The signal wire.

Eclipse Ventures

Greylock Partners

Sequoia Capital

FUNDING signal

Luminous Ventures, Huaqin Technology

United Airlines Ventures

Luminous Ventures, Huaqin Technology

Sorenson Capital

Colam Impact

SlateVC

General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz

BlueYard Capital

Accel, IVP

Jump Capital

Ruben Dominguez is the author of The VC Corner and an investor in Harbor, disclosing his stake in the company being profiled.

AIUC ties insurance to the audit, converging on a 'verify, then insure' model, validating the category.

The ECB has asked every bank it supervises for a plan against AI-enabled threats, due October 31, creating a regulatory forcing function for banks.

Insurers price risk from years of claims history, and AI agents have almost none, creating an insurance gap that traditional carriers can't price.

Harbor measures the risk of every agent a company runs, blocks the decisions that break the company's own rules, and insures what's left.

AIUC, which certifies agents and ties insurance to the audit, raised a $40M Series A led by Ribbit in September. · Ribbit

They raised $10M anyway, from three lead investors, in a market that barely existed three years ago · Base10, Abstract +5

Builds AI agents that automate private-credit operations across documents, spreadsheets, and systems. · Thrive Capital

Radical Ventures

Agentic operating system for legal research, review, and drafting. · Bessemer Venture Partners

Search infrastructure for better AI agents. · Accel

AI-powered social media automation platform that transforms voice notes into native posts across 8 platforms while amplifying engagement through team-based posting from individual accounts.

Google's advanced fitness tracker with built-in GPS, ECG, skin temperature monitoring, and 7-day battery life, designed for active lifestyles and seamless health tracking.

Upsolve provides row-level security enforcement for AI agents, preventing unauthorized data access through server-side permission rules that agents cannot bypass or talk around.

On-device text-to-speech app that reads books, articles, and PDFs aloud using neural voices entirely processed locally without cloud uploads.

Multi-device music recorder app that instantly applies finished sound production to ideas with one-tap recording and library management.

Native macOS mail client with unified inbox for multiple email providers and AI-powered drafting and summarization features.

Open-source, on-device speech-to-text transcription app for iOS that runs local AI models without requiring cloud uploads or subscriptions.

Agent fleet orchestration platform that manages AI agents on a heartbeat loop, maintains distributed memory, and proactively surfaces bugs from logs.

Free open-source macOS app that uses AI coding agents to generate and edit Remotion video projects in real-time, enabling launch video creation without traditional video editing.

AI-native wire harness design platform combining schematic, layout, BOM, and formboard tools with an AI assistant to streamline electrical engineering workflows.

Web-based platform for rapidly building and launching camera experiences using AI coding agents and an open SDK with live preview and instant deployment.

Unified server management console providing web terminal, file editing, job scheduling, fleet commands, monitoring, and status pages with zero open ports.

AI-powered project delivery prediction tool that forecasts missed deadlines by collecting anonymous team input and providing portfolio-level insights to engineering leaders.

Open source AI coding agent available as terminal, desktop, or web app that automates code generation and development tasks.

AI agent that automates file organization, deduplication, and document generation across cloud storage and local systems with plan approval and undo capabilities.

Open-source macOS tool that enables AI agents to orchestrate and control other CLI agents with session monitoring and manual takeover capabilities.

AI-powered operations center that consolidates traffic, errors, user feedback, and compliance data across all shipped projects with MCP agent integration for prioritization.

AI-powered mock interview platform that conducts realistic job interviews with feedback and scored debrief, charging per-minute with no subscription requirement.

Free, open-source Mac app for recording talking-head videos with AI-powered editing via Claude Code for cutting, vertical formatting, and post-draft generation.

Open-source, free local AI agent orchestration platform that brings multiple supported AI agents together in a familiar chat interface with tools and automation routines.

AI agent tool that enables autonomous design, creation, and publishing of on-brand social media content across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms.

AI search visibility tool that helps companies get featured in AI-generated answers by optimizing their presence across listicles, Reddit, comparisons, and other trusted sources.

