI building monitoring platform company, raised a $13M Series A

  • Cleafy: AI banking fraud detection company, raised a $13.8M Series B

  • Crafting: AI agent infrastructure company, raised a $5.5M seed

  • Delfos Energy: AI energy infrastructure software company, raised a $3M seed round

  • Denki: AI financial audit automation company, raised a $4.1M seed

  • Dify: AI agentic workflow platform company, raised a $30M pre-Series A

  • Eridu: AI data center networking equipment company, raised a $200M Series A

  • Escape: AI cybersecurity testing agents company, raised an $18M Series A

  • GenSpark: AI agentic workspace company, raised a $385M Series B extension

  • Guild.ai: AI agent development and observability company, raised $44M

  • Gumloop: AI agent workflow company, raised a $50M Series B

  • Hayden AI: AI traffic management systems company, raised $180M

  • Intelligent Legal Solutions: AI legal workflow automation company, raised a $3M seed

  • Isembard: AI manufacturing systems company, raised a $50M Series A

  • Jazz: AI data loss prevention company, raised a $61M seed and Series A

  • Juicebox: AI recruiting platform company, raised an $80M Series B

  • Kai: AI cybersecurity operations company, raised $125M

  • Kled: AI training data marketplace company, raised a $5.5M seed round

  • Legora: AI legal collaboration platform company, raised a $550M Series D

  • Levitate: AI client outreach automation company, raised $16M

  • Mega: AI marketing and SEO agents company, raised an $11.5M Series A

  • Mind Robotics: AI factory robotics company, raised a $500M Series A

  • Mirai Robotics: AI maritime surveillance vehicles company, raised a $4.2M pre-seed

  • Nebius Group: AI data center infrastructure company, raised $2B

  • Nexthop AI: AI hyperscaler networking hardware company, raised $500M

  • Nitra: AI medical practice management agents company, raised a $50M Series B

  • Nscale: AI infrastructure hyperscaler company, raised a $2B Series C

  • Nyad: AI wastewater operations platform company, raised a $1.3M pre-seed round

  • Onyx Security: AI agent security company, raised a $35M Series A

  • Option Circle: AI autonomous trading company, raised $3M

  • Oro Labs: AI procurement software company, raised a $100M Series C

  • PixVerse: AI video generation company, raised a $300M Series C

  • Qdrant: AI vector search infrastructure company, raised a $50M Series B

  • Qevlar AI: AI security operations platform company, raised a $30M Series A

  • Qurrent: AI back-office operations company, raised a $15M Series A

  • Quantro Security: AI cybersecurity risk analysis company, raised a $2.5M pre-seed round

  • Replit: AI coding platform company, raised a $400M Series D round

  • Rhoda AI: AI industrial robotics models company, raised a $450M Series A

  • Sandbar: AI wearable transcription company, raised a $23M Series A round

  • Scanner: AI security data platform company, raised a $22M Series A round

  • Sigma360: AI financial crime risk intelligence company, raised a $17.3M Series B

  • Standard Kernel: AI GPU optimization company, raised a $20M seed round

  • Sybilion: AI manufacturing decision platform company, raised a $4.2M seed round

  • Talvy: AI video recruiting platform company, raised a $2M seed

  • TaxDown: AI tax planning and filing company, raised $4.6M

  • Taya: AI voice note wearable company, raised a $5M seed round

  • Translucent: AI healthcare finance platform company, raised a $27M Series A round

  • Unreasonable Labs: AI scientific research platform company, raised $13.5M

  • VeryAI: AI biometric identity verification company, raised a $10M seed round

  • Vor Systems: AI renewable energy deal analysis company, raised a $3M pre-seed

  • Waiv: AI cancer testing company, raised $33M

  • Wonderful: AI customer service agents company, raised a $150M Series B

  • Xscape Photonics: AI data center interconnects company, raised a $37M Series A

  • ZyG: AI e-commerce demand prediction company, raised a $58M seed

  • Zymtrace: AI workload optimization company, raised an $8.5M seed round