Weekly Download #18

Welcome to the week where Trump convinced China to sell TikTok for the price of a mid-tier SaaS acquisition, Jensen Huang decided to become the Federal Reserve of AI, and Apple quietly built a ChatGPT clone while pretending Siri isn't five years behind.

As we continue to build at Context Ventures, we've launched Startup Intros with a simple mission: to help early-stage founders find the right investors, faster and smarter.

🎯 BLUF: Bottom Line Upfront

• TikTok's Fire Sale: Trump signed an executive order blessing the $14B deal, giving Oracle, Silver Lake & friends 80% of TikTok

• Chip Tariff Insanity: Trump wants tech companies to match every imported chip with a U.S.-made one or face massive tariffs, so good luck finding those American fabs

• Nvidia's $100B Power Move: Jensen Huang committed nine figures to OpenAI while bankrolling the entire AI stack, basically becoming VC with a GPU side hustle

• OpenAI's Enterprise Push: Struck $100M deal with Databricks and  launched "Pulse" morning briefs for $200/month users

• Apple's Secret Sauce: Built an internal ChatGPT clone called "Veritas" (Latin for truth, ironic much?) to test their Siri reboot coming March 2026

🏛️ America's New State Capitalism: TikTok Fire Sales & Chip Tariff Insanity

💸 TikTok's $14B Government-Mandated Bargain

Trump has signed an executive order blessing a $14B TikTok spinout to a consortium of Oracle, Silver Lake, Rupert Murdoch's Fox, Michael Dell, and, surprisingly, UAE fund MGX, which will control 80% of TikTok's U.S. operations.

The Numbers Don't Add Up:

• Previous valuations: $40-60B just months ago

• Sale price: $14B (a 75% haircut)

• ByteDance's take: Less than 20% equity, but somehow still gets 50% of profits through "licensing arrangements"

• Board control: 6 of 7 seats go to Americans, with Oracle managing the algorithm

The real story? Trump secured this during talks with Xi Jinping, who apparently decided that getting something for TikTok beats getting banned entirely. Analysts are calling it "the most undervalued tech acquisition of the decade", while others see it as textbook crony capitalism.

🏭 Match Every Chip or Pay Up: The New Semiconductor Shakedown

The Trump admin is cooking up a semiconductor tariff scheme to require tech companies to match every imported chip with a domestically made one, or face crushing penalties.

The Insane Requirements:

• 1:1 ratio: For every chip you import, make one in America

• No U.S. production? Enjoy your 100% tariffs

• "Credits" for promises: Pledge to build a fab, get temporary exemption

• Supply chain nightmare: Track every chip in every component of every product

Who Wins: TSMC's Arizona fab (suddenly very valuable), GlobalFoundries (one of the few with U.S. capacity), and lawyers who'll track all this compliance.

Who Loses: Apple (good luck making M-series chips in Ohio), every electronics company, and consumers ready for $3,000 base model iPhones.

The Bigger Picture: As the WSJ notes, "capitalism in America is starting to look like China," as the US Govt can force foreign companies to sell at fire-sale prices to politically connected buyers while mandating domestic production ratios.

🤖 The AI Industrial Complex: Everyone's Building, Nobody's Profiting

💰 Nvidia's $100B Power Play: Becoming the Fed of AI

Nvidia is committing $100B to OpenAI while quietly becoming the financial backbone of the entire AI economy. Jensen Huang isn't just selling GPUs—he's financing his own customers to buy more GPUs in the most brilliant/insane circular economy ever created.

The Full Portfolio:

• $100B to OpenAI: Ensuring they keep buying H200s forever

• $6.3B backstop to CoreWeave: Funding the cloud that buys Nvidia chips

• Multibillion deals with Lambda: Another GPU cloud needing hardware

• Intel pieces acquired: Snapping up the fallen giant's scraps

The Infinite Money Glitch: Invest in AI companies → They need GPUs → Sell them GPUs → Use profits to invest in more AI companies → Repeat until $4.3T valuation or heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

🤝 OpenAI's Enterprise Sprint: $100M Deals & $200/Month Morning Briefs

OpenAI is desperately trying to justify its existence beyond a "chatbot that occasionally tells users they can fly" with two more enterprise moves this week.

