Desk
Investment and venture news in AI.
An investment research firm and Anthropic ran a genuinely interesting autonomous protein-design experiment, then sold it as drug discovery. The science got the easy part; the marketing skipped the hard part.
Meta is building itself a new funding valve for AI, and the design tells us the spending is expected to outrun even its enormous cash machine.
Nous Research built its name on an open-source agent people actually use. The $1.5 billion question is whether it can sell a private, enterprise version without hollowing out the open project.
Rival AI companies and two federal agencies are pooling money and data behind one nonprofit's virtual cell, a bet that biology's real bottleneck is shared data, not smarter models.
Lambda's reported $4 billion raise looks like proof of AI demand, but its backlog is leaning on one customer, and that concentration is the real story heading into an IPO.
An MIT Technology Review Insights brief argues the agentic shift fails on siloed data and fixed stacks — not missing models — and puts sovereignty next to composability.
NVIDIA’s AI-factory pitch: megawatt-scale plants (~$60M each) win on productive tokens-per-MW, multi-year durable GPUs, and fungible workloads — citing SemiAnalysis AgentX gains for Vera Rubin.
Satlyt raises an $8M seed to run AI software across others’ satellites — Gemma already cut error-downlink size 60%+ on a Momentus craft — as a SpaceX rideshare lofted more demos.
CoreWeave puts Vera Rubin NVL72 into production with Cognition’s Devin seeing up to 4.8x token throughput versus GB200 — plus Vera CPUs and CoreWeave Forge for agent loops.
Bloomberg says OpenAI is courting a $30B-plus pre-IPO round near $1.4T — a bridge after Altman ruled out a 2026 public debut for safety.
OpenAI doubles down on the Lenfest AI Collaborative with $5M cash plus up to $5M in credits—expanding the largest AI fellowship program in US journalism.
British neocloud Nscale locked $3.36B in convertible notes—led by Third Point, with $1B from Nvidia in November—ahead of a US IPO eyed near a $35B valuation.