The Startups VC

🔋 Google engineer allegedly made $1.2M using insider information on Polymarket The US Department of Justice charged Google engineer Michele Spagnolo with making $1.2 million from prediction market bets using non-public company information. According to prosecutors, Spagnolo used advance knowledge of Google’s annual Year in Search rankings to place bets on Polymarket before the results were published. He reportedly wagered more than $2.7 million in total. Google said the information came from internal marketing materials that were widely accessible to employees, but using it for betting was prohibited. ✔️ news.nzoko.com

“When people start telling you you’re crazy, you just might be on to the most important innovation in your life.” ~ Larry Ellison ✔️ @venture

$2,600 invested in Tesla’s IPO is worth more than $1 million today. ✔️ @technco

⚖️ AI is pushing more people to sue without lawyers MIT and USC researchers analyzed 4.5M federal cases and 46M PACER records to study how generative AI is changing US courts. For almost 20 years, only ~11% of federal cases were filed without attorneys. In 2025, that jumped to 16.8%. The increase is strongest in paperwork-heavy cases. AI helps people draft complaints, handle legal formatting, and navigate filings without paying a lawyer. Courts are already seeing the effect. These cases are not resolved faster, but they generate far more activity inside the system. In the first 180 days, court filings and procedural records in self-represented cases rose 158% versus the pre-AI period. Researchers also found AI-written complaints rising fast: from ~1% in 2023 to 18% by early 2026. ✔️ @thestartupsvc

🚫 China is restricting overseas travel for top AI engineers China has started limiting foreign travel for AI researchers and engineers working at private companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek, according to Bloomberg. People involved in advanced AI work now reportedly need government approval before leaving the country. The restrictions target specialists considered strategically important for China’s AI race with the US. The move shows how seriously Beijing now treats AI talent and research. Engineers are increasingly being viewed less like employees and more like critical infrastructure. The global AI race is starting to look closer to semiconductor policy than normal tech hiring. ✔️ @venture

🤖 Anthropic nears $1T valuation after $65B raise Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round, raising its valuation to $965 billion from $380 billion months ago. It reported an annual recurring revenue of $47 billion, surpassing peers including OpenAI, valued at $852 billion. ✔️ @venture

🚖 Uber questions AI spending amid rising costs Uber's COO said heavy AI spending is hard to justify as token consumption grows without clear consumer benefits. The company used its annual AI budget in just 4 months. Nvidia's VP noted their compute costs now exceed employee expenses, showing AI is becoming more expensive than human labor. ✔️ @venture

🤖 Anthropic Could Surpass Alphabet by 2027 Investor Joseph Jack from OSS Capital projects Anthropic's ARR to jump from $1B in January 2025 to $30B by April 2026, with growth accelerating rather than slowing. Even a conservative slowdown scenario predicts $100B revenue by end of 2026 and $340B in 2027. Anthropic builds AI models and enterprise software, rapidly expanding its client base. The number of customers spending over $1M annually doubled to 1,000 in under two months, fueling fast scaling and market capture. Demand for Anthropic's Gemini tokens grew 10x last quarter, far outpacing Alphabet's 60% growth. This rapid adoption narrows the revenue gap, making it likely Anthropic will overtake Alphabet around mid-2028 at $575B revenue. ✔️ @venture

Most investors don’t understand how brutal losses really are. Down 50%? You need +100% just to break even. Down 80%? You need +400%. This is why “cheap” stocks can be dangerous. And why protecting capital matters just as much as finding winners. ✔️ news.nzoko.com

📈 Robinhood traders keep buying every AI dip Retail traders spent 2026 piling into Nvidia, Tesla, Micron, Sandisk, and other AI infrastructure plays. The strongest signal came during the DeepSeek panic in January, when Nvidia lost almost $600 billion in market value in one session. Robinhood users responded with the highest buy-to-sell ratio for Nvidia seen in the last 3 years. The same pattern showed up across other selloffs. Traders kept buying discounted AI names while taking profits in stocks that had already run hard. Retail is still playing one trade. Buy the panic. Hold the AI winners. ✔️ news.nzoko.com