AI executive assistant for solopreneurs and founders that automates email triage, meeting scheduling, transcription, and task management across email, calendar, and task systems.

Meta's Muse Wonder model series for personal and professional agents with active memory, active focus, and domain expertise in law, finance, health, and coding.

AI-powered tool that simulates buyer reactions to headlines, positioning, and pages in real-time within Claude or ChatGPT, validated against human research with 86% accuracy.

Gil Allouche is founder and CEO of Metadata and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Gal Aga is co-founder and CEO of Aligned and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Sachin Bhat is co-founder and CTO of 1mind and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Amanda Kahlow is founder and CEO of 1mind, who founded 6sense before that; a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Brian Peterson is co-founder and CTO of Dialpad and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Marilee Bear is CRO at Gainsight and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Nadia Rashid is CRO at Outreach and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

James Roth is CRO at ZoomInfo and a featured speaker on building recursive GTM loops.

Hard Skill Exchange is hosting free 'AI Practice Sessions: Recursive GTM' on October 15, 2026, featuring operators from ZoomInfo, Outreach, Gainsight, Dialpad, 1mind, Aligned, and Metadata.

Sam Altman called the pattern of AI tools that help build better AI 'a larval version of recursive self-improvement' in The Gentle Singularity (June 2025), and the author argues GTM is at the same larval stage today.

Satya Nadella said on the BG2 podcast (December 2024) that agents will 'update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak.'

The loop's design depends on governance and decision rights using Jeff Bezos's one-way/two-way door framework from Amazon's 2015 shareholder letter; give the loop two-way doors and leave one-way doors with leadership.

The author proposes 'feedback-to-change latency' as the key GTM dashboard metric: time between an outcome landing and the system behaving differently. Quarterly QBR = 90 days, weekly sequence tests = 7 days, recursive system = hours.

The 'context graph' concept, co-authored by Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital, is 'a living record of decision traces stitched across entities and time so precedent becomes searchable' and is called AI's trillion-dollar opportunity.

GTM software is evolving into a three-layer stack: CRM as system of record, agents as system of action, and a new 'system of learning' on top that rewrites the playbook agents run.

Hannah Ritchie authored the data insight at Our World in Data.

China is the reference case for how fast extreme poverty can fall; in the early 1980s over 90% of its population lived in extreme poverty, but by the early 2020s that number had dropped to nearly zero.

Ramp, WorkOS, Rogo, Vanta, and Ridgeline are advertised sponsor companies; Patrick states he runs his business on Ramp

Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Spotify, Barnes & Noble are named as examples of the incumbent-to-digitally-native migration (retail, media, transportation) that Vélez says is still very early in financial services

Vélez references the 'Amazon or Bezos view' of attacking incumbents with extraordinary margins

Tobi Lütke uses AI to eliminate the separation between CEO and ground-truth data at Shopify

Patrick O'Shaughnessy cites Wealthfront's 'self-driving money' concept as a model for AI-driven personal finance

Micky Malka... Remains a Nubank investor and is doubling down on later-stage neobanks · Ribbit Capital

Micky Malka, founder of Ribbit Capital, is described as possibly 'the best fintech investor ever' and remains a Nubank investor; Ribbit is doubling down on later-stage neobanks while spending more time on AI

Plaid can connect 120 million accounts and with AI intelligence on top, customers can learn to optimize their entire financial lives

Real-time payment systems like Pix (Brazil) and UPI (India) and consumer data portability reduce incumbent inertia and enable competition

Blockbuster had huge amounts of data but lacked the systems and culture to exploit it, unlike Netflix which built a better algorithm with no data — a lesson for AI-era incumbents

We acquired a company called Hyperplane in Palo Alto that was already working on doing foundation models for financial services. They were having such a hard time selling to the big incumbent banks. Sales cycles were 2 years.

Global consumer financial services is a ~$10 trillion industry and ~90% still flows through banking branches owned by incumbent banks

Sequoia Capital (implied by hosts' firm) · Sequoia Capital

Yannis Assael, a former AlphaGo team member backed by the hosts' firm, noted Silver's ability to hold incredibly ambitious visions while grounding teams in practical research milestones.

