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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
May 08, 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
Anthropic on Wednesday announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at his company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. As part of the agreement, Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and it also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space.
Prediction market Kalshi today announced a $1 billion Series F round at a $22 billion valuation, led by Coatue, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, has testified under oath that CEO Sam Altman lied to her about the safety standards for a new AI model. In a video deposition shown during the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial on Wednesday, Murati said Altman falsely stated that OpenAI’s legal department determined a new AI model did not need to go through the company’s deployment safety board.
While crypto-focused venture firms are hedging their bets and pivoting to AI, Andreessen Horowitz is going all-in on blockchain. The firm's crypto division just closed a $2.2 billion fund, one of the largest crypto-focused pools of capital raised in 2026, even as the industry faces mounting regulatory pressure and waning mainstream interest. It's a bold statement of conviction at a moment when many of crypto's biggest backers are quietly diversifying into the red-hot AI sector.
Former Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun announced on Monday in a press release that her firm has raised $1 billion across new funds to continue its thesis of backing crypto and blockchain.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has raised $6 billion for a new fund to invest in later-stage companies, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the firm’s largest haul ever.
China’s state-backed semiconductor investment vehicle, known as the Big Fund, is in talks to lead DeepSeek’s first external fundraising, which could value the AI company at about $45 billion. Tencent is also among the investors still in discussions, though the final lineup has not been decided.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
JuliaHub raised $65M Series B led by Dorilton Capital, with General Catalyst and AE Industrial Partners participating. The company combines physics-based simulation models with AI to automate industrial engineering workflows, testing, and control code generation.
Standard Intelligence raised $75M from Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital at a $500M post-money valuation. The company is building AI models designed to learn and reason more like humans.
Casa raised $20M Series A led by Forerunner Ventures. The company provides a subscription platform that manages home maintenance and repair scheduling while proactively planning future household projects.
Iterative Health raised $77M Series C co-led by GV and Intrepid Growth Partners, with Insight Partners, Obvious Ventures, and EDBI participating. The company uses AI and a clinical trial site network to improve patient identification, enrollment, and study execution.
Creati Gen AI raised $20M led by Redpoint Ventures. The company developed Buzzy, an AI-powered video editing tool that allows users to edit and refine videos using text prompts.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Whether you talk with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians, the so-called San Francisco consensus on the impact of A.I. for workers is bleak. Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect this scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us.
Mercury CEO Immad Akhund on surviving years of painful pivots before building a multi-billion-dollar fintech, and why he still refuses to glorify nonstop hustle culture.
David Sacks is profiled by The Atlantic, which traces his path from libertarian PayPal Mafia figure to a central player in Silicon Valley’s shift to the political right.
The founder of Slash, a company that has raised over $160M across four rounds, most recently a $100M Series C at a $1.4B valuation, shares a comprehensive breakdown of how venture fundraising actually works. Drawing heavily from Y Combinator's playbook, the post covers everything from how companies get priced at different stages to the most common mistakes founders make when running a process.
This startup studio founder realized his team hadn't touched AI while he'd been building automations for months. This post breaks down his three-phase framework for building an AI-first culture, from curiosity-driven experimentation to workflow mapping to scalable infrastructure, arguing that adoption is a comfort problem, not a technology one.
There are around 25 companies with a $1B+ headline valuation in their first round of raised capital (TML, SSI, Ineffable, Ricursive, World Labs etc). Here are 11 reasons this happens, and the case for it.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
Moderne Ventures is looking for a Senior Associate.
Samsung Next is looking for a Investor.
SoftBank is looking for a VC Analyst.
ICONIQ Capital is looking for a VC Associate.
Singtel Innov8 is looking for a Principal.
