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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
January 16, 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
Thinking Machines cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz are leaving the fledgling AI lab and rejoining OpenAI. The departures are a blow for Thinking Machines Lab. Two narratives are already emerging about why they happened.
Just when you thought the circular deals couldn’t get any more circular, OpenAI has invested in CEO Sam Altman’s brain computer interface (BCI) startup Merge Labs.
CoinGecko is exploring a potential sale at a valuation near $500 million as dealmaking heats up across crypto. According to sources, the company has hired investment bank Moelis to run the process. The move comes as consolidation accelerates and traffic shifts toward AI-powered discovery.
Nvidia is putting $1 billion behind a joint AI lab with Eli Lilly to speed up drug discovery. The Silicon Valley facility aims to automate lab work that still depends heavily on human researchers. Nvidia sees pharma as a major new market for its AI systems, beyond Big Tech customers.
Booz Allen Hamilton shares jumped after the firm struck a landmark partnership with Andreessen Horowitz focused on government technology. The deal positions the company as a bridge between cutting-edge startups and federal agencies working on AI, cyber, and defense. Investors see upside in faster tech adoption across highly regulated markets.
Anthropic is pushing Claude deeper into everyday office work with a new product called Cowork. The tool aims to handle routine tasks with more autonomy, similar to how Claude Code changed developer workflows. The bet is that agentic AI can finally simplify knowledge work at scale.
ElevenLabs quietly crossed $330 million in annual recurring revenue, reaching the milestone less than three years after founding. Growth is accelerating fast, with each $100 million arriving in fewer months than the last. Enterprises are already using its voice agents to handle tens of thousands of customer calls every month. Voice AI is moving from novelty to serious revenue engine.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Converge Bio, a two-year-old Boston startup using generative AI trained on molecular data to help drugmakers develop drugs faster, raised a $25 million Series A round. Bessemer Venture Partners led the deal, with TLV Partners, Saras Capital, and Vintage Investment Partners also participating.
Haiqu, a startup building software to run practical applications on today’s quantum hardware, raised an $11 million seed. Primary Venture Partners led the round, with Qudit Investments, Alumni Ventures Group, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and Mac Venture Capital also joining.
JetZero, a six-year-old startup developing a commercial airplane with a single wide wing body design, raised a $175 million Series B round. B Capital led the financing, with United Airlines Ventures, Northrop Grumman, 3M Ventures, and RTX Ventures also participating.
Defense Unicorns, a startup building software that securely delivers updates to disconnected military systems, raised a $136 million Series B round. Bain Capital led the deal, with Ansa Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, AVP, Uncorrelated Ventures, and David Petraeus also taking part.
Etched, a California startup building specialized AI chips designed to run large language models faster and more efficiently than general-purpose GPUs, raised a $500 million round. Stripes led the investment, with Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, and Ribbit Capital also joining.
In an AI-saturated world, skills will expire but agency will not. According to this essay, the edge belongs to people who act without permission, iterate fast, and treat life like an experiment. AI does not replace creators or workers, it exposes who never had vision in the first place. The future favors generalists who can adapt, learn, and move on their own terms.
Jensen Huang claims that without ChatGPT, Nvidia would still be winning as accelerated computing becomes unavoidable. He says reasoning models are improving fast, inference is already profitable, and compute costs keep falling. Jobs, he claims, will shift rather than disappear, with robotics filling real labor gaps.
Michael Burry, an Anthropic co-founder, and top AI thinkers debate whether today’s AI boom is progress or a massive capital mistake. Trillions are flowing into chips, data centers, and models, while real revenues lag behind. Productivity gains are real but uneven, and job disruption has been slower than expected. The open question is whether AI creates durable value or just makes everything cheaper.
Andreessen Horowitz just raised $15 billion, and this deep dive explains why LPs keep betting bigger. The firm is no longer just picking winners, but shaping markets through capital, policy, media, and infrastructure. Its advantage is scale, belief, and a willingness to look wrong early to win late.
Researchers are starting to study large language models as if they were living organisms, not software. By borrowing tools from biology and neuroscience, they are uncovering why these systems behave in strange and sometimes troubling ways. The work reveals how little we still understand models used by millions every day. It could reshape how we test, trust, and control AI.
Marc Andreessen says AI is the biggest tech shift of his career, and it still feels early. Model costs are falling fast, changing how AI is priced, distributed, and defended. Startups and incumbents are racing through open and closed bets, while China quietly closes the gap. The real question is not adoption, but who captures the value as intelligence gets cheaper.
📌 PinPoint - Weekly Startup Job Opportunities
Chai Discovery is hiring a VP, Business Development.
Fal is hiring a Customer Success Manager.
Boom Supersonic is hiring a Financial Accountant.
Gradium is hiring an Account Executive.
PermitFlow is hiring a Platform Engineer.
You can earn thousands of dollars for referring candidates to top companies. Sign up to PinPoint.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
Plug and Play is looking for a VC Associate
Comcast Ventures is looking for a VC Associate
Equal Ventures is looking for a VC Principal
Entrepreneurs First is looking for a Ops Associate
Arnold Ventures is looking for a VC Director
