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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
January 23, 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 CEO Dario Amodei shocked Davos attendees by comparing the U.S. approval of Nvidia chip exports to China to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. Despite Nvidia being a major investor in his firm, Amodei warned that shipping high-performance processors like the H200 creates a massive national security risk.
Capital One Financial said on Thursday it will acquire fintech firm Brex in a cash and stock deal valued at $5.15 billion and reported a rise in quarterly profit on the back of higher interest income from its credit card debt.
AI detection startup GPTZero scanned all 4,841 papers accepted by the prestigious Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), which took place last month in San Diego. The company found 100 hallucinated citations across 51 papers that it confirmed as fake.
Ethos Technologies is targeting a $1.3 billion valuation for its upcoming Nasdaq debut under the ticker "LIFE." The life insurance platform plans to raise roughly $211 million by offering 10.5 million shares priced between $18 and $20 each. Despite a valuation reset from its $2.7 billion private peak, the company enters the public market with a strong financial profile, reporting $344 million in revenue and consistent profitability. Pricing is expected during the week of January 26, 2026.
OpenAI is set to introduce advertisements to the free version of ChatGPT in the U.S. to create a new revenue stream. The ads will appear as clearly labeled banners at the bottom of the chatbot’s responses, though the company insists they will not influence the AI's answers. While paid subscribers remain ad-free, this move aims to offset massive infrastructure costs following a year of record spending.
Former Apollo and Bridgewater executive Alfia Ilicheva has launched Formulary to modernize the manual world of private fund administration. Using AI "bionic accountants," the platform automates data tracking and reporting to eliminate the human error common in venture capital and private equity. The oversubscribed $4.6 million seed round, led by Khosla Ventures, aims to bring hedge-fund-level efficiency to private capital.
Former General Catalyst managing director Niko Bonatsos is teaming up with entrepreneur Michael Fertik to launch Verdict Capital, a new venture firm targeting up to $300 million. The duo plans to back early-stage startups in San Francisco, New York, and Israel, with a heavy focus on artificial intelligence. This move follows a growing trend of senior investors departing established firms to pursue independent strategies.
The NYSE is launching a blockchain-powered venue to enable 24/7 trading and instant settlement of U.S. stocks and ETFs. By tokenizing assets, the platform will support fractional shares and stablecoin funding, allowing global investors to move capital outside traditional banking hours. Partnering with giants like BNY and Citi, the exchange aims to merge its historic regulatory trust with the efficiency of on-chain market infrastructure.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Ditto, a six-year-old San Francisco startup whose platform helps teams write, review, and publish product text directly into their apps and websites, raised a $12.2 million Series A round. Craft Ventures led the transaction, with previous investor Y Combinator also taking part.
Dominion Dynamics, a one-year-old Ottawa startup that builds interoperable autonomous systems for Arctic and allied defense operations, raised a $15.2 million seed round. Georgian led the deal, with Bessemer Venture Partners and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation also showing up.
XBuild, a four-year-old San Francisco startup building AI-powered estimating and proposal software for residential construction contractors, raised a $19 million Series A round. N47 led the deal, with Rackhouse Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz also participating.
humans&, a San Francisco-based AI lab, raised $480 million in seed funding. SV Angel and Georges Harik led the round and were joined by NVIDIA and others.
ClickHouse, a four-year-old Palo Alto startup building real-time analytics and data infrastructure for AI workloads, raised a $400 million Series D. Dragoneer Investment Group led the round, with Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price Associates, and WCM Investment Management also contributing.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp told Davos attendees that "peak AI" will eventually make mass immigration obsolete by automating white-collar roles while leaving plenty of vocational jobs for citizens. He argues that the technology will "destroy" humanities-based positions, whereas hands-on, specialized labor will remain in high demand.
Los Angeles hard tech is surging, with the top 50 firms raising $7.8 billion in 2025 alone. Titans like SpaceX and Anduril are leading a massive wave of innovation in aerospace, defense, and energy. With billions in new government contracts and a growing army of engineers, Southern California has cemented its status as the global capital for industrial hardware.
Solo founders now start over 36% of all new companies, marking a historic shift in a startup landscape that once viewed building alone as a major red flag. This rise is fueled by AI tools that allow a single individual to match the output of an entire engineering and marketing team, fundamentally changing the economics of company creation.
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are surging into the mainstream, with nearly $12 billion traded in December alone. Once a niche for political junkies, these platforms now offer wagers on everything from geopolitical conflicts to pop culture milestones. While some argue they provide unparalleled "crowd wisdom" and real-time data, critics raise alarms over market manipulation and the expansion of unregulated gambling.
After a rare dip in 2024, global dry powder reserves surged back to $4.63 trillion by mid-2025. This rebound suggests fund managers are calling capital at a slower pace even as total cash piles grow, particularly within private equity. The trend is putting significant pressure on firms to deploy massive checks before their investment periods expire. While most sectors are swimming in cash, private credit and secondaries saw slight declines due to an unusually rapid pace of deployment.
The AI fundraising frenzy showed no signs of slowing down in 2025 as mega-rounds became the new industry standard. While fewer companies crossed the billion dollar mark compared to previous years, a record number of startups successfully secured multiple massive raises within the same calendar year. Early data from 2026 suggests the momentum is only accelerating with massive new commitments for xAI and Merge Labs.
The sudden exit of cofounder Barret Zoph from Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab was reportedly triggered by a workplace relationship with another leader at the firm. While the startup faces a broader talent exodus to OpenAI, internal documents suggest this specific misconduct led to a breakdown in leadership trust. The departure marks a turbulent moment for the lab as it seeks a massive valuation hike amid shifting alliances in the AI sector.
📌 PinPoint - Weekly Startup Job Opportunities
NBA Investments Principal @ NBA
Fal.ai is hiring a Security Compliance Lead
Chai Discovery is hiring a Scientist, Partnerships
Boom Supersonic is hiring a Machinist
Unconv.ai is hiring a Software Engineer
Gradium is hiring an 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.
NBA is looking for an Investments Principal
Wittington Ventures is looking for a Growth Fund Director
Voy Ventures is looking for an Investment Director
Village Global is looking for a Head of Comms
Sanofi Ventures is looking for a VC Principal
