Rob Broderick

Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public on.ft.com/3MaguGJ

The people of Silicon Valley are unwell. If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn, you’ve got it bad. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, invites from friends to hang out are waning, even weddings are on hold. This is the time to make your mark and make your money, after all. If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100M on the table, you fucking idiot. Being an underdog isn't as fun as you thought. If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death. "Too many of my friends are spiraling," Brie Wolfson writes. "I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this." It’s all too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. Every month, a new frontier model is released. Every day, a new unicorn is minted. Seriously. 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far. So what’s left for the sane ones? Brie went looking for teams playing a different game. She found one in Ottawa: a search infrastructure company that many of the AI darlings rely on. It's growing fast, and its people are well. Read @zebriez’s latest company dispatch from inside the sane asylum of turbopuffer. colossus.com/article/sane-as…

launched a model accidentally served trillions of tokens a day 29.4% of the fortune 500 showed up raised a really big series A from @a16z it's been 3 weeks we would like to sleep now

Introducing Beam: a highly efficient agentic open model with 501B total parameters and 23B active. - Frontier reasoning efficiency - Advances the Western open frontier on coding & agentic tasks - Trained end-to-end from scratch Full weights release this month. Learn more about Beam: reflection.ai/beam

Excited to share @profound has raised a $180M Series D, co-led by @sequoia and @kleinerperkins. Winning in AI Search requires an inhuman amount of work. That is why we are building the AI platform for marketers, underpinned by two things: 1/ Your AI Marketer, a marketing expert that proactively investigates your data, identifies opportunities, and then does the work while you stay in the loop. 2/ Context Manager, a living synthesis of your meetings, email threads, and brand data powering this new teammate. As your brand evolves, so does your AI Marketer. AI labs are pushing the frontier in fields like engineering, law, and finance. But marketing, one of the economy's most complex and consequential applications, has received far less attention. That’s why we’re expanding our applied AI research team. We’re bringing together research scientists, engineers, and IOI medalists to advance AI for marketing. Their focus: post-training models for marketing workflows, and building the world's first AI benchmark for real-world tasks in the field.

Today we're announcing our $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by @a16z , with participation from existing investors @8vc, @pearvc, and @BloombergBeta and new investors @HRTVentures and @nextladder. Alongside the fundraise, three more announcements: - Vals Smith: is now generally available. Anyone can create a custom coding benchmark from any GitHub repo with 120 free credits to get started. - Frontier Risk Benchmarks: We are releasing the RSI Index in collaboration with @CoreWeave and just launched ReverseEngBench, a new cyber benchmark built with Columbia University, Tufts University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. We are also sharing our initial work in mental health, with more to come across environmental impact, military, and biosecurity. - Website + Vals Index 2.0: We completely rebuilt the Vals website and have released Vals Index 2.0, with coverage of more of the economy. Our revenue has already grown 8x compared to all of 2025. Our customer base doubled and the team tripled in 6 months. Our results have been cited in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI. The AI economy runs on self-reported grades. When a model ships, the scores come from the company that built it. No other trillion-dollar industry works this way. Finance has ratings agencies. Medicine has the FDA. AI has vibes and vendor benchmarks. We built Vals to be the independent evaluation layer the industry is missing. Check out our new website and try Vals Smith!

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $115 million in funding, including a $100M Series A led by @kleinerperkins. America has lost the ability to build, and we’re here to restore it. My co-founder, @NoahMcGuinn, and I left our jobs at @SpaceX , where we worked on programs including Starship, Starshield, and @Starlink, to build a company that will solve construction’s greatest challenges. Infrastructure is the foundation of civilization, and construction is the precursor to innovation. If America wants to build a brighter future for the next generation, we have to make it faster, cheaper, and safer to build. That’s where @TerraFirma_Inc comes in. We’re a new type of company, a robotic construction company that builds the full technology stack needed to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in one of the world’s oldest, largest, most important, but least efficient industries. We are building technology that expands what’s possible in construction on Earth, and then we'll use that same technology to build megastructures and colonies on the Moon and Mars. We’ve made tremendous progress over the past year, growing the company more than 10x in the last 12 months. We are performing projects across the world. By the end of October 2026, we are on track to operate 3 of the top 3 largest robotic construction fleets in the world, each on a different continent, bringing unprecedented speed, scale, and efficiency to some of the world’s most complex critical infrastructure projects. This funding will allow us to step on the gas and scale our manufacturing, software, operations, and construction deployments, including work on massive commercial and government contracts. We’re building the future of construction right here in Austin, Texas, and scaling it globally. If you want to be part of the team changing the world, now and on Mars, join us. Our Series A was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital, and Ravelin Capital. Huge thanks to all of our angel investors, friends, and family who have helped and supported us throughout this journey. Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/TerraFirma-…