NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA
Hey readers,
Welcome back to your weekly tech digest, a quick look at the biggest stories shaping the tech world this week.
This past week: the AI infrastructure race continued to accelerate. Crusoe raised $3B at a $30B valuation, while Wonderful raised $550M at a $5B valuation and Instinct raised $250M at $2.5B. At the same time, Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, bringing one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure companies closer to one of the biggest open-source AI ecosystems.
The trend is becoming increasingly visible at the startup level, too. In YC’s latest batch, 52% of startups are B2B, with many founders moving beyond building AI agents themselves to focus on the infrastructure that powers them, from routing and context management to evaluation and automation. See the latest batch in full below.
The trend is overall hard to miss: the next phase of AI may be less about building another application and more about building the infrastructure that makes AI useful at scale. As models themselves become increasingly capable, the opportunity may increasingly sit in everything around them, the compute, data, tooling, security and physical infrastructure needed to turn intelligence into something businesses can actually use.
This edition covers:
👀 The latest AI news
🗝️ Trend of the week: Inside the YC Summer 2026 batch
💰 Top startup news & funding rounds (sourced using Harmonic)
🤝 Acquisitions
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show
and much more.
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Inside the current state of AI
Oura has filed to go public according to its filing.
Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen steps down, being replaced by Anil Chakravarthy.
OpenAI launched its latest model, Astra.
Google launched AI voice features in Gmail, Docs, and Keep.
John Ternus officially became Apple’s CEO on September 1, 2026, succeeding Tim Cook, who transitioned to executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors after 15 years leading the company.
NYC banned generative AI for students in grades 2-K through 8, about 600,000 kids, while high schoolers keep limited access to approved tools. Companion chatbots are barred at every grade.
Wayve and Uber launched the first-ever autonomous rides in the UK.
Network School Kazakhstan is now officially open, with a packed crowd for the ribbon cutting, and government officials welcoming them.
Isar Aerospace made history on their second flight, becoming the first commercial space company from Europe to deliver satellites into orbit. Mission 'Onward and Upward' successfully lifted off and deployed payloads into orbit. A new chapter for European spaceflight is here!
Meet the latest YC startups ahead of demo day next week
Y Combinator’s Summer ‘26 Demo Day is under a week away. We’re back with a full overview of the latest startups in the batch, what they’re building, the categories they’re focused on and the trends behind them, as well as the partners who coached them.
So what have we learned about this batch so far?
52% of the batch are B2B startups, with founders building across productivity, the agent supply chain, and infrastructure tools for other companies rather than end users.
Consumer stays a minority category at around 5% of the batch, consistent with the last several cohorts.
The agent story is maturing: YC’s previous batch was defined by agent applications, while this batch of companies are building the infrastructure underneath them, routing, context management, evaluation, and automation tooling that makes an agent usable in production.
Batch size: 235 companies are in this cohort, a 20% increase from the previous batch.
Let’s explore the latest trends shaping this batch in full.
Top startup news & funding rounds
We take a closer look at some of the hottest startup rounds of the week:
Crusoe, the AI cloud and data center developer powering OpenAI, Meta, and Oracle, raised $3B at a $30B valuation co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners, with Mubadala Capital.
Wonderful, the enterprise AI operating system, raised $550M Series C at a $5B valuation led by Insight Partners, with Salesforce, Index Ventures, IVP, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Instinct, a proactive AI assistant that texts, calls, and handles everyday tasks, raised $250M in a Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark at a $2.5B valuation.
REGENT, developer of electric Seaglider vessels for coastal transport, raised $240M in a Series B co-led by Mare Liberum and AE Ventures, with Founders Fund, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Japan Airlines, and DCVC.
Félix, a WhatsApp-native remittance platform, raised $200M in a Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz, with QED Investors and General Catalyst.
Blank Street, the coffee and matcha chain with 100+ compact storefronts, raised $105M led by General Atlantic at a $650M valuation, with Left Lane Capital, General Catalyst, and Tiger Global.
HiddenLayer, an AI security company protecting agentic and generative AI apps, raised $100M in a Series B led by Delta-v Capital, with Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft’s M12, and Booz Allen Ventures.
Scan.com, a medical imaging network for booking diagnostic scans, raised $90M in a Series C led by Noteus Partners, with Aviva, Concord Health Partners, YZR Capital, and Oxford Capital.
Odyssey Energy, financing distributed renewable energy in emerging markets, raised $74M from Broadscale Group, FMO, Al Mada Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and FJ Labs.
Conveo, an AI consumer research platform running qualitative interviews at scale, raised $50M in a Series A from DST Global Partners, Balderton Capital, 6 Degrees Capital, and Y Combinator.
AIR Security, an Israeli AI cybersecurity startup, raised $50M across two seed rounds backed by Sequoia and Greenoaks.
Deep Cogito, a post-training research lab building AI that teaches itself to improve, raised $43M in a Series A led by TQ Ventures, with Benchmark, Nexus Venture Partners, Atreides, and Zscaler.
Empirik.ai, an AI infrastructure reliability platform out of stealth, raised $21M in a seed backed by Sequoia, Canapi Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
XDOF, a robotics data startup collecting real-world teleoperation data to train general-purpose robots, is in talks for a Series B at ~$1.2B valuation led by 8VC, just three months after exiting stealth.
Ultrahuman, the Indian smart ring maker expanding into health intelligence, raised $70M led by Qualcomm Ventures, a bet to turn smart rings into wrist-free wearable computers.
(sourced using Harmonic).
Acquisitions
Nvidia confirms the Hugging Face acquisiton for $12.9 billion.
Action camera maker GoPro to be acquired by Starman Optical.
Palo Alto Networks acquired Console for $500M.
Adobe acquired Indian AI marketing startup Rilo.
Must-watch interviews from our podcast show
Will GPUs become a new asset class? Our latest podcast guest may have some answers.
Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CTO of Lambda, joins us to explain why a $40,000 monthly AWS bill was the best thing that ever happened to the company in its early days, why he recently handed over the CEO title after fourteen years at the helm, and what is really going on in the GPU market, and whether we should be concerned or excited about the opportunity.
Previous episodes include
Superhuman CEO: The Strategy to Turn Standalone Apps Into a $13 Billion Suite | Shishir Mehrotra.
Europe Is Quietly Building the New Silicon Valley | Saul Klein.
$2 Billion Founder: The Secret to Building a High-Growth Startup in 24 Months | Tanay Kothari.
Canva Co-Founder: AI Is Useless Without This 1 Skill | Cam Adams.
Why most people are underusing AI and why the winners won’t just be OpenAI and Anthropic | Reid Hoffman.
Base44 Founder: The Strategy Behind Building a Million Dollar Company Solo | Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix).
Watch and subscribe now!
See all previous episodes here 👉
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