The Uber Founder Is Back
Uber founder's new startup. AI Microdramas. New unicorns and the latest on U.S. venture funding rounds.
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 in startups: funding surged across robotics, cybersecurity, healthcare, infrastructure, and enterprise software. At the same time, major industry moves included Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s latest startup, Atoms raising $1.7B, OpenAI unveiling its first AI hardware device, Databricks reaching a $188B valuation, and Apple confirming its first CEO transition since Steve Jobs.
This edition covers:
🗝️ Key trends: AI Microdramas
📊 Graph of the week on U.S. funding rounds
🔍 Top startup tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights easily sourced by using Harmonic
👀 New VC funds launched
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show
and much more.
🗝️ Key trends: AI Microdramas
AI microdramas are exploding globally. In China, these bite-sized, mobile-first entertaining forms of content already generate more revenue than the country’s domestic box office.
Justine Moore, Investor at Andreessen Horowitz calls them the next generation of soap operas: serialized, mobile-first, and monetized like games. As AI increasingly replaces work once handled by CGI - such as visual effects, backgrounds, voices, and other production tasks - they’re becoming dramatically cheaper and faster to produce. We even created our own, see a snippet of it below on the Nike origin story.
The impact will extend well beyond entertainment. As production costs fall and AI tools continue to improve, creators will be able to produce and iterate on content at a much faster pace, enabling entirely new business models centered on high-volume, personalized storytelling distributed through recommendation algorithms.
Learn about the latest trends across consumer tech and entertainment on our latest podcast episode.
📊 Graph of the week: U.S. Venture Rounds
Over the last 30 days, 181 early-stage deals (Pre-Seed and Seed) deployed just $1.5B - high volume, small checks. At the other end, 26 late-stage deals (Series C through E+) deployed $6.3B, or 4.2× more capital from 7× fewer deals.
The most striking comparison is that Series D rounds ($3.1B from 10 deals) now rival Series A ($3.0B from 70 deals) in total capital deployed, despite having one-seventh the deal count.
Those 70 Pre-Seed deals raised just $80M total (avg. $1.2M each). The 70 Series A deals raised $3.0B (avg. $42.7M each). Same deal count, wildly different dollars. Series A sits at the heart - it matches Pre-Seed on volume (70 deals each) but delivers 37× more capital.
Data shows, this is a market funding more experiments than ever at the bottom while concentrating unprecedented capital into a shrinking number of winners at the top.
🔍 Top tech news
Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s industrial automation startup Atoms raised $1.7B in funding.
DeepSeek prepares for mainland China IPO filing.
OpenAI revealed its first hardware device, a smart speaker. Designed with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom studio, the screenless device includes cameras, sensors, and autonomous movement capabilities.
Databricks hits $188B valuation with $3B Coatue-led round.
💰 Startup funding highlights
AegisAI, founded by former Google security execs raised $36M in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures to stop AI-driven spear-phishing.
Yope raised $12.3M in Seed funding led by Northzone to build a private social network without algorithms or ads.
Humanoid raised $152M in Series A funding at a $1.35B valuation, the UK’s first humanoid robotics unicorn.
Genius AI raised $44M in Series D funding led by Lux Capital to expand from wellness into AI in-person service economy.
Scape raised $3.2M from Y Combinator, General Catalyst and others to build the first email inbox that works for you.
Paper raised $34M in Series A funding led by Accel and ICONIQ Capital to connect your teams, agents, code, and data on a single design space built on web standards, so nothing gets lost in translation.
Etched raised $300M in Series C funding led by Sequoia at a $10.3B valuation to power large-scale AI inference.
CuspAI raised $450M in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins to expand its AI-powered materials discovery platform, international operations and AI Materials Foundry.
Defense startup Twenty raised $30M led by Khosla to build and scale software for modern cyber conflicts.
Meticulous raised $15M in Series A funding led by Chemistry Ventures to help software teams test AI-generated code and ship it faster.
Telli raised $15M in Seed funding led by Redalpine to build AI for customer-facing operations.
Candid Health raised $120M in Series D funding led by Sixth Street Growth to automate the entire financial infrastructure of healthcare.
👀 New VC funds
🤝 Acquisitions
Sierra acquired Takeoff.
Cognition is acquiring Interaction, the makers of Poke.
Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star.
🎤 Must-watch interviews
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why we’re still underutilizing AI, why agent management - not individual contribution - becomes the default mode of work within three years, and why the next decade of company-building rewards taste and judgment over raw skill: once AI can draw, code, and write as well as any specialist, the only thing left to own is the specific, unrepeatable bar for what excellence looks like.
Previous episodes include
AI is a Better Writer Than You But Here’s What it Can’t Replace | Mark Manson.
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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