Baseten is raising $1.5bn at up to $13bn, betting AI’s profits lie in cheap inference
Baseten is raising $1.5bn at up to $13bn, betting AI’s profits lie in cheap inference

Baseten is finalising a $1.5bn funding round that values the company at up to $13bn. The structure is almost as notable as the size. The round is dual-tiered, with some investors buying in at an $11bn valuation and others at $13bn, according to the com…

NASA picked Eric Schmidt’s Relativity Space to fly to Mars. It has never reached orbit.
NASA picked Eric Schmidt’s Relativity Space to fly to Mars. It has never reached orbit.

NASA is partnering with Relativity Space, the rocket company run by former Google chief Eric Schmidt, to fly a science mission to Mars. Announced on June 17, the mission is called Aeolus, the first flight in Relativity’s new Interplanetary Sciences Pro…

Midjourney says its new full-body scanner beats an MRI. It has never built hardware before.
Midjourney says its new full-body scanner beats an MRI. It has never built hardware before.

Midjourney, the company best known for turning text prompts into images, has announced something it has never made before: hardware. And not a phone case or a pair of glasses, but a full-body medical scanner. At an event in San Francisco on June 17, fo…

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joins the SpaceX board, days after the record IPO
Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joins the SpaceX board, days after the record IPO

SpaceX has named its first new board member since going public, and the word doing the heavy lifting in the announcement is “independent.” In a filing on June 17, the company said its board had elected Roelof Botha, the former Sequoia Capital steward, …

Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel in the US
Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel in the US

The news that Apple had agreed to make its chips in the United States did not come from Apple. It came, on Thursday, from a post by President Donald Trump on Truth Social, announcing that the company had agreed to work with Intel to design and manufact…

The Trump Mobile T1 was supposed to be made in America. It’s a Taiwanese phone with a gold coat.
The Trump Mobile T1 was supposed to be made in America. It’s a Taiwanese phone with a gold coat.

The Trump Mobile T1 is here, and it is not what was promised. When Donald Trump’s eldest sons unveiled it at Trump Tower a year ago, the pitch was a gold-coloured handset with an iPhone resemblance, proudly made in the US. What shipped is a rebranded H…

Half of Americans now use AI chatbots, but 40% think AI will make society worse and two-thirds don’t trust the government to regulate it
Half of Americans now use AI chatbots, but 40% think AI will make society worse and two-thirds don’t trust the government to regulate it

Half of American adults now use AI chatbots, but a plurality believe the technology will ultimately damage society, and overwhelming majorities have lost confidence that either the government or the companies building it will manage it responsibly. A n…

Arcade raised $60M to fix the real wall blocking enterprise AI agents: what they’re allowed to do
Arcade raised $60M to fix the real wall blocking enterprise AI agents: what they’re allowed to do

The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “wil…

The bottleneck in geothermal moved from the drill to the turbine. This SpaceX alum raised $22M to fix it
The bottleneck in geothermal moved from the drill to the turbine. This SpaceX alum raised $22M to fix it

The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX en…

a16z is betting $38M that you want an AI ‘teammate’, not another agent
a16z is betting $38M that you want an AI ‘teammate’, not another agent

The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberat…