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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
June 05, 2026
Welcome to PIN’d - our weekly newsletter where we pin (lol, bear with us) the most important tech/startup news of the week for aspiring angels, vc’s, startup investors, founders, etc. Expect a new weekly roundup from us every Friday morning!
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📰 This week’s best news
Benchmark Capital, the storied Silicon Valley VC firm known for early investments in eBay, Snap, Uber, and Twitter, is breaking with one of its signature traditions: keeping its funds to about $425 million and backing only young startups. After more than two decades of restricting its vehicles to that amount or lower, the outfit has closed on commitments of $2 billion across two new funds.
Have you ever had the desire to see Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey square off over a moderately suspenseful card game? If so, you are in luck. Silicon Valley’s leaders are rushing to embrace the power of media for the purposes of marketing and political capital. Now, in a sign of the times, Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has launched its own game show.
Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.
Corporate card and expense management platform Ramp is on a roll this week. In addition to launching Stack, an AI-native platform for accountants, the New York-based company also raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation.
SpaceX is preparing for what could become the largest IPO in history, targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion and plans to raise approximately $75 billion through a fixed-price share sale.
Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, has filed confidentially for an IPO, submitting a draft registration statement to the SEC for a proposed public offering. The IPO is expected to depend on market conditions.
Google parent Alphabet announced plans to raise $80 billion in stock to fund AI infrastructure at a scale that is currently outpacing its available supply. The raise includes a $10 billion stock sale to Berkshire Hathaway.
Gigascale Capital, founded by former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, has closed its first institutional fund at $250 million to back early-stage deep tech companies focused on clean energy, advanced manufacturing, grid modernization, and AI-integrated hardware.
Defense tech venture funding has already surpassed $14.6 billion in 2026, blowing past the sector's previous full-year record of $9.6 billion set in 2025, and we're only five months in. The surge is being driven by megarounds into AI-powered military systems, autonomous vehicles, and space infrastructure, with Anduril's $5 billion Series H leading the way.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Town raised $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Forerunner Ventures, First Round Capital, Alt Capital, and Conviction participating. The company provides a personalized AI assistant across inboxes, calendars, Slack, and docs that manages follow-ups, briefings, scheduling, and administrative tasks.
Wordsmith AI raised $70M Series B co-led by Highland Europe and Index Ventures. The company helps in-house legal teams draft contracts, answer legal questions, route requests, and manage workflows using AI.
Lassie raised $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Night Capital, Gokul Rajaram, and Edward Zuckerberg participating, at an approximately $250M post-money valuation. The company develops AI software to automate administrative work for dental practices.
Sekai raised $26M across seed and Series A co-led by Khosla Ventures and Connect Ventures, with 359 Capital, Parable VC, 645 Ventures, Mayfield, Andreessen Horowitz, A*, and MVP Ventures participating. The company enables consumers to create and share mini-apps from text prompts through a social feed.
ZeroDrift raised $10M seed, with Andreessen Horowitz, Reign Ventures, PitchDrive Ventures, and U&I Ventures participating. The company detects compliance violations in AI-generated messages and rewrites them to meet regulatory standards.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Mercor CEO Brendan Foody revealed on the 20VC podcast that his $10 billion startup now spends more on AI tokens for internal agents than it does on employee salaries. Mercor. Read more on his predictions for the next 5 years.
Stories of companies blowing through their annual AI budgets in months are everywhere. Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget in four months. JPMorgan published a note titled "AI Token Costs Are Eating Internet Profits Alive." Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz argues the panic is misplaced, here’s why.
a16z speedrun's newsletter breaks down how "building in public" has evolved past Product Hunt launches and revenue dashboards.
Oana Olteanu, founder and GP of Motive Force, on the learnings of her first-ever angel check. The post is less about the outcome and more about the investment thesis she's been refining ever since.
Benchmark's Bill Gurley shares a new theory about Anthropic on the All-In Pod, and it's not the regulatory capture story everyone assumed. After spending 30 days reading everything he could find on the company, he landed somewhere far more interesting.
Stratechery's Ben Thompson argues that Alphabet's $80 billion equity raise marks a turning point: Google is no longer just a tech company, it's becoming a capital allocator at an infrastructure scale that rivals sovereign wealth funds.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
Pillar VC is looking for an Investing Analyst.
Sixty Degree Capital is looking for an Principal
SuperSeed is looking for an Investor.
SPLY Capital is looking for a Fund Associate.
Social Capital is looking for a Senior Fund Accountant.