PIN

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
March 20, 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

Jeff Bezos is in early discussions to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would acquire ​manufacturing companies and seek to use AI to ‌drive and speed up automation. Bezos traveled to ⁠the Middle East to discuss the new fund ​with sovereign wealth representatives in the region a few ​months ago, according to the report.

The U.S. Army has awarded Anduril Industries a potential 10-year, $20 billion contract to consolidate the procurement of the company’s commercial IT platforms and related services as part of efforts to shorten procurement timelines, reduce administrative costs and speed up the deployment of capabilities to soldiers and government stakeholders.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan sparked a debate in the developer community after open-sourcing his personal Claude Code configuration, called "gstack," a set of 13 skill files that simulate an engineering org structure with roles like CEO, engineer, and code reviewer. The repo quickly racked up nearly 20,000 GitHub stars and thousands of forks. Critics pushed back hard, calling it "just a bunch of prompts in a text file" and arguing that experienced Claude Code users already build their own versions of this.

OpenAI is shifting strategy to concentrate on coding and enterprise, pulling back from the sprawling "do everything all at once" approach that defined last year. At an all-hands meeting, applications CEO Fidji Simo told staff that Anthropic's growing dominance in the business and developer markets should serve as a wake-up call. The company is now reviewing which projects to deprioritize, with announcements expected in the coming weeks.

Arizona's attorney general filed 20 misdemeanor counts against prediction market platform Kalshi, making it the first criminal case the company has faced. The charges accuse Kalshi of accepting bets without a license, including wagers on state elections, which Arizona explicitly prohibits. Kalshi argues it operates under federal jurisdiction via the CFTC and has already filed for a preliminary injunction, though a federal judge denied its request for a temporary restraining order this week.

Jensen Huang raised the stakes just one day after predicting $1 trillion in AI chip sales through 2027, signaling total revenue will go beyond that figure as Nvidia expands into new markets. The company is pushing into CPUs, space-based data center chips, and semiconductors built on technology from startup Groq. Nvidia also plans to return roughly 50% of its free cash flow to investors through buybacks and dividends in the second half of the year.

Coefficient Capital, a New York growth equity firm focused on consumer and technology-driven brands, closed its Fund II at $290 million and revealed a previously unannounced late-stage vehicle, the Apex Fund, with $240 million in committed capital. The two funds bring the firm's total AUM to over $800 million, with early bets including beauty brand Sincerely Yours and premium pet food company Untamed.

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company scraped nearly 100,000 of their online articles to train its models without permission. The publishers also allege OpenAI violates copyright when ChatGPT reproduces their content verbatim and uses it in its RAG workflow.

💰 Funding announcement highlights

Here you go, same style, clean and consistent:

Sequen, a startup that provides real-time personalization and ranking infrastructure for consumer apps, raised a $16 million Series A co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures. Additional investors included Greycroft. The company has raised a total of $22 million.

Multiply, a startup that uses AI to automate B2B advertising campaign creation and optimization, raised a $9.5 million round led by Mayfield. Additional investors included Sorenson Capital.

Gumloop, a startup that enables employees to build AI automations, raised a $50 million Series B led by Benchmark. Additional investors included Nexus Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Box Group, The Cannon Project, and Shopify Ventures.

Corridor, a startup focused on AI coding security, raised a $25 million Series A led by Felicis. Additional investors included Conviction, Timeless, Artisanal Ventures, Lux Capital, Sunflower Capital, Datadog, and SV Angel.

Respan, a startup building an AI observability platform, raised $5 million in funding from Gradient, Y Combinator, Hat-Trick Capital, XIAOXIAO Fund, Antigravity Capital, Alpen Capital, and angel investors.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Benchmark's Bill Gurley is calling it: the AI wave is real, but the money flowing in has all the hallmarks of a bubble, and a reset is coming.

Kyle Harrison argues that "venture capital" has become a meaningless catch-all for four fundamentally different asset classes: seed investing, venture classic, supercharged growth investing, and what are essentially private small-cap tech stocks.

Ben Thompson sat down with Jensen Huang right after the GTC 2026 keynote to unpack why Nvidia went back to basics, retelling the CUDA origin story as the company pushes into new industries, CPUs, and disaggregated inference via the Groq acquisition.

AI is triggering a third major cost decline for entrepreneurs, after the shift to online retail and the rise of platforms like Shopify, according to ARK's Varshika Prasanna. Tools embedded directly into the commerce stack now compress the timeline from idea to live storefront to a matter of hours.

As frontier AI models grow more capable, a popular narrative suggests a handful of labs will dominate every layer of the tech stack. Sabrina Albert and Vivek Ramaswami push back, arguing that step-function technologies historically expand opportunity rather than consolidate it.

David Senra sits down with Marc Andreessen for a wide-ranging conversation covering the building of Mosaic and Netscape, the founding logic behind a16z, and his contrarian views on founders versus managers. Andreessen also shares his framework for how technology drives progress, why he thinks the best venture firms are built around helping founders rather than financial engineering, and what lessons from Jim Clark, Edison, and early internet skeptics still apply today.

Three years after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Vinod Khosla is revisiting what that weekend revealed about venture capital.

📌 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 Head of IR

Flashpoint is looking for a VC Associate

UMICH is looking for a VC Analyst

Cross Cut Ventures is looking for a VC Vice President

Ecolab is looking for a Senior VC Manager