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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
November 21, 2025
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
Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, has raised a massive $1 billion round at a $11 billion valuation, according to a person familiar with the deal. The round comes less than two months after the seven-year-old startup announced its previous fundraise of $300 million at a $5 billion valuation.
Venture capital funds are living nearly twice as long as planned, with some hitting 20 years old while billions remain trapped in overvalued startups. Portfolio companies once valued at 20 times revenue now fetch just 2 times in secondary markets, a 90% discount that's forcing LPs to completely rebuild their investment strategies.
Anthropic just landed up to $15 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia, pushing its valuation to around $350 billion. The AI startup will spend $30 billion on compute across Azure and Nvidia chips. It’s a bold bet in the escalating arms race to dominate generative AI and a clear signal that Big Tech is hedging beyond OpenAI.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says the AI investment frenzy might be getting ahead of itself. In an exclusive BBC interview, he warned the bubble could hit everyone, including Google. Still, he backed AI’s long-term potential, while urging caution around energy use and job disruption.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang struck a bullish tone in the company’s third-quarter earnings. And based on the company’s results, there may be reason to. Nvidia reported revenue of $57 billion in the third quarter, 62% higher compared to the same quarter last year. The company’s net income on a GAAP basis was $32 billion, 65% higher year-over-year. Both revenue and profit results beat Wall Street expectations.
Peter Thiel’s fund, Thiel Macro, sold all its Nvidia stock last quarter, a $100 million exit. The move came just ahead of the chipmaker’s much-anticipated earnings release. Thiel now joins SoftBank and other major players cashing out of AI’s favorite stock.
Jeff Bezos is back in the driver’s seat. He’s co-leading Project Prometheus, a new A.I. company focused on building tools for industries like aerospace and robotics. With $6.2 billion in funding and top talent from OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta, it’s entering the A.I. race at full speed.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Backflip, a startup providing technology and capital products to residential real estate investors, raised a $10 million round. FirstMark Capital, LiveOak Venture Partners, and Vertical Venture Partners were among the investors.
Suno, a platform that lets anyone create AI-generated songs using simple text prompts, raised a $250 million Series C round at a $2.45 billion post-money valuation. Menlo Ventures led the deal, with participation from Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures, Hallwood Media, Lightspeed, and Matrix.
Condukt, a London startup that provides a real-time data layer to automate business-verification compliance workflows, raised a $10 million seed round. Lightspeed Venture Partners and MMC Ventures co-led the investment, with Cocoa Ventures also showing up.
SubImage, a two-year-old startup that maps cloud assets through an open-core security graph, raised a $4.2 million seed. FundersClub, Y Combinator, Phosphor Capital, and Transpose Platform joined the round.
Parallel Web Systems, an AI startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, raised a $100 million Series A round at a $740 million valuation. Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures co-led the deal, with participation from existing investors including Khosla Ventures.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Paras Chopra, founder of Lossfunk, says extinction from advanced AI is not just a sci-fi scenario but a plausible risk. After reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, he’s pushing for real-world testing of AI behaviors instead of blindly chasing progress. His lab is shifting focus to study agency, alignment and the ethics of AI systems before it's too late.
Sam Gerstenzang shares what he learned about execution after years at Stripe. His advice: move faster, stay focused on what matters, and don’t wait for perfect clarity to act. It’s a sharp, no-fluff guide for anyone serious about building and operating well.
Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire breaks down Elon Musk’s edge, from brutal execution speed to capital allocation instincts. He shares why backing SpaceX in 2019 was nearly impossible, and what founders can learn from Elon’s way of working. The conversation also touches on Boring Company, Bell Labs, and why Gwynne Shotwell is key to making it all work.
This double feature digs deep into Palantir’s origins and ethics. Joe Philleo breaks down Peter Thiel’s ideological vision behind the company with surgical clarity while Joe Lonsdale offers a rare firsthand look at how Palantir was built to balance power, security and civil liberties from day one.
AI demand is skyrocketing with token usage numbers proving it. a16z dives into why cheaper compute isn’t slowing things down, it’s speeding them up. Token prices are falling, but real consumption is still growing fast, with new entrants like xAI driving fresh spikes. The question now is if this another shale-style bust or the start of a whole new platform shift?
German researchers have successfully teleported quantum information between photons from separate quantum dots, a first in the field. This breakthrough brings us closer to practical quantum networks that can stretch across entire cities and solves a key problem in building quantum repeaters, needed to scale secure communication.
📌 PinPoint - Weekly Startup Job Opportunities
Beside is hiring a Product Engineer (Backend)
Gamma is hiring a Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager
Bending Spoons is hiring a Chief of Staff to the CFO
Whatnot is hiring a Fraud Agent
LangChain is hiring a Commercial Account Executive
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.
CPG is looking for a VC Director
Bain Capital is looking for a VC Vice President
Snowflake is looking for a Senior VC Manager
Intuit Ventures is looking for a Senior VC Principal
Dalio Family Office is looking for a VC Associate
