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Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire AI industry. And he's using OpenAI's own talent as his weapons. What started as a few strategic hires has escalated into the most aggressive corporate talent raid Silicon Valley has ever witnessed.
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.
Before getting into the newsletter, you should check out our events this week:
🔥 Context VC & Startup Intros Events Coming Up
June 30: WorkTech Startup Pitch Night: Join us for a high-energy event where founders and investors come together to explore how AI is transforming the future of work. Unfortunately, pitches are closed, but join on Luma!
July 2: Caffeine & Capital: The next round of our morning coffee series. Come ready to get caffeinated and talk startups. Sign up on Luma!
July 7: Live AdvancingVC Podcast Interview Series with Tim Hsia from Context VC:
10:30 AM: Amanda Robson, Founder of Modern Technical Fund, which recently closed a $22M debut fund. Sign up on Luma!
2:00 PM: Chris Douvos, Founder of Ahoy Capital, who is known for his unique LP perspective. Sign up on Luma!
3:30 PM: Jeff Clavier, the Founding Partner at Uncork Capital, one of the valley’s top seed-stage VCs. Sign up on Luma!
Keep reading for the latest edition of the Weekly Download covering the past week:
🎯 BLUF: Bottom Line Upfront
Meta executed the AI's Biggest Talent Heist, poaching 8 OpenAI researchers in one week.
Zuck is Raising $29B to fund massive AI infrastructure expansion; it’s one of the largest private financings by a public tech company ever
Aaron Sorkin is making The Social Network Part II, focusing on Facebook's role in misinformation and January 6th
A Venture Studio plans to launch 100K startups per year using AI to help everyday people become founders
Databricks, Perplexity Co-founder Pledged $100M to create an AI research institute, claiming commercial interests have corrupted the field
🧠 Meta's AI Ambitions Take Center Stage
Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash
🎯 Meta Just Executed the AI's Biggest Talent Heist
Meta is making OpenAI's worst nightmare come true. In just one week, Zuckerberg poached eight researchers from OpenAI, including those behind the most advanced reasoning models:
Shengjia Zhao: Contributor to GPT-4 development.
Hongyu Ren: Post-training lead for o1-mini and o4-mini models.
Jiahui Yu: Multimodal systems expert with DeepMind pedigree.
Shuchao Bi: Manager of OpenAI's multimodal models.
Trapit Bansal, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai: Specialized in reasoning systems and foundational model training.
Apparently, Meta reportedly offered signing bonuses of up to $100M to seal these deals.
🤖 What are We Hearing from OpenAI?
In response, OpenAI is "recalibrating comp" and pausing ops this week to address 80-hour workweeks. With a few words from their C-suite:
Chief Research Officer Mark Chen told staff it feels like "someone broke into our home and stole something."
CEO Sam Altman publicly dismissed Meta's success, claiming "none of our best people have decided to take them up."
🕵️ The Secret "Genius List" Reveals Meta’s New Playbook
Behind the OpenAI heist lies an even more systematic strategy. Zuck has been quietly building what insiders call:
"The List:" a curated roster of the AI world's most promising minds:
Specific Profile: 20s to 30s PhDs from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon, or alumni of elite labs like OpenAI or Google DeepMind.
They all know each other: Meta is targeting the interconnected web of researchers who collectively push the field forward.
The Purpose: Understand the relationships to predict which hires will create a multiplier effect, attracting entire research clusters rather than individuals.
The existence of "The List" shows that what appeared to be opportunistic hiring is evidence of a sophisticated, long-term talent strategy.
Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash
💰 The $29B Fundraising Bet Shows How Serious This Gets
Behind the talent raids, Meta is also preparing to spend like never before, with advanced talks to raise up to $29B:
The Amount ($3B Equity & $26B Debt): To be one of the largest private capital financings ever undertaken by a public tech company.
The Investors: Heavy hitters including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle, and PIMCO.
The Purpose: Funding a massive expansion of AI data center infrastructure.