📊 AI startups are inflating ARR numbers to look bigger TechCrunch spoke with founders, investors, and finance operators who say many AI startups are stretching the meaning of ARR to boost growth narratives. The main trick is replacing real ARR with “contracted ARR” or annualized projections. In some cases, startups reportedly counted revenue from customers who were not fully onboarded yet, long pilot programs, or contracts that may never convert into payments. Several investors admitted the practice is common and often tolerated because everyone is chasing the same AI growth story. One VC said some companies report CARR that is 70% higher than actual ARR. The pressure comes from AI valuations. Investors now expect companies to jump from $1 million to $100 million revenue at record speed. In AI, revenue headlines are becoming part of the marketing stack. ✔️ news.nzoko.com

Who owns the satellites orbiting Earth ✔️ news.nzoko.com

🤖 DeepMind Founder Holds Stake in Anthropic The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, secretly invested early in Anthropic as an angel investor. Anthropic is an AI startup competing closely with DeepMind. Despite this rivalry, Google recently agreed to invest $10 billion in Anthropic, possibly influenced by Hassabis. ✔️ @venture

🤖 Altman Offers Startups $2M in Tokens for Equity Sam Altman proposed giving each YCombinator startup $2 million in tokens for about 7% equity, roughly YCombinator's usual stake. The tokens come from Codex, which Altman aims to promote by tying new startups to his ecosystem amid competition with Anthropic. ✔️ @venture

🤖 OpenAI had 11 founders. Only 3 are still there. The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company. 🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment. 🖱 Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX. 🖱 Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI. 🖱 Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic. 🖱 Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic. 🖱 John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines. 🖱 Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed. 🖱 Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator. 🖱 Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems. OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI. The original team ended up shaping the entire industry. ✔️ @venture

✖️ xAI promised employees $420 for tax returns and hasn’t paid xAI asked employees to submit their personal tax returns as training data for Grok and offered $420 in return, according to Bloomberg. The company wanted to improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 filing deadline as users increasingly turned to ChatGPT and Claude for accounting tasks. Two months later, employees are still waiting for the payments. Even training data can end up as an unpaid invoice. ✔️ @venture

🔥 OpenAI Co-Founder Joins Anthropic Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, has officially joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude. Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher, helped found OpenAI in 2015 and later led AI efforts at Tesla. He now says he wants to "return to R&D" during a critical time for large language model development. ✔️ @venture

👹 MIT Builds Robot from 12 Labubu Heads Researchers at MIT created a moving spherical dodecahedron robot using twelve detached Labubu figurine heads, naming it Labububot. The project challenges typical social robot design, which aims to be cute and friendly to avoid the "uncanny valley"-a discomfort zone where robots look almost human but feel unsettling. Instead, the team leans on monster theory, suggesting a robot that causes slight unease can engage users more deeply by provoking thought rather than comfort. They shared full assembly instructions and files on GitHub for those interested in building their own version. 📊@tech

🔍 DeepMind reinvents the mouse pointer DeepMind created an AI-powered mouse pointer that acts as a context highlighter for an embedded agent. You can point at a table and ask the agent to make a chart or select a restaurant name in a photo to book it for you. This pointer shifts some cognitive load from the user by removing the need to write detailed prompts. You just click on something and say commands like “tell me about THIS” or “move THIS HERE.” The system combines speech with gestures, making interaction more natural. It is already available in Gemini in Chrome and Google AI Studio, and will be integrated into upcoming GoogleBook laptops designed for AI experiences. 📊@tech

🚚 Tesla starts production of Semi trucks after years of delays Tesla has begun serial production of its electric Semi, first unveiled in 2017 after multiple delays. The truck will be sold in two versions. Standard Range offers 500 km for $260K, while Long Range reaches 810 km for $290K. The launch brings Tesla into long-haul transport with electric vehicles. 📊 @tech