The Databricks Deal: OpenAI and Databricks signed a $100M partnership to help enterprises build AI agents. GPT-5 will be directly available to Databricks' 20,000 customers, promising 95% accuracy (meaning your AI will only hallucinate 1 in 20 times).

ChatGPT Pulse: OpenAI launched Pulse, a $200/month feature that generates personalized morning briefs while you sleep. It's so compute-intensive that they can only offer it to Pro subscribers and are building five new data centers with Oracle just to power it.

🍎 Apple's Secret ChatGPT Clone: Project Veritas

Apple is quietly testing Veritas, an internal ChatGPT clone to prep for Siri's March 2026 reboot. Named after the Latin word for "truth," it's designed to test features such as screen reading, email sorting, and in-app actions. Sadly, Siri should've been able to do this five years ago.

The Reality: Apple is building internal chatbots just to understand how chatbots work. Built on their new "Linwood" LLM framework (using both in-house and third-party models), it's Apple's admission that they're so far behind in AI.

🔍 The Search Wars: Perplexity Takes on Google's Monopoly

Perplexity launched a search API giving devs access to hundreds of billions of web pages, declaring war on Google's search infrastructure monopoly. Perplexity wants to be the search backend for everyone else.

The Pile-On: Ollama also launched a search API this week, while Glean and Algolia fight for enterprise search. Meanwhile, ChatGPT Pulse might just replace search altogether by proactively answering questions you haven't asked yet.

Why This Matters: Every AI company needs web data, Google controls most of it, and everyone's scrambling for alternatives. Building a search index costs billions, maintaining it costs more, and Google has a 25-year head start.

⚡ Startup Quick Hits: When GPU Wars Meet Sovereign Dreams

☁️ Nscale's $1.1B "Neocloud" Fantasy: London startup raised Series B led by Aker ($285M for 9.3% stake) with Nvidia joining the party. They're calling themselves a "neocloud" provider, which is just fancy talk for "we rent GPUs."

🎯 Cohere's $7B Consolation Prize: Added $100M to August's $500M round, hitting $7B valuation (up from $6.8B). Co-founder helped write the transformer paper that started this whole mess, yet they're worth 1/70th of OpenAI.

🦑 Kraken's $20B Pre-IPO Pump: Crypto exchange in talks for another $200-300M at $20B valuation, just after closing $500M at $15B. Setting up for 2026 IPO after acquiring NinjaTrader for $1.5B. Four executives fled ahead of the offering.

🔧 Modular's $1.6B Switzerland Play: Raised $250M led by US Innovative Technology Fund for their "run AI anywhere" platform. Promising to break Nvidia's CUDA stranglehold by making code portable across GPUs. The pitch: be the neutral Switzerland of AI chips.

🤖 Factory's $50M for "Droids" That Actually Code: Raised Series B at $300M valuation from Sequoia, NEA, Nvidia, and JP Morgan. Their "Droids" don't just autocomplete; they handle entire workflows like migrations, debugging, and documentation.

💰 Investor Quick Hits: From Dropout Dreams to Dynasty Dollars

🎓 YC's Launches Early Decision: Y Combinator’s new program lets college kids secure funding and a YC spot while still in school, then defer until after graduation. A complete 180 from the dropout-or-bust gospel they've preached for years.

✝️ Peter Thiel's Antichrist Investment Thesis: Thiel is hosting a closed four-part lecture series in SF about biblical prophecies and how existential risks (nuclear war, bioweapons, autonomous AI) lead to a one-world totalitarian government, aka the Antichrist.

🚀 Ex-Sequoia's Matt Miller Bags $400M for Evantic: After 12 years at Sequoia (with a messy Klarna board stint), Miller closed his London-based B2B AI fund with 140 founders/ operators as LPs. He is allocating up to 50% of carry to LPs who help portfolio companies. 

👑 Draper Dynasty's 4th Gen Raises $87M: Adam Draper closed Boost VC's fourth fund for pre-seed, backed by family offices including his dad, grandfather, and cousin. The pressure of losing your cousin's money apparently trumps losing institutional LPs'.