By going with private credit over public bonds, Meta gets greater flexibility, faster deployment, and less public scrutiny.
⚡ The Gigawatt Shopping Spree to Feed Its Insatiable AI Appetite
The energy requirements are staggering, too, as Meta just secured 1 GW of renewable energy through:
791 MW from Invenergy across Ohio, Arkansas, and Texas through solar and wind projects (adding to an already hefty 1,800 MW partnership)
360 MW from Adapture Renewables via two Texas solar farms, where Meta will snag the environmental credits
650 MW from AES through solar projects in Texas and Kansas
150 MW Geothermal Plant in New Mexico plus a 20-year deal to keep Illinois' 1.1 GW Clinton nuclear facility humming along
The timeline: Most projects will start between 2027-2028, though some solar facilities could be operational as early as 2024.
It's a massive bet that positions Meta to satisfy AI's voracious energy appetite while being able to achieve clean energy goals and net-zero emissions target by 2030.
🎬 Aaron Sorkin Is Back to Roast Facebook (Again)
Sony just greenlit The Social Network Part II, and Aaron Sorkin is returning to expose what Facebook became after those Harvard dorm room days.
Sorkin will write and direct the sequel, drawing from WSJ's Facebook Files investigation.
Focus shifts from startup betrayals to Facebook's role in misinformation and political polarization.
Specifically explores how Facebook contributed to the January 6th Capitol riots.
With Meta now worth over $800B and facing constant scrutiny, there's arguably a much richer, darker story to tell than the original startup tale.
🚀 The Bottom Line: Meta's Is Going All-In AI
These big moves aren’t random: it's part of Meta's systematic response to Llama 4's disappointing performance earlier this year.
Zuck is betting Meta's future on a simple thesis: whoever controls the best AI talent and infrastructure will dominate the next decade of tech.
The next 18 months will determine whether Zuckerberg's AI gamble pays off or becomes Silicon Valley's most spectacular flameout.
💡 The Future of Startup Funding
Photo by Waqar Mujahid on Unsplash
🚀 This Startup Studio Wants to Create 100K Companies a Year
Henrik Werdelin spent 15 years launching startups through his studio, Prehype. Now his new venture, Audos, uses AI to help everyday people become entrepreneurs at an unprecedented scale.
The Audience: Targets mechanics, golf instructors, and nutritionists who see opportunity but lack startup experience.
The AI Agent Studio: Users will be guided by AI agents through identifying problems and testing customer acquisition via social media.
The Terms: Takes 15% revenue share instead of equity, provides up to $25K funding, plus AI tools.
True Ventures led the $11.5M Seed round, betting that millions want entrepreneurial opportunities but lack access to traditional startup capital.
🔬 Databricks, Perplexity Co-Founder Drops $100M to Fix AI Research's Money Problem
Databricks and Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski thinks AI research has gotten too cozy with commercial interests, so he's putting $100M where his mouth is:
His new Laude Institute will function as a grant-making fund with an all-star board including UC Berkeley's Dave Patterson and Google's Jeff Dean.
First Major Commitment: $3M annually over five years for a new AI Systems Lab at Berkeley.
The Purpose: Aims to counter increasingly commercialized AI development with independent research.
While "humanity-focused" AI initiatives aren't exactly rare, having this caliber of technical leaders backing truly independent research could provide a much-needed counterbalance.
💸 In Other Funding News
Here’s a roundup of notable recent funding rounds across various sectors:
🗣️ Voice & Communication Technology
Clearspeed: Raised $60M Series D led by Align Private Capital for voice-based risk assessment tech.
Decagon: Raised $131M in a Series C led by Accel and a16z Growth to develop conversational AI agents for customer experience.
Wispr Flow: Raised $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures for effortless voice dictation technology.
SuperDial: Raised $12M Series A led by SignalFire for improving healthcare communication, one phone call at a time.
🔧 Developer Infrastructure & Tools
LanceDB: Raised $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures for a developer-friendly, open source database.
