Weekly Download #4

Crypto Goes Corporate: Senate passes stablecoin laws, JPMorgan launches token, Shopify accepts crypto payments

$2B for PowerPoint: Ex-OpenAI CTO raises record seed round for startup with zero revenue

Talent Wars: Tech giants pay billions to acquire entire AI teams instead of hiring

SEO is Dead: Startup raises $20M to help brands optimize for AI search engines

Back Office Billions: Private equity software company becomes $1.1B unicorn with AI platform

Solo Success: Developer sells 6-month side project to Wix for $80M cash

The Regulatory Breakthrough: Stablecoin issuers must now back tokens 100% with segregated funds (no more Celsius-style shenanigans), and there's a $10B threshold where federal oversight kicks in. Big Tech companies need unanimous approval from Treasury, Fed, and FDIC chairs to issue stablecoins.

The Corporate Stampede: Within days, JPMorgan announced JPMD, their institutional deposit token launching on Coinbase's blockchain. Shopify has partnered with Stripe and Coinbase to let millions of merchants accept USDC payments across 34 countries. Even Walmart and Amazon are reportedly exploring their own stablecoins.

The Numbers: Stablecoin market cap hit a record $251.7B, up 22% this year. Stripe has processed $94B in stablecoin payments over two years, with monthly volumes growing from under $2B to over $6.3B.

The Resume that Broke Silicon Valley: Murati was OpenAI's former CTO who led the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and voice mode before leaving in September. She also briefly served as interim CEO when Sam Altman got the temporary boot.

The Dream Team: Several former OpenAI colleagues have joined, including co-founder John Schulman, as well as other AI rockstars like Bob McGrew and Alec Radford.

The Funding Frenzy: A16z led the round with participation from Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners. This could be the largest seed round in history, which is saying something in an era where "seed" rounds have grown from $50M in 2015 to $200M today.

What They're Building: Nobody really knows! The company's goal is to make AI systems "more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," which just means "we'll figure it out as we go."

The Recent Example: Meta just paid $14.8B to get Scale AI's CEO Alexandr Wang and his team. The company? Mostly irrelevant. The talent? Priceless. Wang now runs Meta's new "superintelligence" lab.

Other Tech Giants: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are doing the same, getting entire AI teams for billions. Google paid $2.7B for Character.AI's founders, plus 30 engineers.

Why the Frenzy? Finding good AI talent is hard, and with Seed-to-Series A funding down 86%, struggling AI startups make perfect targets. Instead of the painful process of hiring, tech giants just buy pre-assembled teams.

The Deal Structure: Companies avoid merger reviews by "licensing technology" and "hiring teams,” not technically buying the whole company. About 70% of the deal goes to employees as golden handcuffs, while early investors get scraps.

The Shift: When asking ChatGPT, "What's the best project management tool?", you get a direct answer, not a list of links like that from Google Search. So the goal is to get AI to mention your brand or product in its response.

What Profound Does: They track how brands appear across the AI platforms by processing 100+ million AI queries monthly. Early clients, such as Indeed and MongoDB, are seeing a 25-40% improvement in AI visibility within 60 days.

The Investor Lineup: Kleiner Perkins led, with Khosla Ventures, NVIDIA Ventures, and angels like Guillermo Rauch (Vercel's CEO) joining.

The Unsexy Reality: Private markets manage over $1T in capital, but still run on Excel spreadsheets and email chains. When you're handling pension funds and sovereign wealth money, "move fast and break things" isn't really an option.

What Juniper Square Does: They're the operating system for 2,000+ private market firms managing 40,000+ funds. Plus, JunieAI automates the mind-numbing stuff, including investor updates, fund administration, and portfolio reporting.

Why It Matters: Private markets are projected to hit $60T in the next decade. When the industry manages more money than most countries' GDP needs, better software, investors pay attention.

The Numbers: 10k users in three weeks, 250k users in six months, and $189,000 profit in May alone. All bootstrapped.

What It Does: "Vibe coding" platform where you type what you want, and AI builds complete applications.

The Growth Hack: Shlomo just posted about building it on LinkedIn and Twitter. That's it. No marketing budget, just a developer documenting his journey.

Commure: Raised $200M Round led by General Catalyst for an AI-based healthcare company.

Pano: Raised $44M Series B led by Giant Ventures for deep learning AI and computer vision to automatically detect wildfire events in real time.

Browserbase: Raised $40M Series B led by Notable Capital for browser-based AI infrastructure.

Cluely: Raised $15M Series A led by a16z for a desktop assistant that uses AI to help users in virtual meetings and sales calls.

Alta: Raised $11M Seed led by Menlo Ventures for next-generation personal shopping and styling powered by AI.

PublicAI: Raised $8M Series A led by Saudi Telecom Company for a Web3 distributed AI training network.

Crosby: Raised $5.8M Round led by Sequoia Capital for an AI legaltech startup.

Typedef: Raised $5.5M Seed led by Pear VC for an inference-first data engine built for productionizing AI workloads.

mysite.ai: Raised $2.4M Pre-Seed led by Inovo.vc for an AI employee to lead business online presence.

Athena: Raised $2.2M Seed led by Y Combinator for helping marketing teams improve brand mentions in AI-powered search tools.

Uncountable: Raised $27M Series A led by Sageview Capital for a unified R&D laboratory informatics platform for industrial research and development.

Fleet Device Management: Raised $27M Series B led by Ten Eleven Ventures for an open-source device management platform.

WorkWhile: Raised $23M Series B led by Rethink Impact for an hourly labor marketplace connecting businesses with flexible workers.

PrismaX: Raised $11M Seed led by a16z crypto for a robotics intelligence platform offering decentralized data collection and model training.

Digger: Raised $3.6M Seed led by Initialized Capital for securing Terraform deployments.

eMotive Software: Raised $3M Round for comprehensive SAAS solutions for the asset-based sales and lending community.

Visby Medical: Raised $55M Round led by Catalio Capital Management for polymerase chain reaction diagnostic tests for infectious disease detection.

Celltrio: Raised $15M Round led by Premier Partners for cell culturing automation and biobanking solutions.

Spinwheel: Raised $30M Series A led by F-Prime Capital for debt APIs and drop-in modules to help businesses and customers understand and act on debt.

Tensec: Raised $12M Seed led by Costanoa Ventures for cross-border B2B payments and global transaction banking for SMBs.

Inclined Technologies: Raised $7.9M Round for a financial technology company helping policyholders enhance life insurance policy value.

Xona Space Systems: Raised $74.6M Round for satellite services for positioning, navigation, and timing to support intelligent systems.

Project Eleven: Raised $6M Seed led by Variant & Quantonation for cryptography tools protecting digital assets from quantum computer attacks.

Integrated Reasoning: Raised $1.9M Seed led by 1984 Ventures for efficient computer processors, accelerating NP-complete problems.

Endeavor Catalyst: Raising $300M for its fifth global VC fund, which focuses exclusively on Endeavor Entrepreneur-led companies in emerging markets.

Saturn was acquired by Snap: This student calendar app raised $44M from firms like Insight Partners, Coatue, General Catalyst, Bezos Expeditions, and 01 Advisors.

Biomea Fusion: Post-IPO equity raise for a precision oncology company developing novel small molecules that target aggressive forms of cancer.

Navan: Filed for IPO; backed by a16z and Lightspeed, the corporate travel and expense management platform generated $300M in revenue in 2022 and is valued at $9.2B.