The New Era for Gaming
Plus a quick recap on this week in startups.
NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA
Hey readers!
Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.
This week, gaming entered a new era as Sony’s push toward an all-digital PlayStation ecosystem sparked a fierce debate over ownership, preservation, and consumer rights. At the same time, AI continued reshaping the startup landscape: billion-dollar funding rounds accelerated across healthcare, defense, banking, and creative tools, while major industry moves — including Tom Blomfield joining Anthropic, Fidji Simo stepping down at OpenAI, and Greylock and Paradigm raising $2.7B in fresh capital combined — highlighted that the AI investment cycle is showing no signs of slowing down.
This edition covers:
🗝️ Key trends: The New Era for Gaming
🔍 Top tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights
👀 New VC funds
🎤 Must-watch interviews
and more… let’s dive in.
🗝️ Key trends: The New Era for Gaming
Do you remember the days when we went into an actual shop to buy the latest games for our PlayStation? Well, those times are about to change forever because Sony is discontinuing physical PlayStation discs starting in 2028, and the backlash has been immense.
A petition against the move has passed 300,000 signatures, with KFC and Domino’s joining in with parody jabs of their own. On paper, this looks inevitable: Sony says almost 80% of its game sales are now digital, up from 27% a decade ago, and Capcom, Nintendo and Rockstar are all reporting the same shift. So what’s actually driving fans’ anger?
Well it isn’t nostalgia for plastic cases — it’s ownership. As you might know, physical discs are how players resell, lend and pass games down; losing that pushes everyone into a pure licensing model, where a purchase is really just a rental Sony can end whenever it likes. That shift matters more in gaming than it did for music or film, because a delisted game can vanish entirely rather than simply move platforms — the Video Game History Foundation already rates 87% of classic US-released games as “critically endangered”, no longer commercially available anywhere.
Sony’s economics are straightforward: cutting out manufacturers and retailers keeps a bigger margin on every digital sale, and dropping disc drives trims future console costs — savings unlikely to be passed on to gamers. What’s missing from the announcement is any kind of offset: no resale system, no lending mechanism, no preservation commitment, no price cut. That silence is the real story fans are asking for — it reads less like a company adapting to consumer trends, and more like one that sees its most loyal fans as a captive audience rather than stakeholders worth negotiating with.
🔍 This week’s top tech news
Neko Health, founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek has raised $700M Series C.
YC Partner Tom Blomfield is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic.
Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, has stepped down.
David Beckham’s health drink startup IM8 raised $1B from General Catalyst’s unusual CVF fund.
💰 This week’s startup funding highlights
Intelligence startup Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.
Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar launched Vorflux, Autopilot for software engineers. The new startup emerged with $15M in fresh capital.
Valarian, which is building sovereign infrastructure for high-consequence systems, raised a $50M Series A led by NEA.
Meticulous, which helps teams ship software at the speed AI agents write code, has raised $15M Series A from the likes of Chemistry Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
AI-Native private banking startup, Flex raised $70M Series B.
Chai Discovery, an AI drug startup, raised $400M.
PixVerse, the creative infrastructure platform for the next generation raised $439M.
Singularity Defense raised $80M in Series A funding to build low-cost air defense systems that can be produced at scale.
Infinia raised $13.5M in Series A funding to connect traditional banking infrastructure with next-generation digital asset rails.
Oak raised $60M in Seed funding to build the AI-native identity operating system for the enterprise AI era.
Sliceline raised $6M in Seed funding to operationalize internal company comms and more.
microagi, a data research and deployment lab powering embodied AI raised $55M in Seed funding led by Hummingbird.
Prediction markets platform Pascal raised $15M in funding.
Indian AI coding startup Emergent becomes a unicorn after raising $130M in Series C funding.
👀 New VC funds
Greylock raised $1.5 Billion for Greylock 18 to back AI-native founders.
AlleyCorp raised $335M for Fund II.
Paradigm raised $1.2B to invest in ‘technical frontier’ startups.
Acurio Ventures launched $130M vehicle to provide liquidity to European VC funds.
Catalyst Fund raised $30M to back climate tech startups across Africa.
🤝 Acquisitions
Stripe and Advent offered to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion.
OpenAI deployment arm to acquire Northslope.
Y Combinator backed startup Benchmark joins Harvey.
Whatnot acquired Shaped to power real-time live shopping recommendations.
📎 What we are reading
The Most Human Technology Ever Made | Anish Acharya, Andreessen Horowitz.
🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show
Mark Manson is someone you've probably heard of before. He's the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In this episode, he shares some incredible advice on life, what it takes to become a successful creator, why creators should think more like founders and what he's building next - including his self-help app, Purpose.
Previous episodes include
The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.
Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.
Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.
Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.
We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.
5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.
How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau.
Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine.
No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang.
Watch and subscribe now!
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