Weekly Download #9

Welcome to the most unhinged week in tech history, where Tesla's solution to cratering revenue is opening a diner with robots that can't high-five, and OpenAI discovered that $40B burns faster than rocket fuel.

If you thought Silicon Valley had already reached peak absurdity, grab your $13.50 Tesla Burger with electric sauce and buckle up for this ride.

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

Here's what's moving markets and making headlines:

📉 Tesla Posts Worst Quarter in a Decade: Tesla's Q2 2025 revenue crashed 12% YoY to $22.5B, with automotive revenue down 16.6% and deliveries falling 14%. The company made $500 less per car than last quarter, regulatory credit revenue was cut in half, and operating income plummeted 42%. Key executives are fleeing, Musk's political antics are scaring away eco-conscious buyers, and analysts warn free cash flow could go negative by year-end.

The response? Double down on "AI and robotaxis" that currently generate zero revenue.

🤖 Tesla Only Built "Hundreds" of Promised 5,000 Robot Units: Musk promised 5,000 Optimus robots in 2025, but Tesla's only managed to build "hundreds." The program is so secretive that it requires multiple security clearances, the engineering head just quit, and Tesla's suing YC-backed competitors over trade secrets. While rivals sensibly use simple pinchers, Musk is currently betting Tesla's future on humanoid butlers that currently can't even high-five.

🍔 Tesla Opens a Diner Where Robots Serve Burgers: The Tesla Diner opened July 21 in LA, featuring 80 Supercharger stalls, roller-skating servers, and an Optimus robot making popcorn. The menu includes a $13.50 "Tesla Burger with electric sauce" served in Cybertruck boxes, while two 45-foot screens play movies synced to your car's sound system. It's either clever lifestyle branding or the world's most expensive midlife crisis manifested as a restaurant.

💸 xAI's $12B Debt Makes Even WeWork Look Fiscally Responsible: Musk's AI startup is seeking $12B in private credit to fund "Colossus 2," its second data center packed with 550,000 Nvidia chips. This comes after already raising $20B, but xAI is projected to burn through $13B in 2025 alone while generating "little revenue." At a reported $75-200B valuation range, they're essentially valued at $15B per year of cash incineration.

📡 Starlink Goes Dark Right After T-Mobile Launch: Coincidentally, Starlink suffered a 2.5-hour global outage on July 24, about one day after T-Mobile launched its nationwide satellite texting service using Starlink satellites. Over 60,000 users lost service worldwide, including Ukraine's military (awkward). SpaceX blamed the outages on "internal software services" and a "recent network upgrade."

💸 OpenAI Reopens $40B Round Because It Wasn't Enough: Just months after closing the largest private funding round in history ($40B at a $300B valuation), OpenAI is back seeking "additional capital from both new and existing investors." The company's burning cash so fast that even SoftBank's $30B commitment (contingent on OpenAI becoming a real company by year-end) can't keep up.

💰 Founders Fund & Dragoneer Drop $1B+ Each on OpenAI: Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Dragoneer each committed over $1B to OpenAI's second $30B tranche, because when you're already in deep, why not double down? These "existing investors" are showing "strong institutional confidence" as long as OpenAI ditches its nonprofit charade by year-end.

🏗️ Stargate Gets Real: 4.5 Gigawatts and 100K Jobs: OpenAI and Oracle announced a 4.5 GW data center partnership to power 2M+ chips and create 100,000 jobs. However, they're counting construction jobs for building the facilities, but will eventually automate all other jobs. Combined with their Texas site, that's 5 GW of capacity, halfway to their $500B/10 GW goal.

🧑‍💻 GPT-5 Will Code Your Job Away: Expected in August 2025, OpenAI's GPT-5 is being hyped as the coding messiah, with early testers claiming it can debug legacy code, handle "five-hour tasks," and work with a 20M-token context window. The model is reportedly integrated with Codex capabilities, supports multimodal inputs, and is available in "nano" versions.

🔒 Vanta Hits $4.15B Because Compliance is the New Gold Rush: The AI-powered compliance platform raised $150M Series D led by Wellington Management, jumping from $2.45B to $4.15B valuation in just one year (a cool 69% increase). With 12,000 customers across 58 countries and $220M ARR, they're essentially selling digital peace of mind to companies terrified of regulatory hellfire.

🏗️ Armada Raises $131M for Leviathan: The edge computing startup raised $131M from Founders Fund, Microsoft, and others to launch megawatt-scale modular data centers that can be deployed "within weeks." Their Leviathan units offer 10x the compute of their previous model and can run on everything from natural gas to nuclear power. And the US military is already testing these bad boys for drone data processing.

🦄 Reka AI Triples Its Way to Unicorn Status with $110M: This Sunnyvale startup raised $110M led by Nvidia and Snowflake, rocketing from $300M to over a $1B valuation in just two years. Founded by ex-Google and Meta researchers in 2022, they're pushing "ultra-efficient multimodal models" that handle video, image, text, and audio while using "dramatically less computational resources."

🧠 Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Backs 37 AI Startups: Google's AI godfather, Jeff Dean, has quietly angel invested in 37 AI startups over two years, including Perplexity. The co-founder of Google Brain is betting on everything from stealth startups to ex-Google researchers, focusing on AI tooling, LLM infrastructure, and AI for science. 

💰Elad Gil's $1.5B Fund is Stretching the Definition of Solo GP: His prolific fund could be up to $2B fund and follows Cosmic-Aleph 3 that raised $1.1B. With early bets on Airbnb, Stripe, and Coinbase, Gil's proving you don't need a team when you have a track record that makes LPs throw money at you like confetti.

🚀 Glade Brook Closed Its Fourth $515M Fund: The Strategic Growth Fund IV (SG IV) comes in at $515M, surpassing its original target of $450M. Having already invested in companies such as SpaceX, Revolut, Stripe, Perplexity, and others, this fund focuses on growth equity investments in tech across all stages.

🏴‍☠️ Meta Names Its AI Chief: Zuckerberg crowned Shengjia Zhao (who built ChatGPT, GPT-4, and o1 at OpenAI) as Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Also, Meta has just hired three Google DeepMind researchers (Tianhe Yu, Cosmo Du, and Weiyue Wang) who built the model, which achieved gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad. 

🍎 Apple's AI Exodus: Apple's foundation models head, Ruoming Pang, bolted to Meta for $200M after Craig Federighi killed his team's open-source plans, fearing the public would see their mobile models as "too weak." Pang's exit triggered a morale collapse and more departures, while Apple is asking researchers for "product ideas" without a technical roadmap.

💻 Intel Axes 25,000 Jobs, Cancels Factories: New CEO Lip-Bu Tan is cutting 15% of Intel's workforce while canceling billion-dollar chip factories in Germany and Poland. After missing the mobile and AI revolutions, Intel's new strategy is apparently "stop hemorrhaging cash." 

🖥️ Microsoft Defends 9,000 Job Cuts: Satya Nadella addressed Microsoft's latest 9,000-person layoffs with an email that reads like it's from ChatGPT. Despite the company "thriving," they need to cut jobs because of "the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value."

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

Total Bay Area Deals: 29, totaling $1.117B

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

That's a wrap on this crazy week in Silicon Valley, where burning billions is a business model and robot waiters are considered innovation while 34,000 humans lose their jobs.

Remember: when your AI startup's burn rate exceeds some countries' GDP and your solution to falling revenue is serving burgers with "electric sauce," you've either reached enlightenment or need an intervention, and in this market, nobody can tell the difference.

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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