WHAT’S INSIDE

Top Signals: Nvidia adds $442B, Debt hit $40T, Bonds Revolt, Record $22B gold buys

Big Movers: Nvidia $96.2B Q2 + $110.1B Q3 guide, OpenAI Jalapeño chip, Anthropic Mythos 5 cyber, & Gemini Enterprise for legal/finance

Open Deals: Temporal $500M at $12B+, Fractile $6.5B Anthropic chip repricing, & General Intuition $6B robot-brains round

Mega Rounds: General Intuition $6B, Xpeng Robotics $900M+, Groq $350M + Nvidia $20B cloud bet, Instinct $250M, Owner $240M, & REGENT $240M

Exit Watching: Vanguard-Altruist $4B, Socure-Fravity AI fraud deal, Hugging Face $13B acquisition offers, Shein $27B IPO, & Lambda $12B+ IPO watch

The Funding Buzz: OpenAI $400M startup fund, Pentagon $500M battery lifeline, FGV Capital $35M Fund II, & Capital F $17M debut fund.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ATTIO

“When I think of revenue, I think of Attio.”

— Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business

Granola’s revenue motion runs on Attio. Here’s what that adds up to:

TOP SIGNAL ALERTS

The hottest Signals & News To Watch This Week

In case you missed it, our Friday editorial covered Nvidia’s earnings and the gold and commodities exodus.

On Thursday Nvidia added $442B in a single day, the second-biggest one-day gain any stock has ever posted, dragging the whole US market up while nearly every other sector fell. It told investors revenue would grow about 70% next year, far above the 44% Wall Street expected, and at roughly $5.5T it's now the most valuable company on the planet.

Underneath that record, the macro picture is uglier: federal debt just passed $40T, the Treasury is buying back its own bonds to hold off a revolt, and central banks bought a record $22B of gold in three weeks, picking metal over US Treasuries as gold trades near $4,600.

Why It Matters: These two signals pull in opposite directions. The market is leaning harder than ever on one chipmaker, with a plain S&P 500 fund now carrying close to 8% Nvidia and some tech funds past 20%, so everyone owns the AI trade whether they chose to or not. Meanwhile the smartest money on earth, sovereign reserve managers, is quietly rotating out of the dollar and into hard assets. Copper hitting a six-month high shows it's spreading. For investors and VCs, the read is that AI upside and dollar risk are both stretched at the same time, so concentration cuts both ways.

Big Movers

Big tech moves, movers and trends to watch this week

Frontier Cyber, Behind Glass — Anthropic opened Mythos 5 to defenders through partner tools and a new $35M open-source fund, without exposing the raw model itself.

OpenAI's Own Silicon Comes Alive — OpenAI's Jalapeño chip beat rival systems by 1.5-1.9x performance per watt and up to 3.6x lower latency across three public models.

They Turned Down Bezos — Stealth lab, Accelerated Understanding's founders turned down a Bezos-backed offer to build a rival physics-AI scaled to 35T parameters, betting simulation beats language-only reasoning.

OPEN DEALS

Open Funding Rounds or VC Fund Raises to watch this week

Six Billion for Robot Brains — General Intuition is raising at a $6B pre-money valuation led by Valor and Point72, just weeks after a $320M round valued it at $2.3B.

Fractile's Sixfold Repricing — British chip startup Fractile is raising at $6.5B, six times its May mark, after agreeing to supply roughly $250M of chips to Anthropic.

Nebius Borrows Big for GPUs — Nebius plans a $4.5B convertible note raise for data centers and GPUs, on top of the $5.66B it spent on property and equipment last quarter.

Temporal Talks a $12B Number — Temporal is in talks for a $500M raise at $12B+, doubling its February mark, as AI agents lean on its workflow reliability layer to run.

IN THE MONEY

Companies that raised money in the past week and why they matter

Massive Deals

Xpeng Spins Out Its Robots — Xpeng's robotics unit raised more than $900M led by IDG Capital, with both Tencent and Alibaba also backing, at a $6.3B valuation.

Groq Ditches Chips for Cloud — Groq raised $350M to pivot away from AI chip design toward Neocloud, its new GPU-based cloud and data-center infrastructure business. Nvidia is spending $20B on Groq, with new racks due online by year-end.

Large Deals

Trillion-Won Line — Korean AI access services startup, WRTN Technologies raised $72M, becoming Korea's first AI startup past 1T won.

Smaller Deals

EXIT WATCHING

Mergers & Acquisitions and IPOs

Hugging Face Weighs $13B — New York's Hugging Face is fielding multiple $13B acquisition offers, though its open-source community is deeply sceptical of any sale.

IPO Watch

Open or upcoming IPOs to watch:

Shein Lists at Half Price — Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein launched a $27B IPO, down 57% from its 2022 peak but still among the largest listings of the year.

OpenAI Eyes a 2027 Listing — OpenAI is targeting a 2027 IPO, with its CFO telling staff the company stays competitive despite Anthropic's gains in the enterprise.

Nscale Lines Up a $3B Listing — London AI cloud firm Nscale is seeking up to $3B in a US IPO as soon as September, working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

THE FUNDING BUZZ

VC & PE Activity To Watch

Open Deals

Lightspeed — Seeking $600B funds in a secondary process dubbed Project Mercury to extend ownership of OpenAI and add a new commitment to Anthropic.

Khosla Ventures — Menlo Park VC is raising $5.5B across new funds in largest yet effort with $1B early-stage, $2B venture, $2.5B mature startup allocations.

The Pentagon Bails Out Batteries — US battery startups landed $500M in defense funding, a lifeline after EV market cuts left them with far more capacity than demand.

TECH BUZZ DIRECTORY
Featured Products*

SEO Bot — A fully autonomous "SEO Robot" with AI agents for busy founders.

Memelord — Meme Software for marketing memes, tech memes, & sales memes.

Otonomos — Incorporate your Delaware C-corp or tax advantaged foundation and get 5% OFF.

FOR INVESTORS
Open Deals
Investors– request an intro to startups - [email protected].

Before we restart our placements of raising startups, we’re sharing an open call to send in your own company. Just shoot us an email with a deck and we may feature you in this bulletin.

For detailed pitch materials, please email [email protected] with your deck.
🔥 — hot deal!
⏰ — leaving soon.

FOR EMPLOYERS
Job Candidates