Weekly Download #21

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Welcome to the week where Alibaba solved the GPU shortage with math instead of money, ByteDance quietly built a ChatGPT killer with 157M users while Silicon Valley was asleep.

Also, Meta just pulled the most predictable rug pull in platform history: invited everyone to build on WhatsApp, then kicked them all out once they copied their homework.

Check it out, stay plugged in, and don’t miss these hot upcoming events:

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While everyone's hoarding H100s, Alibaba Cloud dropped "Aegaeon," a GPU pooling system that slashes Nvidia requirements by 82% when serving dozens of LLMs up to 72B parameters.

The Breakthrough: Instead of dedicating GPUs to models that sit idle 90% of the time, Aegaeon grabs GPUs when needed and releases them when no longer in use.

The Context That Matters:

Translation: The US tried to cripple China's AI ambitions with export controls. Instead, they forced Chinese engineers to become 5x more efficient. Congratulations, you created your own competition.

Nvidia and TSMC just produced the first Blackwell wafer at Fab 21 in Arizona, marking the first time the world's most advanced AI chips are made on American soil. Jensen Huang called it "historic," and for once, the hyperbole is warranted.

What's Actually Happening:

Reality Check: The wafers still ship back to Taiwan for packaging and testing, so the supply chain isn't fully domestic. But when you can't get chips fast enough and China's threatening Taiwan, "Made in USA" suddenly matters, even if it's only half-true.

ByteDance's Doubao hit 157M monthly active users by August 2025, processing 30T tokens daily. For context, that's more than ChatGPT's global usage, concentrated entirely in China, built by the TikTok company everyone underestimated.

The Stunning Scale:

Why You Missed This: While OpenAI burns $13B chasing AGI and making enterprise deals, ByteDance focused on consumer features, mobile optimization, and platform integration.

ByteDance is quietly pushing Cici in the UK, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. Here's the kicker: it runs on OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini models, not ByteDance's own tech.

The Stealth Invasion:

Translation: ByteDance is using American AI models to conquer non-American markets while keeping its ownership hidden. It's like Huawei building phones with Qualcomm chips and selling them everywhere the US isn't looking.

📱 WhatsApp's AI Purge: There Can Be Only One: Meta updated WhatsApp Business API to ban ALL general-purpose AI chatbots by January 2026. Meta AI remains the sole survivor with 2B users having one monopoly.

👑 MLK Estate Shuts Down AI MLK: OpenAI paused all MLK video generation after "disrespectful depictions" and a formal estate complaint. Now offering opt-outs for other historical figures, dead icons have more control than living creators.

🎌 Japan Defends Anime as National Treasure: Government formally asked OpenAI to stop Sora from generating anime/manga content, calling them "irreplaceable treasures." When Pikachu becomes foreign policy, the simulation has jumped the shark.

🎨 Pinterest Admits 57% of Internet Is AI Garbage: Rolling out feed controls to limit "AI slop" after acknowledging GenAI content hit 57% of all online material. First platform to admit we've crossed the synthetic content event horizon.

📚 Wikipedia's Slow Bleed: While specific traffic numbers remain disputed, the pattern is clear: AI chatbots serve Wikipedia content without attribution or backlinks, breaking the volunteer → edit → donate cycle that keeps it alive.

🛡️ Cloudflare's One-Click AI Blockade: New managed robots.txt lets sites block AI crawlers while allowing search engines. Separate permissions for indexing vs training. Enforcement still relies on crawlers playing nice. Spoiler: they won't.

🚀 Tempo's $500M Because Stripe Needs Its Own Blockchain: Stripe's blockchain platform raised from Thrive and Greenoaks at a $5B valuation, proving that even payments unicorns need crypto side projects, as everyone's chasing the "blockchain payments" narrative.

💼 Deel's $300M Trophy Round at $17.3B: The remote payroll unicorn raised from basically everyone (Ribbit, a16z, Coatue), jumping its valuation by billions. Claims to be targeting 100M customers globally, which is adorable as there are only 3.3B employed people on Earth.

🎮 General Intuition's $134M Seed Because AI Needs Gaming Data: Khosla and General Catalyst threw the fattest seed ever at teaching AI spatial reasoning through video games. Building "world models" from Medal's gaming dataset as AI just doesn’t understand physics.

📄 Reducto's $75M to Make PDFs Less Terrible: A16z led this Series B (total now $108M) for "AI document intelligence," or teaching LLMs to read invoices. It’s been 12 weeks since Series A, because VCs finally realized enterprises have 50B unstructured docs that AI can't read.

📊 Campfire's $65M Speed Run: Closed Series B just 12 weeks after Series A (over $100M total) from Accel and Ribbit for "AI-driven ERP." Translation: they're automating the mind-numbing spreadsheet work that junior accountants thought was job security.

💎 Huobi Founder's Billion-Dollar Ethereum Bet: Li Lin and Asia's earliest Ethereum backers raised $1B to launch a digital asset trust focused on accumulating ETH, targeting institutional exposure with plans to acquire a Nasdaq-listed company as the vehicle.

💊 Ascenta's $325M Biotech Time Machine: Dr. Evan Rachlin and Dr. Lorence Kim closed their inaugural fund, betting on "multi-medicine therapeutic platforms," or VC speak for companies that haven't picked which disease to cure yet.

🔗 Asymmetric's $137M Second Try: Raised for Fund II targeting early-stage crypto and tech, because Fund I's returns were apparently asymmetric enough to convince LPs to double down. No word on whether they've figured out the difference between asymmetric returns and just losing money one-sidedly.

📸 Getty-Shutterstock's $3.7B Monopoly Attempt: The UK's CMA gave the two stock photo giants until October 27 to explain why merging won't create a dystopian future where every Getty watermark costs your firstborn.

💰 Ripple's $1B Traditional Finance Shopping Spree: The XRP company bought GTreasury for a cool billion, their third major acquisition this year. Ripple's master plan: convince Fortune 500 companies that managing cash flow on blockchain is totally normal.

🎯 Anduril's Infrared Empire Building: The $30B defense unicorn acquired American Infrared Solutions for undisclosed terms, adding cooled infrared cameras to its arsenal. Palmer Luckey's war machine continues vacuuming up every sensor company in America.

🦑 Kraken's $100M Regulatory Arbitrage: Paid IG Group $32.5M cash plus $67.5M in stock for Small Exchange's CFTC license, because apparently it's cheaper to buy regulation than earn it. Nothing says "we're ready for that IPO" like acquiring your way into compliance.

Here's a roundup of this week's trending startup activity in the Bay Area:

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So there you have it: a week where China solved the GPU shortage through actual engineering while America solved it by throwing money at TSMC, ByteDance conquered the world while pretending not to exist, and platforms invited developers to dinner just to poison the meal.

Remember: when your efficiency breakthrough comes from being sanctioned and your platform strategy is "everyone out except us," you're not building the future, you're speedrunning the trust apocalypse with a side of silicon sovereignty.

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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