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A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders
Power in Numbers
June 26, 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
Venture investor Menlo Ventures, has raised $3 billion in new capital, the largest new raise in the firm’s 50-year history, to back AI-focused startups across enterprise, healthcare and consumer sectors.
Google is building an AI startup incubator that draws on its network of former employees, the so-called “Xooglers”. The pitch is neat in its logic: as some of the company’s most capable people leave to start their own AI ventures, an incubator built around alumni keeps Google close to them, and close to whatever they build next.The move would slot into machinery Google has already assembled.
The payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500 million nonprofit whose goal is preventing both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual aim is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to back prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces.
Polymarket and Kalshi, prediction markets where users can bet on outcomes as varied as the Super Bowl and the length of the State of the Union address, have been some of the fastest-growing destinations on the internet.
Mark Zuckerberg has noticed — and he wants in on the action.
Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in world history when SpaceX went public on June 12, boosting his fortune to an estimated $1.1 trillion. Then as the rocket maker’s stock soared by 40% to its all-time high during the trading day on June 16, Musk’s net worth briefly peaked at a record $1.45 trillion, before SpaceX’s stock sank by 31% through Tuesday. Thanks to that slump, and new restrictions on $116 billion of Musk’s Tesla stock, the world’s richest person is no longer a trillionaire. He’s worth an estimated $962 billion as of the end of the day Tuesday.
Bumble, the women-first dating app that once symbolised the boom in online romance, is now exploring a sale as it battles slowing growth, falling paying users and a broader loss of momentum in the sector.
OpenAI’s release of its newest model, GPT 5.6, reportedly won’t be like its previous releases. Instead of distributing it to the public, the company plans to share it only with a select group of close partners because the Trump administration told it to.
💰 Funding announcement highlights
Runlayer raised $30M Series A led by Felicis Ventures, with Khosla Ventures participating. The company provides a control layer for governing employee use of AI agents and monitoring what those agents access.
Upscale AI raised $190M Series A led by Premji Invest, with NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Seligman Ventures, Temasek, Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global participating, at a $2B post-money valuation. The company builds networking infrastructure that connects accelerators, memory, and storage across large AI clusters to reduce latency and improve hardware utilization.
American Perpetuals Exchange raised $30M led by Lux Capital at a $300M valuation. The company plans to operate a regulated U.S. exchange for perpetual futures.
Prosper AI raised $30M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Base10 Partners, Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, and Company Ventures participating. The company deploys voice-based AI agents to handle patient scheduling, insurance verification, billing, and intake workflows.
Engram raised $98M from General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Factory, Modern Venture Partners, Amplify Partners, and Neo, with angel investors including Assaf Rappaport, Andrej Karpathy, and Pieter Abbeel participating. The company develops AI models that learn and reuse internal organizational knowledge to improve enterprise agent performance.
📚 Interesting reads of the week
Ilya Strebulaev is back with a new report; a data driven ranking of the top 100 U.S. venture capital firms, based on more than 230,000 investments and a transparent methodology that evaluates investor performance beyond headline exits.
Alfred Lin on the psychology of expectations, optimism, and self fulfilling prophecies, arguing that supportive communities and high expectations can significantly shape individual success and future outcomes.
Term Sheet interviews Josh Wolfe, founder of Lux Capital; a fascinating conversation on why he thinks more than half of the venture capital firms operating in the U.S. today won't survive the decade.
Recorded live at the New Media Summit, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Gaby Goldberg discuss how media, communication, and influence are changing in the internet era. The conversation explores the shift from legacy media to creator-led platforms, why authenticity has become a competitive advantage, and how founders can build audiences by communicating directly with customers, employees, and the public.
Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. The thing he is most remembered for is not the physics. It is a 4-step learning method he used at Caltech. So simple a 12 year old can run it. So powerful that MIT, Stanford, and UCLA still teach it 38 years after his death. You can run the same 4 steps inside Claude in 20 minutes.
📌 Tweet of the week
💼 Who’s hiring in VC?
Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.
B Capital Group is looking for a Vice President
Tencent is looking for a Strategic Investment Manager
Eval Ventures is looking for a Director of Operations
Cerity Partners is looking for a Investment Associate
Vendep Capital is looking for an Associate
