Hi, welcome back from the weekend.:) | | Top News | OpenAI has struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom to co-develop 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips over four years, a massive bet on vertical hardware control as it races to secure compute far beyond Nvidia and AMD supply. The Wall Street Journal has more here. | Goldman Sachs is acquiring San Francisco–based Industry Ventures, the 25-year-old, San Francisco-based VC and secondaries shop with $7 billion in assets under management, in a deal worth up to $965 million. TechCrunch has more here. | California has enacted the first U.S. law regulating AI companion chatbots, requiring age checks, self-harm safeguards, and clear disclosures and signaling rising political pressure to hold AI companies legally accountable for harms to minors. TechCrunch has more here. | | |
“Every quarter, we pull together a spreadsheet that we all type PortCo data into. There is a lot of back and forth - when did that board meeting happen? Where are the notes?” | - Ops team at a $30B growth fund. | Make reporting season painless with PortfolioIQ. | | Oura is Winning Young Women and Losing Gym Rats, and It’s Fine with That |  | Image Credits: Oura |
| By Connie Loizos | Dorothy Kilroy has seen her company’s smart ring on some very famous fingers. Mark Zuckerberg wears one. So does Jack Dorsey. Prince Harry, too. But when Oura‘s chief commercial officer sat down at Toronto’s Elevate conference with this editor last week, she surprised me, saying the company’s fastest-growing user segment isn’t tech billionaires or wellness-obsessed execs. It’s women in their early twenties. | It highlighted what an interesting moment this is for Oura. The 13-year-old Finnish health tech company essentially invented the smart ring category and turned it into a billion-dollar business. But now competitors are circling, including Samsung with its Galaxy Ring, Ultrahuman with its no-subscription pitch, and Whoop with its athletic performance mystique. Each one promises to take a bite out of Oura’s lead. | The question isn’t whether Oura is winning right now – with 80% of the smart ring market, clearly, it is. The question is whether it can maintain that lead as the wearables market splinters across demographics and use cases, and behind that, whether Oura even needs to capture every demographic to succeed. | Kilroy spent eight years at Airbnb before joining Oura three years ago, and she has watched both companies expand the same way – through word of mouth. At Airbnb, 90% of the company’s revenue ties directly to people raving about their vacations, she suggested; at Oura, it’s people raving about their sleep scores. | That organic enthusiasm is particularly strong among so-called corporate athletes, or high-performing professionals trying to optimize their health to stay sharp. These are people who’ve realized that running on fumes isn’t actually a sustainable career strategy or, as Kilroy described them on stage, “people who are trying to be the best at their game. They want to make sure their sleep is dialed in. They want to know how to exercise. They want to look after their metabolic health.” | | | Massive Fundings | Wayve, a nine-year-old London startup that is developing AI systems designed to enable autonomous driving using AI models trained directly on real-world driving data, is reportedly in the market to raise up to $2 billion at an $8 billion post-money valuation, with Nvidia in talks to invest $500 million. (We’ll have to ask CEO Alex Kendall about this at Disrupt!) Robotics & Automation News has more here. | | Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings | ClaimSorted, a one-year-old startup that provides an AI-enabled service to streamline insurance claims, raised a $13.3 million seed round led by Atomico, with Eurazeo, Y Combinator, Firstminute Capital, and Start Ventures also participating. Forbes has more here. | Resistant AI, a seven-year-old Prague startup that develops tools that detect fraud and financial crime within automated systems and AI agents, raised a $25 million Series B round led by DTCP, with previous investors Notion Capital, GV, and Experian also participating. PYMNTS has more here. | | Smaller Fundings | Meta-Flux, a five-year-old Dublin startup that is building an AI decision-support platform to help drug developers analyze complex biological data, raised a $2.1 million seed round from angels. Tech.eu has more here. | | |
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Download the report today | | New Funds | DVC, a San Francisco venture firm founded by husband-and-wife team Marina Davidova and Nick Davidov, has closed a $75 million fund to back Series A and B AI startups, firing its analyst team and replacing them with AI agents and a network of founder-LPs who source deals, perform diligence, and mentor portfolio companies. Tech Funding News has more here. | | Exits | Two startups backed by Andreessen Horowitz – Fivetran, a 12-year-old Oakland data integration company; and dbt Labs, a nine-year-old Philadelphia data transformation startup – are merging in an all-stock deal to form a new company with $600 million in combined revenue. Reuters has more here. | | Going Public | Strava, now boasting 50 million monthly users and rising revenue from subscriptions and brand deals, is preparing for an IPO to capitalize on Gen Z’s shift toward running as a social outlet. TechCrunch has more here. | | People | Thinking Machines Lab has lost co-founder Andrew Tulloch to Meta, a high-profile defection that underscores Big Tech’s continued poaching of top AI talent despite soaring valuations and fundraising momentum at frontier model startups. TechCrunch has more here. | Following Salesforce co-founder and chairman Marc Benioff’s shock statement on Friday that President Trump should deploy troops to San Francisco, The San Francisco Standard reports that the software billionaire parted ways with San Francisco many years ago. More here. | Reddit cofounder and VC Alexis Ohanian confronted sportscaster Stephen A. Smith on First Take over his criticism of Ohanian’s wife, Serena Williams, for dancing during the Super Bowl halftime show, flipping the exchange into a pointed lesson on credibility. E! News has more here. | | Post-Its |  | Paul Graham @paulg |  |
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Benioff is eccentric and maybe well-meaning but I can't help noticing his oscillations coincide with whatever side has the upper hand. | | | 2:26 PM • Oct 13, 2025 | | | | | | 1.85K Likes 44 Retweets | 117 Replies |
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| | Essential Reads | TechCrunch puts together a list of Nvidia's startup investments, showing how the chipmaker is using its windfall to buy influence across AI labs, robotics, data centers, and autonomous systems, effectively anchoring demand for its hardware across the ecosystem. More here. | Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on how innovation drives long-term economic growth, highlighting the need for open societies, immigration, and competition to sustain technological progress amid rising protectionism. The New York Times has more here. | | Detours | Paris is nuts over peanut butter lattés as Buddy Buddy, a five-year-old Brussels café startup blending nut butters with coffee, builds cult status in the French capital and sets its sights on Manhattan | A new series from Tim Robinson is drawing raves. | A new trailer for the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series just dropped. | | Brain Rot |  | stylesace133K followers | |
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