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Every issue of the daily brief, in full — each one a fixed, dated snapshot of what was worth reading that morning. The live stream lives at Tiago's Bookmarks.
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10 issues
CodeRabbit raises $143.0M Series C for AI code review
CodeRabbit raised a $143.0M Series C for its AI code review tool, which provides line-by-line suggestions and Q&A inside the code. Skan AI raised $63.0M for enterprise process intelligence, and Blacksmith, founded in 2024 by engineers from Faire and Cockroach Labs, raised a $45.0M Series B to run GitHub Actions on gaming-grade CPUs.
9 links
River AI raises $1.1bn for user-owned models
Igor Babuschkin's River AI has $1.1bn to hand model ownership back to users, and it lands the same day xAI ships Grok Bot — agents with their own computers, working your tools around the clock. The bet on both sides is that the scarce thing is no longer the model but the labour it replaces.
10 links
Skild AI raises $1.4bn for robotics foundation model
Skild's $1.4bn Series C bets that robot foundation models will scale the way language models did, while the day's tooling concedes that agents mostly don't behave: Docker is now selling microVM isolation for Claude Code and Codex, and Meta's open 30B is explicitly tuned for failure recovery. Cheap robots, expensive containment.
8 links
Niron Magnetics raises $150m for rare-earth-free magnets
Iron nitride magnets, micro data centres built for orbit, a sovereign Starlink and embodiment-agnostic robot brains: four of today's five raises need a factory, and Niron's $150m is the only cheque large enough to buy one. The lone software company in the batch collects debts.
5 links
LMArena raises $150m to benchmark AI models
A $150m Series A for a leaderboard is a bet that nobody trusts their own evals, and Uber open-sourcing the agent security tooling it runs in production makes the same point from the other end. Models ship freely now; knowing whether they behaved is the scarce part.
13 links
Aurelius raises $40m for anti-drone laser weapons
Most of today's raises buy instruments rather than software: smart balloons in the stratosphere, radar satellites, subsurface models for geothermal drilling, and a scanner that photographs your entire skin. Meanwhile YC's newest cohort shipped two more trading terminals, which suggests the contested frontier is measurement, not the transaction layer built on top of it.
8 links
Anthropic raises $36bn in single round
Anthropic's $36bn is underwritten by the thesis the day's reading spells out — Karpathy's autoresearch agents, Lilian Weng on harness engineering — that a model can improve the pipeline producing its successor. The $2.1bn going to Base Power, Beta and Sunrun is the same bet, placed on the power supply.
12 links
K2 Space raises $500m Series D for large satellites
$810m went to satellites and critical minerals today; $1.5m went to helping brands rank inside ChatGPT's answers. The ratio is the point — with wind and solar now outrunning fossil fuels in Germany, the marginal AI dollar has moved to the power, metal and orbit the models will eventually sit on.
9 links
Seven YC startups launch, including air defense as a service
Four of today's seven YC launches sell into things that fail loudly: air defense, chip design environments, federal case backlogs, hosting you'd rather not have hacked. The trading-card investment platform is the batch's lone consumer holdout, and the only priced round goes to Density, $17m to count people in offices.
8 links
$2.1bn for atoms, 36% for the agents
Antora, Antares, K2 and Agility took in roughly $2.1bn between them today, all of it for machines that must obey physics. HANDBOOK.md, meanwhile, finds the best frontier agent honours a written company policy on 36% of tasks — the atoms are outpacing the paperwork.
34 links