Markets
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Demis Hassabis on his rush to ‘solve all disease’ and Isomorphic’s new $2.1 billion
We’re always running out of time, but that’s something Demis Hassabis reckons with more than most. Hassabis regularly works until 4 AM, and that’s partly the nature of leading AI at Alphabet. The Google DeepMind cofounder also has another company: Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery startup he spun out of Google in 2021. I…
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‘A pressure cooker ready to explode’: The wild secondaries scramble for Anthropic shares
A feeding frenzy in the animal kingdom is, at its core, vicious competition. The idiom “feeding frenzy” gained prominence in the mid-century, first primarily to describe the behavior of sharks frenetically ripping into large schools of fish. It’s chaotic, ruthless, and triggered by the perception of abundance. And I suspect the phrase gained popularity both…
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SpaceX’s IPO filing is full of surprises
SpaceX’s IPO prospectus is a treasure trove. On some level, that’s expected: Elon Musk (the world’s richest person) and his businesses have long been their own landscape of lightning rods. But SpaceX has always especially captured imaginations. The company’s been around since 2002 and for decades has been revamping the once-impenetrable space economy. And the…
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Cerebras soars almost 70% by market close in a true blockbuster IPO
In 2024, Cerebras filed to go public. In 2025, the company withdrew its IPO. And yesterday, Cerebras hit the public markets, at long last. The chipmaker, which designs and manufactures AI inference chips, has long billed itself as an Nvidia challenger, and its first day stock pop certainly reflected Nvidia-mania: Cerebras shares rocketed 70% by…
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What drones and drug discovery have in common
What do weapons and drug discovery have in common? Over the last 24 hours, billions of dollars and a lead investor. In quick succession, Demis Hassabis’s Isomorphic Labs announced it had raised a $2.1 billion Series B, and very early today, Anduril announced it had closed its $5 billion Series H at a $61 billion…
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Exclusive: Roadrunner raises $27 million from Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund
Joubin Mirzadegan will straight-up tell you: it’s boring—and that’s the point. Mirzadegan’s startup Roadrunner builds AI-native, natural-language “configure, price, quote” (or CPQ) software. And before you keep scrolling, consider: The CPQ process—the software companies use to configure what they’re selling, set the right price, and generate a quote—quietly controls how fast and how well they…
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Exclusive: Index Ventures backs Frame’s $50 million bet that employees are still cybersecurity’s weakest link
I used to think I’d never fall for a phishing scam. Now I’m not so sure. A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine received a text from our editor, or so they thought. It turned out to be completely fake. Scams like this, apparently, are becoming the new normal. That’s the bet behind Frame…
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Brian Schimpf has been quietly running Anduril since its earliest days. And once he’s talking, he has a lot to say
In 2017, Brian Schimpf was in the California desert with an engineering problem to solve. The place was Apple Valley, expansive, sandy, and surreal. Schimpf—CEO and cofounder of Anduril, then a startup in the truest sense of the word—had been there for a while, building the defense tech company’s first product: autonomous, solar-powered surveillance towers,…
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Exclusive: Gusto crosses $1 billion in 12-month trailing revenue
After closing, a San Francisco flower market isn’t exactly idyllic. But in 2012, Eddie Kim and Tomer London, cofounders of HR software startup Gusto, were there to see Christina Stembel. The owner of Farmgirl Flowers, Stembel needed to hire her first employee and, accordingly, had to set up payroll for the first time. She’d been…
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District, founded by three Snapchat alumni, raises a $14.7 million seed round to help independent sellers build community-driven marketplaces
Eddie Koai, Patrick Mandia, and I are watching Crazy Lamp Lady on someone’s computer. It’s a town hall of sorts. Crazy Lamp Lady is actually a big deal—her real first name is Jocelyn, but as Crazy Lamp Lady, she has more than 800,000 followers across platforms and an online marketplace attracting thousands. She’s reassuring her…