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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
April 17, 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
OpenAI's new revenue chief Denise Dresser sent an internal memo to staff touting the company's Amazon partnership as a key driver for enterprise growth, while acknowledging that its long-standing Microsoft deal has constrained its ability to reach customers on AWS Bedrock. The memo also took direct shots at Anthropic, calling its revenue accounting inflated and its compute strategy a misstep.
Sequoia Capital just closed a $7 billion fund, marking the first major capital raise under its new leadership structure. Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, now serving as co-stewards of the 54-year-old venture giant, are doubling down on artificial intelligence bets at a moment when enterprise AI is reshaping the startup landscape.
Stanford's annual AI report finds that public anxiety about the technology is rising fast, even as experts remain broadly optimistic. Only 10% of Americans say they are more excited than concerned about AI in daily life, while 56% of AI experts believe it will have a positive impact over the next 20 years.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told attendees at the HumanX conference that the company is "getting more ready every day" for a public offering. No timeline has been announced, but the public comment suggests preparations are well advanced.
26North, the New York firm launched in 2022 by Apollo co-founder Josh Harris, closed its debut private equity fund at nearly $5.9 billion, almost 50% above its $4 billion target. The fund drew commitments from institutional LPs and family offices including Indiana Public Retirement System and the Rutgers University Endowment.
Meta is training an AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg on his image, voice, mannerisms, and public statements so employees can interact with a version of him at scale. If the experiment works, the company may open similar tools to creators on its platforms.
HawkEye 360, a satellite surveillance startup backed by BlackRock and Insight Partners, filed its S-1 last Friday after a standout year. Its public debut will be an early read on investor appetite for VC-backed defense tech companies, most of which are still burning cash.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Mastra raised $22M Series A led by Spark Capital. The company builds a TypeScript framework for developing AI agents and workflows.
Artemis raised $70M Series A led by Felicis, with Theory Ventures, First Round Capital, and Brightmind participating. The company develops an AI "brain" to replace rule-based security tools.
Auctor raised $20M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with M12, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures, OneStream, Y Combinator, and Tercera participating. The company records project discussions and generates implementation documents for enterprise software deployments.
Hilbert raised $28M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company connects data across teams and uses AI agents to analyze user behavior and recommend growth actions.
Mintlify raised $45M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz and Salesforce Ventures, with Bain Capital Ventures, Y Combinator, MVP Ventures, Avra, HubSpot Ventures, and TwentyTwo Ventures participating. The company develops AI tools for the documentation lifecycle.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Jeffrey Yan is 31 years old, employs 11 people, travels with a bodyguard, and last year his company earned over $900 million in profit. Hyperliquid, the decentralized crypto trading exchange he built in Singapore after turning down $100 million in VC funding, now holds 37% of the decentralized perpetual futures market and has done over $4 trillion in cumulative volume.
Former YC founder Jesse Genet joins a16z to talk about how she is using AI agents to run her household while homeschooling four kids under five. The conversation also gets into the harder questions: when and how to let young children interact with AI, and what values parents need to bring to those decisions.
Ramp's VP of Engineering shares the playbook behind a 6,300% increase in AI usage across the company, with 99.5% of staff active on AI tools and non-engineers now contributing thousands of pull requests to the production codebase each month.
An a16z ecosystem partner who recently moved back to San Francisco describes a social scene that is now entirely organized through X mutuals, private group chats, and Partiful invites with bouncers at the door.
Databricks surveyed more than 20,000 organizations, including over 60% of the Fortune 500, to map how enterprises are actually deploying AI agents today.
Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen claims that while the cost of building software keeps falling, the cost of maintaining what you ship does not. Features create new failure modes, support questions, and user expectations that compound over time.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
Huntington National Bank is looking for a VC Strategist
Xora Innovation is looking for a Senior VC Associate
Leah Yosef International is looking for a VC Director
Singtel Innov8 is looking for a VC Principal
500 Global is looking for a Head of Capital