Silver supports pacing suggestions from leaders like Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO), calling them 'generally a good idea.'

OpenAI's 'Hide and Seek' multi-agent experiment is cited as the nearest prior example of self-discovered tool use, but one Silver believes Ineffable can exceed by orders of magnitude of compute.

Ineffable's Vera Rubin cluster is based on NVIDIA GPUs, which is fortunate because it lets them do simulation, training and inference; host Sonya Huang noted both Google and NVIDIA 'have been great partners.'

Lasse Espeholt founded the Google Brain Amsterdam office after leaving DeepMind, and his work scaling to racks of TPUs produced SEED RL.

we are the first, first customers of the largest Vera Rubin cluster on GCP.

AlphaZero beat AlphaGo's two-year human-in-the-loop work in a few hours once human data was dropped; in chess it took 4 hours to beat the world champion.

Ineffable Intelligence's goal is a 'super learner' that learns like humanity collectively did, starting from nothing and discovering everything, across two axes: depth (learning from zero to beyond human knowledge) and breadth (being droppable into any stream of experience, simulated, digital or physical).

NIST is already standardizing many other types of public key systems that can be switched to as a backup if any current assumption breaks.

Justin Drake's 'bunker mode' warning: if true, it would be a cataclysmic event for all digital infrastructure security, making blockchain-specific hygiene advice discordant with the claimed scale of threat.

Justin Thaler countered that hash-only designs rely on SNARK recursion, creating a large bug surface, and the security of SNARK recursion is not well understood.

Smartsheet sponsored pitch: AI can't use institutional intelligence it doesn't have; companies need to capture how work gets done in a form AI can act on

Lawmakers want data centers to shoulder new costs while speeding up permitting for the energy work needed to power the AI boom

Some AI drug discovery companies are struggling to win over public investors as uncertain clinical outcomes cloud their prospects

Meta has spent heavily to assemble a top AI research team and the computing infrastructure needed to compete

Meta positions Muse Wonder models as competing at the frontier, particularly state of the art on personal and professional agentic work

Meta yesterday launched a new family of AI models that it says can compete at the technological frontier.

The Trump administration's approach to AI regulation has rested on self-regulation and voluntary frameworks, but as AI incidents stack up, Washington is feeling the pressure to act

White House Super Intelligence Force issued mandatory notification and remediation process for AI incidents; stated 'This notification and remediation process is not optional... It is a critical national security obligation.'

Anthropic confirmed in August that it is exploring its own chip designs, even as it continues to rely on chips from Nvidia and other suppliers

Amazon has its own Trainium family of AI chips, which are being used by customers including Anthropic. OpenAI has also committed to using them.

OpenAI is developing its Jalapeño chip with Broadcom, initially focusing on inference workloads. The company said in August that its first chip was outperforming Nvidia on certain workloads.

Google's latest-generation TPUs include separate versions optimized for training AI models and running inference

Nvidia's revenue more than doubled to $96 billion in the second quarter, showing overall demand for AI computing leaves room for Nvidia chips and new offerings from Microsoft and others

'We prioritize Maia for inference,' Borkar said, describing it as the largest and fastest-growing opportunity for AI computing.

Microsoft says Maia 300 will deliver 40% more AI tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems

Microsoft unveiled Maia 300, its latest custom AI accelerator, saying it will begin deploying the chip in 2027 and it will become the primary inference system for its own products and services.

MENTION signal

Getty Images was founded in 1995 by Mark Getty, an heir to the Getty Oil fortune, and South African businessman Jonathan Klein.

Around $60 million of Iambic's IPO shares would be purchased by Stan Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office and existing investor Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management.

Krishna Yeshwant is retiring as a partner and co-head of life sciences at GV, where he'll continue to serve as a managing partner emeritus.

Decart previously held sale talks with Anthropic and has raised over $450m in VC funding.

Frances Arnold, Nobel Prize winner and Alphabet board member, is on Iambic's scientific advisory board.

