Top News | According to a report in The Information, OpenAI’s top executives are split over IPO timing, with CEO Sam Altman pushing to go public as soon as this year while CFO Sarah Friar warns the company may not be ready amid massive spending on compute. PYMNTS has more here. | Anthropic says its annualized revenue has surged past $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of last year. Bloomberg has more here. | Kalshi just won a major legal victory after a federal appeals court ruled that New Jersey cannot block its sports prediction markets, marking the first appellate decision to side squarely with federal oversight over state gambling regulators. Reuters has more here. | Iran has threatened to strike Stargate's planned Abu Dhabi AI data center — part of the $500 billion OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle venture — in retaliation for U.S. military pressure, even releasing a video that zoomed in the facility as a warning shot. TechCrunch has more here. | | |
Harmonic | Market maps, competitive analysis, fundraising and ARR projections. | All in one conversation. | That’s the power of AI that knows private markets. | Learn more about Scout | | OpenAI Alums Have Been Quietly Investing From a New, Potentially $100M Fund |  | Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch |
| By Julie Bort | A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has made its first close on its $100 million goal, the founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written a couple of checks. | The fund is called Zero Shot (a play on the AI training term) and its co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming VCs almost by serendipity. | Three of the founding partners hail from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, the former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer, is well-known as the host of The OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Interdimensional, an AI deployment consultancy. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, who then became a VC and is a founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy. | The alums are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, previously a founding partner at 01A, the growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fifth founding member of the fund is Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, who is also CEO at Mayne’s Interdimensional. | The OpenAI alums have “been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked together at the model maker from before it released ChatGPT through its wildest growth years. | After leaving, they all found themselves constantly being hit up to consult for VCs about emerging AI tech, and by founder friends wanting advice. That’s what propelled Mayne to start his consulting company. | “Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and interested in doing companies,” Mayne said. | | | Massive Fundings | SpectronRx, a 22-year-old Indianapolis company that produces medical isotopes and radiopharmaceuticals for diagnostic imaging and cancer therapies, raised an $85 million round. OrbiMed provided the financing. Aunt Minnie has more here. | Syneron Bio, a four-year-old startup based in Guangzhou, China, that develops macrocyclic peptide therapeutics using a high-throughput discovery platform, raised a $150 million Series B round co-led by Decheng Capital, CDH VGC, and an unnamed international life sciences fund, with additional participation from a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, True Light Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and BioTrack Capital as well as previous investors AstraZeneca, LAV, Sinovation Capital, 5Y Capital, GL Ventures, Biotech Development Fund, and Lenovo Capital. Pulse 2.0 has more here. | Xoople, a seven-year-old Madrid startup that is building a satellite data platform for AI models and enterprise mapping applications, raised a $130 million Series B round led by Nazca Capital, with MCH Private Equity, CDTI, Buenavista Equity Partners, and Endeavor Catalyst also taking part. The company has raised a total of $225 million. TechCrunch has more here. | | Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings | Moonbounce, a three-year-old startup based in Oakland, CA, that converts content policies into real-time controls for AI systems, raised a $12 million round. Amplify Partners and StepStone were the co-leads. The Tech Buzz has more here. | Yuzu Health, a four-year-old New York startup that provides claims processing, payments, and administration systems for health insurance plans, raised a $35 million Series A round co-led by General Catalyst and Chemistry, with Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, Bain Future Back Ventures, Timeless Ventures, Lachy Groom, and Neo also contributing. The company has raised a total of $40 million. Pulse 2.0 has more here. | | Smaller Fundings | Ridge AI, a one-year-old Seattle startup that helps product teams build embedded dashboards and data agents, raised a $2.6 million seed round led by Madrona. More here. | | |
Fidelity — Your Pitch Isn’t the Only Thing Investors Are Evaluating. | Investors don’t just listen to what you say - they look at how your company operates. Is ownership clear? Do your numbers match your story? Can you answer follow-up questions without digging through spreadsheets? The Fundraise-Ready Startup Kit equips founders with the materials investors expect to see, before pressure is on. Because confidence in the room doesn’t come from slides. It comes from preparation. | | Going Public | SpaceX is reportedly planning to kick off its IPO roadshow in early June, including a June 11th event for 1,500 retail investors, as it pursues a $75 billion raise at a valuation of up to $1.75 trillion. Reuters has more here. | SpaceX's blockbuster IPO could soak up so much investor capital that whoever goes public next may find the well already running dry. TechCrunch takes a look here. | | People | The New Yorker's deeply reported portrait of Sam Altman underscores just how singular — and polarizing — his ambition is, but anyone who's spent time in Silicon Valley will find little here they didn't already know. Some of the quotes, in fact, come from our own interviews with Altman over the years. More here. | Jack Dorsey says Apple removed his decentralized messaging app Bitchat from China’s App Store at Beijing’s request after regulators said it violated local internet service rules. Cointelegraph has more here. | | Post-Its | | | Essential Reads | The Wall Street Journal reports that both OpenAI and Anthropic are barreling toward potentially record-breaking IPOs, but their confidential financials show a shared problem: staggering compute costs that will keep both companies deeply unprofitable for years even as revenue soars. More here. | North Korean hackers reportedly spent six months posing as a trading firm, meeting contributors in person, and depositing more than $1 million of their own capital before pulling off a $270 million exploit of Drift Protocol. CoinDesk has more here. | Goldman Sachs says workers displaced by AI are likely to suffer a “scarring effect,” including lower wages, longer unemployment, and weaker lifetime wealth accumulation, with the damage potentially lasting a decade. Business Insider has more here. | The New York Times is receiving sharp pushback over its glowing profile of Medvi, with critics pointing to evidence of fake doctors, doctored patient imagery, and misleading marketing at the AI-powered GLP-1 prescription company, which has also drawn scrutiny from the FDA. Futurism has more here. | | Detours | A cruise ship ran aground near the Fiji island where the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away was filmed, prompting a rescue operation and a scramble to prevent 20,000 liters of diesel from spilling into the surrounding reef. | American parents trying to keep smartphones out of their kids’ hands are increasingly installing landlines, reviving everything from dial tones to prank calls to the lost art of not hanging up on your friends. | | Brain Rot | |
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