Trending Thursday #30

Hi !

Happy New Year!

While Silicon Valley nursed its hangovers, the deals kept coming. Here's what's been trending:

• Meta acquired Manus for $2B+, an AI agent startup that's cutting all China ties post-deal; Meta may be back in the AI agent race

• Hong Kong had its busiest IPO month since 2019, with 25 companies debuting in December and ~$7B more in AI/chip offerings filed this week

• Memory chip stocks dominated 2025: SanDisk up 560%, Kioxia up 500%, SK Hynix up 268%; and now your next laptop will cost 20% more

• SoftBank completed its $22.5B OpenAI investment and bought DigitalBridge for $4B, because Masa apparently has infinite money

• OpenAI is paying employees $1.5M each on average, 7x what Google paid pre-IPO and 34x the typical startup

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• Jan 20: AI Startup Pitch Night: Apps to pitch are open! Join us in SF for an exciting pitch night featuring the hottest AI startups. Sign to pitch here!

• May 27: Early Stage Summit: Due to various logistical factors, we had to reschedule the event but plan to make it better than ever. Register on Luma!

🤖 Meta Buys Manus: The Agent Wars Begin

Meta made its first major AI acquisition, and the optics are... complicated.

Singapore-based Manus, which builds AI agents for small and medium businesses, is joining Meta for $2B+. The details:

• Price: $2B+, with a $500M retention pool for employees

• ARR: $125M+ as of December

• Leadership: CEO Xiao Hong will report to Meta COO Javier Olivan

• The China Problem: Manus was initially based in Beijing and Wuhan. Post-acquisition, it will "discontinue its services and operations in China" and cut ties with Chinese investors

The Strategy: Meta wants agents. Not chatbots; actual AI systems that can take actions for businesses. Manus already has paying SMB customers using agents for tasks like customer service, scheduling, and order management. That's a head start Meta desperately needs as it competes with Salesforce's Agentforce, Microsoft's Copilot agents, and whatever OpenAI ships next.

The Irony: Meta just acquired a company that must erase its Chinese origins to pass regulatory muster. The deal comes weeks after the Trump administration cracked down on Chinese AI investments, and Manus is doing everything possible to appear "de-Sinicized:" new headquarters, new investor base, discontinued China operations.

Reality Check: This is what the new tech cold war looks like in practice. A company founded in Beijing, funded by Chinese VCs, serving Chinese customers, now has to pretend none of that ever happened to get acquired by an American tech giant. The talent and IP cross the border; the history gets deleted.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong's $7B AI Stampede

The year ended with a gold rush, but not in San Francisco.

December saw 25 companies debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the busiest month since November 2019. And the filings kept coming through New Year's:

• Biren (AI chip startup): Raised ~$717M; institutional tranche oversubscribed 26x, retail 2,348x

• MiniMax (LLM developer): Seeking ~$538M with Alibaba and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority backing

• Z.ai/Zhipu: Launching ~$560M offering at $6.6B valuation; would be the first LLM developer listed in HK

• OmniVision Integrated Circuits: Seeking ~$617M

• GigaDevice Semiconductor: Seeking ~$600M

• CXMT (China's top DRAM maker): Planning a $4.2B Shanghai IPO, targeting HBM production by the end of 2026

Add it up: that's roughly $7B in chip and AI IPOs filed in a single week.

Why HK, Why Now? US-China tensions have effectively closed the American IPO window for Chinese tech companies. Hong Kong offers access to international capital without the regulatory scrutiny (or political baggage) of a New York listing. And with Chinese VCs sitting on aging portfolios, the pressure to find exits is intense.

The Demand: Biren's retail tranche was oversubscribed 2,348x. Investors are betting that even with export controls, Chinese AI companies will find a way to compete, and that the domestic market alone justifies these valuations.

Translation: When you can't go public in New York, you sprint to Hong Kong. The Chinese AI ecosystem isn't dying under sanctions; it's finding new capital markets and building parallel supply chains. The IPO stampede is proof that global investors still want exposure, just through a different door.

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💾 The Memory Supercycle: Storage Stocks Crushed 2025

Forget the Magnificent Seven. The real winners of 2025 were the companies making the chips that store all that AI training data.

Data storage stocks led the S&P 500 in 2025:

• SanDisk: Up 560%+, the top performer in the entire index

• Western Digital: Second place

• Seagate: Fourth place

• Kioxia: Up 500%+, the world's best-performing stock in the MSCI World Index

• SK Hynix: Up 268%

• Samsung: Up 125%

The Thesis: AI models need data. Lots of it. And all that data needs to be stored somewhere. As AI training runs get larger and inference scales up, demand for NAND flash and DRAM has exploded.

The Consumer Pain: Analysts and manufacturers expect smartphone, PC, and consumer electronics prices to rise by up to 20% in 2026, as AI demand drives up memory chip costs. IDC warns the PC market could shrink by up to 9% YoY due to global memory shortages.

The Math That Breaks Brains: AI data centers are hoovering up so much memory capacity that there's not enough left for regular computers. Your next laptop will cost more because OpenAI needed another training run.