🤖 Touring Capital's $330M CVC Fund: Ex-Microsoft M12 and SoftBank Vision Fund partners closed their debut fund, citing an MIT study showing 95% of AI pilots fail. Their angle is that they know why corporate AI fails because they watched it happen from inside.

💸 IPO & M&A Quick Hits: From Gaming Kingdoms to Shopping

🎮 EA's $55B Saudi Takeover: Saudi PIF, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners are taking Electronic Arts private at $210/share in the largest LBO ever. The Kingdom already owns 9.9% and is doubling down on gaming for "soft power."

🛍️ eBay Acquires Gen Z Thrift Shop Tise: The auction dinosaur bought Norwegian social marketplace Tise (raised $45M) to pretend it's Depop. First invested via eBay Ventures in 2022, now buying the whole thing to get those sweet Gen Z engagement metrics.

🧠 MentalHealth.com Buys Therapy.ai: The platform acquired AI therapy startup to "augment care and strengthen relationships" amid 23% of Americans facing AI therapy bans. The global mental health crisis costs $1T annually, but maybe it can be solved with chatbots?

📚 Ignite Reading Acquires Esteam: The virtual tutoring platform bought AI education startup Esteam to "end the literacy crisis" with automatic speech recognition. Now AI can listen to kids struggle with reading in real-time and generate "precise skill maps."

💸 In Other Funding News

Here's a roundup of notable recent funding rounds across various sectors:

🤖 Business Process Automation & AI

• Burnt: Raised $3.8M Seed led by Penny Jar Capital for restaurant app that automates workflows stuck in legacy ERP systems.

• Factory: Raised $50M Series B led by New Enterprise Associates for AI software agents automating complex development workflows.

• Obot AI: Raised $35M Seed led by Mayfield Fund, Nexus Venture Partners for an open-source Enterprise MCP Gateway.

• Juicebox: Raised $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital for AI platform for talent sourcing, recruiting, and engagement.

• SolidCore.ai: Raised $4M Seed led by Runtime Ventures for making generative AI adoption safe, accountable, and scalable.

• Mohi: Raised $500K Pre-Seed led by YC for a platform that analyzes AI agent workflows to optimize autonomous processes.

🔧 Developer Infrastructure & Tools

• Emergent: Raised $23M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners for a platform for agentic vibe-coding.

• Greptile: Raised $25M Series A led by Benchmark for AI code reviewer that reviews pull requests with full codebase context.

• Bastion: Raised $14.6M Seed led by Coinbase Ventures for a platform that blends the best of web2 and web3 tech.

• Belfort: Raised $6M Seed led by Vsquared Ventures for technology that accelerates encrypted data processing.

🏥 Healthcare & Biotech

• Daymark Health: Raised $20M Series A led by Healthier Capital & Blue Venture Fund for a value-based oncology company.

• AmplifyMD: Raised $20M Series B led by Forerunner for a telemedicine platform connecting medical institutions with specialists.

💳 Fintech

• WeTravel: Raised $92M Series C led by Sapphire Ventures for an online payment platform that offers pre-departure tools.

• Divine Research: Raised $6.6M Seed led by Paradigm for a credit platform that provides small, fast loans.

🏢 Other Notable Rounds

• Quo: Raised $105M Venture Round led by General Catalyst to get a business phone number with no extra phone or SIM.

• Track3D: Raised $10M Series A for an AI reality intelligence platform that revolutionizes construction monitoring.

• Telo Trucks: Raised $20M Series A led by Marc Tarpenning & Yves Behar for compact electric vehicle trucks.

• MaxHome: Raised $5M Seed led by Fika Ventures for an AI-native platform for real estate agents and brokerages.

• Alguna: Raised $4M Seed led by Atlantic Labs & Mango Capital for a modern pricing, quoting, and billing platform.

• Fortera: Raised Venture Round led by Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund for materials tech that produces zero CO2 cement.

• Relaw: Raised Pre-Seed led by YC for AI Assistant for B2C Law Firms.

Please note that we're still working on building our data pipelines to identify pre-seed rounds as they come.

🌟 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.

💭 Parting Thoughts

That's a wrap on another week where the U.S. government forced China to sell TikTok for couch cushion money, Nvidia funded its own customers in a $100B circular economy, and Apple built a secret chatbot to figure out what a chatbot actually does.

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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