Top Stories | China’s Z.ai revealed that it created Ox Alpha, a free stealth model topping online usage charts and rivaling DeepSeek. Z.ai plans to release its weights, opening the high-performing system for others to run and modify. — Bloomberg Anthropic expects its own potential revenue to exceed $30 trillion, an eye-popping projection the company will pitch to investors as it seeks billions in fresh funding. — The Wall Street Journal SpaceX plans a second Starbase on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, committing $100B toward Starship launches as early as 2029 and extending its ambitions beyond Texas. — TechCrunch Revolut launched EURR, a euro-pegged stablecoin, for eligible customers in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal. This is the company’s first planned currency-backed token, as financial firms push digital money into payments. — Bloomberg Bill Gates warned that tech leaders are underplaying AI’s threats to jobs and human life, announcing a platform that includes token taxes, human-only occupations, and mandatory international reviews for systems capable of enabling bioweapons. — The New York Times
| Top Funding Announcements | Lambda — The AI cloud provider is in talks to raise up to $3B in a pre-IPO round from an undisclosed lead investor, funding expansion before a potential 2027 listing. — Yahoo Finance Stability AI — The Stable Diffusion maker raised a $76M Series B backed by entertainment companies and investors, including AMD Ventures. — TechCrunch Generalist — The robotics AI startup raised roughly $200M in a new round led by 8VC at a $3B valuation to develop models helping robots understand and operate in the physical world. — Axios Legato — Emerged from stealth with $12M from Neotribe Ventures, Listen, and Village Global to develop and market AI-powered glasses that amplify voices for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. — TechCrunch Runable — The AI agent platform raised a $21M Series A co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners to help small businesses build products, find customers, and run marketing campaigns. — TechCrunch
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| | | This Week in Startups |  | You Can’t Fire a VC From Your Board: Here’s Why | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics |
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| Timestamps: 0:06 Welcome back to Legal Basics 1:47 When should a seed-stage founder add their first board member? 7:47 From founder-controlled to "balanced" 10:31 Private vs. public company board pay 12:18 Do board members get expenses covered? 14:34 Why observers need a confidentiality provision 15:36 The "sign in the next 24 hours" pressure tactic 17:46 How to remove a director 24:01 When to use "Pled" vs. "Pleaded" |
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| Today’s Fascinating Fact from Harmonic | While fellow entrants in the early generative text-to-image race OpenAI and Midjourney locked their models behind APIs and subscriptions, Stability AI open-sourced theirs, releasing the Stable Diffusion weights for free in August 2022. The models have now been downloaded over 350 million times, making Stable Diffusion the single most downloaded open-source creative AI model in history. By early 2024, Stability was on the brink of collapse, before an emergency $80M fundraise, plus a generous amount of debut forgiveness. Estimated revenue for 2026 now sits at around $190 million. | Try it yourself at harmonic.ai | Subscribe to Us On Your Favorite Podcast Platforms | | | SF Live-Work Space Now Available | Need a flexible living and working environment in San Francisco? This thoughtfully designed loft-style residence at 787 Bryant St., the heart of the vibrant SOMA district and the city’s creative hub, is now available for rent or purchase. Check the listing for more details. | The TWiST500 newsletter is the new, updated, and improved TWiST Ticker. | | |
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