Top News | Stripe seeking to buy PayPal: Stripe, the fintech giant that’s still on the TWiST 500 after all these years, has teamed with private equity firm Advent International on a bid to acquire the ultimate old-school fintech giant, PayPal, in a deal valued at around $53.4 billion. According to Reuters, an offer was submitted earlier this month, backed by $50 billion in bank-backed financing, with Stripe and Advent each walking away with a 50% stake. Pre-merger, these are already two of the largest digital payment platforms on Earth. Currently, PayPal counts around 440 million active accounts; the company handled $1.8 trillion in payments over the course of 2025. Over the same period, businesses transacted through Stripe to the tune of $1.9 trillion. OpenAI is building a smart speaker: Bloomberg reports the company’s long-awaited debut hardware device will be a “mobile, screen-free smart speaker,” designed to function as an “AI companion” that chats with users and controls other smart systems around the home. (It sounds a bit like the next generation upgrade for Amazon’s Alexa devices?) The yet-to-be-named device interacts with smart appliances, plays media, answers questions, and consults ChatGPT on your behalf, as needed. OpenAI suggests that, as your device gains a deeper understanding of its owner and their needs, it will become increasingly personalized and proactive, and will even develop a distinct “personality.” Of course, OpenAI is now involved in a very public legal dispute with Apple over these self-same hardware plans. Cupertino claims that OpenAI has been poaching employees and encouraging them to share confidential information and trade secrets, giving their nascent consumer electronics division an early boost. Hemispheric uses AI to analyze brain activity: The company comes from AI engineer and researcher Gidi Littwin, a veteran of Apple who was among the inventors of both FaceID and the Vision Pro headset. His new venture — developed in collaboration with computational neuroscientist Hagai Lalazar — trained a frontier AI model on a quarter million hours of brain data, collected from over 100,000 paid volunteers across Asia (with stops in Tel Aviv and Boston). The hope is that the model, given enough of this data, can make diagnoses and predictions based on electrical activity in the brain, in the same way that an LLM can break down text statistically. This could allow clinicians to detect brain health issues — including Parkinson’s, PTSD, schizophrenia, even depression — earlier in their development, without having to rely on far less precise methods, such subjective questionnaires and behavioral observations. Hemispheric’s first product — studying the impact of PTSD on the brain — will be submitted for FDA approval next year. They’re also testing now to see if the model can diagnose or predict the onset of Alzheimer’s.
| TWiST 500 | It’s a big week for health tech startups! Yesterday we covered Chai Discovery and their AI system that designs potential illness-fighting antibodies. Today, we’re back with Neko Health, a TWiST 500 startup co-founded by Spotify icon Daniel Ek (along with fellow Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne). | Here’s the pitch: The company takes bloodwork from clients, then runs them through a 60-minute, radiation-free body scan that checks for skin, blood, heart, and circulation issues. The scans are analyzed by both AI software and a human clinician, with early detection of illnesses and recommendations for preventative care as the overall goal. | So rather than waiting for symptoms, then ordering a grueling and expensive scan at a hospital to locate the source of the problem, Neko takes a more proactive approach. The company plans to launch its first US facility in New York later this year. | Preventative, concierge medicine is already a major trend among the wealthy elite, and Neko’s latest cap table serves as further proof about of concept’s appeal among the celebrity/billionaire set. Their new $700 million funding round includes contributions from tennis great Maria Sharapova, Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan, music industry legend and Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine, rapper will.i.am, and author Tim Ferriss, among others. The company is now valued at around $7 billion. – Lon | A message from MongoDB | AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at MongoDB.com/ai | This Week in Startups | E2311: Jason’s been talking a lot about his personal vibecoding projects lately, and on this TWiST ep, we finally get a look at what he’s making. PodMeme is an research AI tool that seeks out segments from across different podcasts about any common theme or idea, and then strings these outtakes together into one seamless feed. On TWiST, we get advice on how to promote a product even before it exists from Tweet Hunter and Taplio creator Tibo “Maker” Louis-Lucas, plus the latest news and streaming recommendations. | E2310: Reservoir seeks out AgTech startups that want to revolutionize farming, and invites them to test out their new products on a working farm in Salinas, CA. On TWiST, founder Danny Bernstein tells Jason and Lon about how robots can automate the most difficult jobs (like picking stone fruit in the summer heat), while other innovations can cut down on the use of harmful pesticides or eliminate the need for chemical weed killers entirely. Then, Jason responds to designer Gal Shir’s viral tweet about quitting the industry in the age of AI, and reveals why he bought $100K worth of Figma stock. | E2309: How many startups matter in tech? Fewer than you think. That’s why venture capitalists are tripping over themselves to get onto their cap tables, no matter the cost. Why? Footwork’s Nikhil Basu Trivedi argues that the Valley has never been more “power-law-pilled” than it is today. Basu Trivedi joined Cendana Capital’s Michael Kim and TWiST’s Alex Wilhelm to go deep on secondary markets, the state of startup M&A, why the SaaSpocalypse may be temporary, and what could trigger a retrenchment of the AI trade. It’s Wednesday, so it’s time for our venture capital roundtable to go deep on how VCs are investing today, and where on the horizon they have their eyes fixed! | TWiST Partner Offers | Agree.com: Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life! Rippling: Don’t settle for AI that’s all talk. Head to Rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business. Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.
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