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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
June 12, 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
For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its Mythos frontier model, with hard safety limits that block responses in high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology. The internet went wild, of course.
OpenAI has filed confidentially for an IPO, joining Anthropic and SpaceX in what is shaping up to be the most consequential IPO season in a generation. The AI IPO pipeline now spans three companies worth a combined $3.6 trillion.
Jeff Bezos is pushing deeper into the AI boom as Prometheus, the artificial intelligence startup he leads, has raised $12 billion in new funding at a $41 billion valuation. The financing strengthens Bezos's position as a major figure in the AI race
Milan-based Bending Spoons, the Italian software company behind AOL, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and Eventbrite, has filed for a Nasdaq IPO targeting a valuation of at least $20 billion. The company swung from a $112 million net loss to $27.5 million in net income year-over-year on revenue of $601 million in Q1 2026.
AI layoffs are everywhere. Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale suspects many of them aren't because of AI at all. The layoff memos look quite similar, from Block to Atlassian to Coinbase. They cite productivity gains from AI technology and the need for smaller teams with fewer layers. Lonsdale isn't convinced.
San Francisco-based Kindred Ventures closed $355 million across two new vehicles to continue backing frontier technology at pre-seed and seed. The firm's previous vintage, which includes Perplexity and Inversion Space, has hit the top 1% of its class.
FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, currently serving a 25-year prison sentence, has officially submitted a pardon application to the Justice Department. Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon him, but has issued over 1,400 pardons during his second term.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Beacon raised $225M Series C co-led by General Catalyst and HarbourVest, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Intrepid Growth Partners, Valiant Peregrine, BDT & MSD Partners, Journey, and Sator Grove participating. The company acquires software businesses and integrates them into a shared operating system to automate engineering, back-office, and go-to-market workflows.
Morpho raised $175M at a valuation of up to $2B, with Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Apollo, Circle, and VanEck participating. The company operates blockchain-based lending markets with customizable lending pools and onchain credit transactions.
Poetic raised $50M at a $500M valuation led by Kleiner Perkins, with Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and OpenAI participating. The company automates complex enterprise processes like fraud investigations, transaction monitoring, and underwriting through executable workflows.
Niteshift raised $7M Seed led by Greylock, with Amplify Partners, Lux Capital, BoxGroup, and SV Angel participating. The company provides cloud development environments where AI coding agents can run, test, and verify software.
Odessia Travel raised $6M led by Sequoia Capital. The company offers an AI-powered travel agent that lets users plan and book entire trips in a single conversation.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
In case you missed it, a viral thread on X this past week had founders sharing their worst VC experiences; VCs falling asleep mid-pitch, ghosting after term sheets, and worse. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince went furthest, dropping stories about Sequoia and Vinod Khosla by name.
Conviction Capital's Sarah Guo has a response to the mid-2026 investor despair that nothing is worth building anymore. She's not buying it, and her reasoning is more interesting than the usual "defensibility" takes.
Sequoia Managing Partner Alfred Lin makes the case against the 80/20 rule, and why founders who live by it are optimizing for the wrong distribution entirely.
John O’Farrell argues that major AI players, including some of his former Andreessen Horowitz colleagues, are using massive PAC spending to intimidate politicians and weaken serious AI regulation debates.
Product leader Diana Stepner on how AI-powered sprint culture is creating a "robotic hamster wheel", more features, fewer customer conversations, and no real learning.
The $300M–$1B venture fund is now the worst size to run: too big to be moved by a single seed breakout, too small to lead growth rounds against the megafunds. The math, and where the money is actually going.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
Starfire Ventures is looking for an Investor.
Invest-NL is looking for an Investment Associate
Alpenglow Ventures is looking for a Chief of Staff
Resolution Impact Ventures is looking for a Senior Investment Manager
Yale University is looking for a Program Manager, Investor Network Yale Ventures