BlackRock and Humana formed a joint venture to manage and operate nearly 150 CareWell Senior Primary Care clinics.

OPay reports $91m of net income on $467m in revenue for the first half of 2026.

Roche signed an obesity drug licensing deal with VC-backed Chinese biotech Rona Therapeutics, including $100m upfront and up to $1.06b in earnouts.

Albertsons is asking a Delaware court to force Kroger to pay more than $9b for their busted merger, arguing Kroger didn't use its 'best efforts' to secure regulatory approval.

Starbucks said it has no plans to buy Chipotle, sending the coffee chain's stock up and the burrito business' stock down; a deal would have been the largest-ever restaurant sector merger.

IonQ agreed to buy Elisity... for up to $1.3b in stock.

Getty in June scrapped a $3.7 billion agreement to buy rival Shutterstock after U.K. antitrust regulators insisted that Getty divest Shutterstock's editorial business; three months later Getty's shares were delisted from the NYSE.

Koch and members of the Getty family will invest $533 million in equity, while lenders agreed to retire around $270 million of outstanding debt.

AirTrunk, an Australian data center operator owned by Blackstone and CPP Investment Board, is delaying a $1.5b REIT IPO until 2027.

Base Electron, a power infrastructure company, said that it confidentially filed for an IPO.

Epyr, a French industrial heat storage startup, raised €15m in Series A funding.

Atlas Atomics, a nuclear startup cofounded by Vivek Ramaswamy, reportedly raised $400m at a $1.9b valuation. General Catalyst led, joined by a16z. · General Catalyst, a16z

Winverse AI, a Chinese developer of AI for robotics, is in talks to raise 'tens of millions of dollars' in seed funding at a $400m valuation led by DeepSeek, per Bloomberg. · DeepSeek

SoftBank is in talks to raise a $100b fund focused on AI, per the FT.

Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, a developer of world models and chip optimization software, for around $7b, per the WSJ.

Oxide Computer, an Emeryville, Calif.-based on-premise cloud computing company, raised $445m in Series D funding. Eclipse led, joined by US Innovative Technology Fund, Riot Ventures, Jane Street, Atreides Management, and AMD Ventures. · Eclipse, US Innovative Technology Fund +4

TypeSafe AI (dba Jev), an SF-based composable AI startup led by OpenAI vet Diogo Almeida, raised around $870m at a $7.5b valuation. A16z led, joined by insiders DCVC and Sequoia Capital. · a16z, DCVC +1

Aspen Neuroscience and Bambusa Therapeutics filed for IPOs.

City Therapeutics set terms 9.7m shares at $17-$19 for a $1b fully diluted value at the midpoint

TRex Bio priced at the low end of its $14-$16 range · Eli Lilly

The public markets last year got burned by computational drug discovery setbacks at companies like Recursion and Schrödinger, shaping skepticism of AI biotech.

First, there seems to be a Google/Demis Hassabis premium on Isomorphic.

Iambic's IPO pricing is being measured against Isomorphic, which is valued at roughly 40x Iambic's price; Wall Street is trying to work out which side is mispriced.

Isomorphic 'is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40 billion.'

Iambic would raise around $160 million at a $900 million valuation were it to price at the top of its IPO range, after having raised around $350 million from venture capital firms. · Duquesne Family Office, ARK Investment Management

Climate specialist fund fundraising hit a high of $77.9 billion in 2023 across PE, VC and infrastructure, but a shift in priorities to energy security has kept money moving into the sector.

2025 was the strongest year on record for the broader universe of funds investing in climate, with over $200 billion in commitments.

Plus: Bumble's take-private, DeepSeek leads a VC round and more

Apogem Capital closed on $372 million for its fourth real assets fund.

HIG Capital is looking to raise about $2.6 billion for its second infrastructure fund focused on the middle market, primarily in Europe and North America.

Banque Misr will sell a 30% stake in Banque du Caire, a Cairo-based state-owned bank, via an IPO on the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

ICG is exploring a sale of UK bingo clubs operator Buzz Bingo, Sky News reported.