Translation: The AI boom has winners and losers. If you own memory stocks, congratulations. If you need to buy a computer in 2026, condolences. The infrastructure buildout is creating real scarcity, and that scarcity is about to hit consumer wallets.

🏦 SoftBank's Infinite Money Mode

Masa Son has apparently decided that sleeping is for people who don't believe in AI infrastructure.

On New Year's Eve, SoftBank announced it had completed a $22.5B investment in OpenAI, finalizing the up to $40B commitment announced in March. The stake: approximately 11%.

But Masa wasn't done. The same week, SoftBank agreed to acquire DigitalBridge for $4B (including debt). DigitalBridge is a NYSE-listed private equity firm that invests in data centers and digital infrastructure operators.

The Strategy: SoftBank isn't just betting on AI models; it's betting on the entire physical stack that enables AI. OpenAI provides them with access to the model layer. DigitalBridge provides them with exposure to the data center and infrastructure layers. Add in the $500B Stargate announcement from earlier this year, and Masa is building a vertically integrated AI empire.

The Numbers:

• OpenAI stake: ~11% for $22.5B+

• DigitalBridge: $4B

• Stargate commitment: Up to $500B over four years

Translation: SoftBank is making the biggest infrastructure bet in tech history. If AI is the next electricity, Masa wants to own the power plants, the transmission lines, and the utility companies. Whether this is visionary or insane depends entirely on whether AGI arrives before debt payments.

🤖 Product Quick Hits: The Hardware Race Heats Up

🧠 Neuralink's 2026 Plans: Elon Musk says Neuralink plans to start "high-volume production" of brain-computer interface devices and move to an almost automated surgical procedure in 2026. From a science experiment to an assembly line in one year, if you believe the timeline.

⚡ xAI's 2GW Expansion: Musk says xAI bought a third building called "MACROHARDRR" (yes, really) adjacent to Colossus 2, taking the company's training compute to almost 2 GWs. For context, that's enough power for a small city.

🥽 Vision Pro Reality Check: IDC expects Apple to ship just 45K units of the Vision Pro in Q4 2025. Apple cut digital ad spend for the headset by 95% in 2025. The $3,500 ski goggles aren't finding an audience.

📱 AI Companion Apps Boom: A researcher counts 206 AI companion apps on the App Store and 253 on Google Play, with 220M+ total downloads as of July 2025. Loneliness is a growth market.

🔥 Firecrawl's /agent: Firecrawl launched /agent, a tool to gather structured data wherever it lives on the web. Point it at any site and get clean, structured outputs; no more scraping spaghetti code.

🌐 Claude in Chrome: Anthropic released Claude in Chrome, enabling it to see, click, type, and navigate in your browser. The browser agent wars are heating up alongside the enterprise agent wars.

👔 Personnel Quick Hits: The Great Reshuffling Continues

💰 OpenAI's Compensation Insanity: OpenAI's stock-based pay averaged ~$1.5M per employee in 2025, which is roughly 7x what Google paid pre-IPO and 34x the average pay of other pre-IPO peers, per Equilar. The talent war has an arms race problem.

🔒 OpenAI Seeks New Safety Chief: Sam Altman says OpenAI is seeking a new Head of Preparedness, noting "the potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025." This comes after the ChatGPT suicide case made headlines.

🇨🇳 Tencent Poaches OpenAI Researcher: Former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu, who joined Tencent in September, has been promoted to chief AI scientist reporting directly to president Martin Lau. The talent drain to China continues.

🔄 Microsoft's Leadership Overhaul: Sources indicate Satya Nadella has overhauled Microsoft's senior leadership this year amid intense competition from Google, Amazon, and others in the AI race.

🤖 90% of Groq Employees Join Nvidia: Sources say ~90% of Groq employees will join Nvidia following the $20B acquisition, with cash payouts for all vested shares. Most shareholders will get per-share payouts tied to the $20B valuation.

🌟 Editor's Note

At Startup Intros, our mission is to bring the latest founder-investor news straight to your inbox, keeping you ahead in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley.

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💭 Parting Thoughts

The first week of 2026 revealed something important: the AI race is now a capital-allocation and geopolitical competition.

Meta just paid $2B+ for an AI agent startup that has to erase its Chinese history to close the deal. Hong Kong is absorbing billions in Chinese AI IPOs because the US market is closed. Memory stocks crushed everything in 2025 because AI companies are willing to pay any price for storage. SoftBank just wrote $26B in checks in a single week.

This isn't about who has the best model anymore. It's about who can marshal the most capital, secure the most chips, and navigate the new tech cold war. The Manus deal is the template: talent and IP can cross borders, but only if you're willing to delete everything that came before.

The question for founders: in a world where the winners are determined by access to capital, compute, and the right passport, how do you compete?

Forward to a friend or hit reply to let me know what you're seeing in your world.

Till next time!

P.S. Raised this week, and we missed you? Want to be featured? Have tips or funding questions? Reply or DM us as we’re here to help.

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