Eventual: Raised $20M Series A led by Felicis to help AI companies handle petabytes of multimodal data.
Skyramp: Raised $10M Seed led by Sequoia Capital for testing solutions that help devs find and fix future production issues.
🤖 Business Process Automation
Kognitos: Raised $25M Series B led by Prosperity7 Ventures for an AI platform that automates business ops.
BackOps AI: Raised $6M Seed led by Construct Capital for AI autonomous supply chain management solutions.
Waypoint AI: Raised $3.1M Pre-Seed led by 42CAP and Dreamcraft Ventures for AI takes care of issues before they become crises.
💼 Sales & Marketing Technology
🏥 Healthcare Technology
Neuron23: Raised $96.5M Series D for developing precision drugs intended to treat Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Empo Health: Raised $7M Seed led by Story Ventures for in-home health monitoring tech that fits seamlessly into patients' daily lives.
Avelis Health: Raised $500K Pre-Seed led by Y Combinator for AI that eliminates medical bills and fights insurance denials.
🔬 Advanced Hardware & Computing
Tacta Systems: Raised $64M Series A led by America's Frontier Fund and SBVA for robotics with human-like tactile abilities.
Snowcap Compute: Raised $23M Seed round led by Playground Global for building a superconducting compute platform.
LightXcelerate: Raised $1.9M Seed for photonics technology that empowers the next computing paradigm for AI.
🎮 Consumer AI & Entertainment
Owl AI: Raised $11M Seed led by S32 for revolutionizing the way people watch, coach, and judge sports using AI.
2wai: Raised $5M Pre-Seed for a platform that enables users to create and interact with highly realistic AI avatars called "HoloAvatars."
Gemist: Raised $6M Seed for the first-ever D2C custom jewelry company that allows you to design and try jewelry virtually.
💰 Other Fundings
Spinwheel: Raised $30M Series A led by F-Prime Capital to develop Agentic AI for the consumer credit ecosystem.
Paraform: Raised $20M in Series A funding led by Felicis for a hiring marketplace.
Bonfy.AI: Raised $9.5M Seed led by TLV Partners for cybersecurity software.
Jarsy: Raised $5M Pre-Seed led by Breyer Capital for a platform offering global investment opportunities using stablecoins.
Jobright: Raised $3.2M Seed led by Translink Capital for an AI-native job platform providing a career agent that finds, customizes, and submits apps.
💸 New Venture Funds
Sentinel Global raised $213.5M for its first fund focused on enterprise technology.
Counterpart Ventures raised $132M for its third fund to unlock community and corporate value for startups.
Avista Healthcare Partners raised a continuation fund for GCM, a Union City, Calif.-based manufacturer of components for medical tech.
📈 IPO & Public-Market Moves
Wealthfront: The 17-year-old automated investing platform has filed for an IPO after raising $250M+ from Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Slow Ventures, UBS, and Greylock.
🤝 M&A Activity
OpenAI has acquihired Crossing Minds, a SF startup that builds AI recommendation engines for e-commerce.
Meta is in talks to acquire PlayAI, a voice technology startup, to integrate advanced voice features into future products.
Rubrik is acquiring Predibase, a startup that helps businesses customize and deploy open source AI models, in a deal valued between $100-500M.
Capchase acquired Vartana, an SF-based vendor financing platform; it has raised over $150M in VC funding.
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 keep you informed and help you raise in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley. Our free weekly newsletter delivers curated insights, deals, and trends to help you navigate the startup ecosystem.
Stay tuned for our upcoming paid daily newsletter and fundraising app to help you close your next round!
💭 Parting Thoughts
That’s a wrap for this week! Whether you're building, investing, or just exploring the AI space, we hope these stories sparked new ideas. Catch you next week with more updates from the Bay Area's fast-moving startup scene.
Till next time,
Dev Chandra
CEO @ Startup Intros
Associate @ Context VC
LinkedIn: /in/devchandra
Tim Hsia
Investor @ Context VC
Co-Founder @ Startup Intros
LinkedIn: /in/timhsia
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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