Bambusa Therapeutics, an RA Capital-backed developer of drugs for eczema and inflammation, filed for a US IPO.

OPay, a SoftBank-backed, Nigeria-based digital payments company, is seeking to raise about $500 million in a US IPO and private placement, Bloomberg reported.

United Group, owned by BC Partners, could fetch about €700 million for its Croatian business, Bloomberg reported.

HyLight, a French zero-emission aerial inspection startup, secured a €13 million Series A led by Rubio Impact Ventures, DRW and Teampact Ventures. · Rubio Impact Ventures, DRW +1

Ambi, an app that continuously listens to users' conversations in the background to provide insights, raised $26 million in several rounds led by Luminous Ventures. · Luminous Ventures

Sava Technologies, a London-based glucose microsensor developer, raised a $36 million Series B led by Ascensia. · Ascensia

Scarlet, which specializes in certification for AI medical devices, raised a $50 million Series B led by Headline. · Headline

raised $62 million across two rounds: a $50 million Series A led by Framework Ventures and a $12 million seed round led by Y Combinator and NextView. · Framework Ventures

Winverse AI, a startup focused on AI for robotics, is raising a seed round led by DeepSeek at a $400 million valuation, Bloomberg reported. · DeepSeek

Nuclear energy startup Atlas Atomics, which was co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, raised a $400 million Series A led by General Catalyst at a $1.9 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. · General Catalyst

raised a $1.85 billion round led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital at a $60 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. · Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital

PitchBook's own math puts OpenAI's fair value closer to $1 trillion, not $1.43 trillion; closing the gap requires hitting a $70 billion run-rate by year-end.

NYSE-listed IonQ agreed to acquire Insight Partners-backed cybersecurity company Elisity in a $1.3 billion deal.

Amazon is in talks for a $7 billion acquisition of Decart, which develops software to switch between AI chips and is backed by investors including Adobe Ventures.

Nvidia is in talks to deepen its existing investment in or acquire open-weight AI model developer Reflection AI, which is also backed by investors including Sequoia and 1789 Capital.

The frontier lab is reportedly in talks to raise at least $30 billion at a $1.43 trillion valuation.

Hugging Face's SmolVLA is listed as a baseline in the LIBERO benchmark, representing the current state of open-source, efficient VLA models.

Physical Intelligence (π) is referenced as a key adopter of diffusion or flow-matching action experts, the same underlying action generation paradigm SAVLA modifies to be equivariant.

SAVLA is built directly on NVIDIA's GR00T N1.5 architecture, using its frozen SigLIP2 vision encoder and Qwen3-1.7B language model as the baseline.

Injecting rotational symmetry (equivariance) into the VLA architecture outperforms data augmentation; SAVLA increases LIBERO-Goal mean success rate under rotation from 41.5% to 90.4% without additional rotated demonstration trajectories.

SAVLA: Symmetry-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation

One South Carolina pastor declared that 'AI wants to be God', reflecting growing religious backlash to AI.

Andrey Sushko explained the Air Force contract as a vehicle for continued growth of the balloon constellation and R&D on hardware and performance.

SRS Acquiom published a 2026 M&A Earnouts and Claims Study with insights from 1,174 private-target acquisitions valued over $1T, analyzing 366 indemnification claims, 870 expense funds, and 405 earnout metrics.

Harmonic's Scout platform is used by 20VC to find winners; described as startup-discovery intelligence.

Torii had raised $65 million, including a $50 million Series B led by Tiger Global in 2022, before being acquired by Freshworks.

Elisity has raised a total of $70+ million before being acquired by IonQ.

Orion Security has raised $38 million to date, including a $32 million Series A in February.

Startups Peak Pulse and Sweat and Soak run 'wellness darties' for college Greek organizations, attracting sponsors including Lululemon, Red Bull, and Celsius.

Alexandr Wang restructured Meta's AI efforts, preceding the release of its first frontier AI models.

OPay's lending overtook payments as its biggest business, changing the risk profile of the IPO story beyond the headline growth rate.