Issue #4August 6, 202612 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.

Cool Company Raises

YC S26

Agent FM launches at YC (Summer 2026)

One group chat to hear and steer your coding agents.

Artificial-Intelligence Developer-Tools Productivity YC B2B

$830.0M

Beta Technologies raises a $830.0M round

BETA Technologies is an electric aviation company based in Burlington, Vermont. Founded in 2017, BETA is working to change the paradigm of how we transport goods and people by making aviation cleaner, safer, and more cost-effective. To do this, the company is producing all-electric aircraft; multimodal, interoperable charging infrastructure; and training programs for next-generation pilots and maintainers. The BETA team has designed and is pursuing certification of two electric aircraft, including an electric fixed-wing and an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The company has also brought more than 20 chargers online across the East and Gulf coasts, with over 50 more in development.

Manufacturing Information-Technology Transportation Exim Bank $100M+Aerospace

$25.0M

Delightree raises a $25.0M round

Delightree is an all-in-one franchising technology platform built for emerging franchise brands to scale efficiently without compromising their brand promise, enabling faster location launches, streamlined onboarding and training, automated operations, and stronger communication across teams to drive consistency, engagement, and sustainable franchise growth.

Information-Technology Emergent Timber Grove Ventures Accel Innovius $10M+

$3.5M

Claryx raises a $3.5M Seed round

Claryx is a genomic intelligence company focused on preventing hospital outbreaks. It is developing an immune system for hospitals that detects transmission in real-time and guides intervention by infection prevention teams. The company was founded by brothers Kurt and Dirk Hackenberger.

Biotechnology Health-Care Health-Diagnostics Outlander Vc $1M+

$1.0B

Polymarket raises a $1.0B round

Polymarket is the world’s largest prediction market where traders predict the outcome of future events and earn rewards for being right. Market forecasts span politics, current events, and pop culture, and the platform is increasingly trusted by both the general public and news organizations.

Software $100M+

$24.3M

Clearjet raises a $24.3M round

Clearjet is an end-to-end express delivery network infrastructure + operating system utilizing the US commercial airlines for ecommerce delivery. Clearjet zone skips packages to all final mile providers including UPS, Fedex, USPS, regional carriers and gig drivers enabling retailers faster delivery at lower rates.

Professional-Services $10M+

$36.0B

Anthropic raises a $36.0B round

Learn the critical role of AI & ML in cybersecurity and industry specific case studies. Watch on-demand sessions today.

Artificial-Intelligence Cyber-Security Machine-Learning Blackstone $100M+

$30.0M

Ambrook raises a $30.0M Series B round

Ambrook's mission is to build a more prosperous and resilient future for America's family-run businesses. We're starting with accounting tools to help businesses manage finances, improve margins, and stay independent.

Software Finance Fintech Cameron Ventures Field Ventures Thrive Capital+3 more

$267.0M

Sunrun Inc. raises a $267.0M round

Sunrun is a United States-based provider of residential solar electricity and solar power services for homeowners.

Energy Rbc Capital Markets Morgan Stanley Citigroup Bof A Securities $100M+

$1.0B

Base Power raises a $1.0B Series D round

Base Power raised $1B in Series D funding at a $13B valuation, bringing total funding to over $2.5B. The Austin-based company installs home battery systems in customers' backyards on a subscription model — it retains ownership of the batteries, charges an install fee plus a monthly rate, gives homeowners outage backup, and sells stored electricity back to the grid at peak demand. It operates in Texas and Illinois, installs roughly 100 batteries a day, and has utility partnerships totalling over 200 MW. Alongside the round it launched Base Core, a 39.2 kWh home battery built in the United States.

Energy Energy Storage Battery Ribbit Addition Valor Equity Partners+15 more

Interesting

github.com

karpathy/autoresearch: AI agents running research on single-GPU nanochat training automatically

AI agents running research on single-GPU nanochat training automatically - karpathy/autoresearch

RSI

lilianweng.github.io

Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement

The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific feedback loop: an AI uses its current intelligence to improve the cognitive machinery that produces its intelligence. This feedback loop in modern AI may indicate the model rewriting its own weights directly, or more broadly the model improves the training pipeline and the deployment system, which in turn enables a better successor model with improved performance across economically valuable tasks. The speed of research development in AI has been shown to drastically accelerated in frontier labs (Anthropic; OpenAI).

Harness Engineering RSI

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