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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
May 22, 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
SpaceX has finally made its IPO filing public, revealing a company that has grown far beyond its original pursuit of reusable rockets. The company claims it has "identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history" at $28.5 trillion, and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at an expected valuation of $1.75 trillion, what could be the largest IPO ever.
Business Insider's latest Seed 100 spotlights the early-stage investors with the rare knack for finding tomorrow's tech giants before the rest of the market knows they exist.
During a Y Combinator event on Tuesday night, Sam Altman offered $2 million worth of OpenAI API tokens to every startup in the current YC class, approximately 169 companies, in exchange for equity. The deal will be structured as an uncapped SAFE, converting at each startup's next priced round, typically the Series A.
Oura, the maker of the eponymous smart ring that tracks the health and sleep of wearers, has confidentially filed a draft of its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company announced on Thursday.
Andrej Karpathy, one of the world's most respected AI researchers and an original co-founder of OpenAI, announced he is joining rival lab Anthropic. His post on X drew nearly 3 million views within an hour, and the hire is widely seen as a major coup for Anthropic in the escalating competition for elite AI talent.
Mercury, the technology company providing radically different banking*, today announced a $200 million Series D at a $5.2B valuation, led by TCV. The round included participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital. This brings total primary and secondary funding to approximately $700 million.
Polymarket has launched a new category of prediction markets tied to private company milestones, including valuations, IPO timing, and secondary-market activity, for names like OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI alignment researcher, has disclosed that his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, has placed massive bearish bets against AI chip makers.
At Google I/O, Google unveiled the biggest overhaul to Search in its 25-year history. The revamped experience replaces the traditional list of blue links with an AI-powered, conversational interface built on Gemini 3.5 Flash.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Flick raised $6M seed, with True Ventures, GV, Y Combinator, Lightspeed, Formosa Capital, Pioneer Fund, Olive Tree Capital, and N1 participating. The company enables filmmakers to direct and iterate on AI-generated films through cinematic editing and storytelling workflows.
GovWell raised $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with Work-Bench and Bienville Capital participating. The company uses AI to automate permitting, licensing, inspections, fee collection, and other local government workflows.
Viktor raised $75M Series A led by Accel, with Bek Ventures, Kaya VC, Inovo VC, Tenacity Capital, and Stewart Butterfield participating. The company provides AI coworker software that operates inside Slack and Microsoft Teams to automate reporting, workflows, app creation, and operational tasks across business systems.
Status AI raised $17M in combined seed and Series A from Abstract, General Catalyst, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and LightShed Partners. The company develops AI-powered social role-playing and interactive entertainment apps.
Leadbay raised $4.3M seed, with Y Combinator, Rebel Ventures, Roosh Ventures, Inovexus Ventures, TS Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Bright Data, Transpose Platform, and Deel Ventures participating. The company provides AI-powered prospecting and lead generation tools for SMB sales teams.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Slow Ventures hosted an "Etiquette Finishing School" for young Y Combinator founders and tech entrepreneurs, covering styling tips for work outfits, how to engage in good conversation, and a caviar tasting session.
If there is a foundational thought in VC, it’s TAM (Total Addressable Market size). What was true in 1970 is mostly still true today: the bigger the number, the easier the pitch. But in Vertical AI, filtering on TAM alone is a mistake, here’s why.
Product management veteran Itamar Gilad breaks down three circulating predictions about the future of the PM role, the AI-PM, the Developer PM, and the No-PM future, and challenges the hype around each.
OpenAI's frontier models still lead on intelligence benchmarks, but Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in enterprise spending on Ramp's AI Index for May 2026. Here’s why.
South Park Commons GP Aditya Agarwal argues that Silicon Valley's obsession with speed is curdling into something destructive. Researchers cycle between labs every eighteen months, founders wind down companies when the excitement fades, and engineers treat career progression like a video game.
AI amplifies whoever was already good, and the gap between those people and everyone else is widening fast. Solutions Engineers have the most to gain, AEs face a rising minimum viable technical bar, and the entire client-facing function is converging toward the Forward Deployed Engineer archetype. The variable AI amplifies most is technical curiosity, and crucially, that's a choice.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
b2venture fund is looking for an Associate.
Hof Capital is looking for a Venture Capital Analyst.
Engine Ventures is looking for an Associate.
CVX Ventures is looking for a Head of New Markets.
Paladin Capital Group is looking for a Senior Associate.
