Corgi Times

Corgi Times | Issue 31

Corgi Times — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 23:32:31 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Corgi Business Auto insurance, starting with coverage for contractors and service fleets! This launch expands our transportation insurance offerings and brings more opportunities for our partners to serve their clients.

Our approach combines underwriting expertise with driver-level data and telematics to better understand each fleet and inform risk selection and pricing. We look forward to expanding the offering to more business classes over time.

Check out our coverage here:

We’re excited to welcome James Kullman as Corgi Insurance’s Head of Underwriting for North America! James joins us from Chubb, where he served as an Assistant Vice President and underwriting manager, and brings nearly 15 years of experience in commercial insurance.

At Corgi, James will lead our commercial underwriting efforts across North America, bringing together insurance expertise and AI-powered tools to help make coverage more efficient and accessible for businesses.

We’re thrilled to have James on the team as we continue building the future of insurance. Read the full announcement here.

It’s also been a busy time for the Corgi community, with plenty of opportunities to connect, move, and build together!

We brought founders together for some friendly competition at Founders Pickleball : a chance to step away from our screens, get on the court, and connect with the community.

We started the morning with movement, new connections, and a very special guest at Corgi Yoga! Women in tech hopped on the Corgi bus for a yoga session alongside our very own Trudy.

SCALE at GMI’s Spooky Demo Day brought founders, investors, and builders together to see what AI startups created over six weeks. The day featured live demos, opportunities to meet the teams, and an evening reception.

Ideas meet action at the Lovable x Girls into VC Buildathon! Together with Lovable and Girls into VC at Berkeley, we brought women in venture, startups, and tech to Corgi to turn everyday frustrations into solutions.

Lastly, a big thank-you to our drink partners for being part of our events and helping make these gatherings even more enjoyable. We appreciate your support and love sharing your drinks with the Corgi community!

Up next, catch up on the latest in AI and tech, startup funding, job openings, and upcoming events all in one place for your next break between meetings.

Recent News

1. Anthropic files for IPO, revealing explosive growth and staggering costs

Anthropic has officially filed to go public, setting the stage for one of the most anticipated IPOs in tech history. The company behind Claude disclosed rapid revenue growth alongside enormous losses and infrastructure commitments, offering investors their first detailed look at the economics of a frontier AI lab. The filing could reshape how Wall Street values the entire AI industry.

2. Meta plans to raise up to $95 billion to fund its AI expansion

Meta announced plans to raise as much as $95 billion through stock offerings to support its massive AI infrastructure buildout. The fundraising includes an initial $35 billion offering and a potential additional $60 billion share sale. Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom have also expressed interest in participating. It’s one of the clearest signs yet of just how expensive the AI infrastructure race has become.

3. SpaceX secures a $40 billion financing deal for AI chips

SpaceX has reportedly agreed to a roughly $40 billion equipment-financing arrangement with Apollo to fund Nvidia GPU purchases for its AI initiatives. The deal highlights how AI infrastructure spending is increasingly being financed through enormous debt and leasing agreements rather than traditional venture funding.

New Funding Updates

Bedrock Robotics raises $600 million at a $4.1 billion valuation

San Francisco-based Bedrock Robotics raised $600 million in Series C funding, bringing its valuation to $4.1 billion. The company develops autonomous technology for construction equipment, including excavators that can operate without human drivers. The new capital will help expand deployments as AI moves beyond software into physical industries.

Approaching.AI raises nearly $195 million to make AI inference cheaper

Beijing-based Approaching.AI secured more than 1.3 billion yuan, approximately $195 million, in Series B funding. The company develops infrastructure that makes running large language models more efficient, with a focus on reducing inference costs and improving computing performance. As AI agents become more widely adopted, the cost of generating responses is becoming an increasingly important part of the industry.

Nevis raises $70 million for an AI-powered wealth management platform

London-based Nevis, founded by former Revolut executives, raised $70 million to develop an AI-powered wealth management platform. The funding highlights growing investor interest in applying AI to financial services, particularly products designed to automate traditionally complex financial workflows.

What’s Been Going On?

Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI spending grows

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to approximately 60,000 employees, representing more than a quarter of its workforce. The move comes as the company looks to control operating costs while continuing to invest heavily in AI infrastructure. Employees across divisions including Copilot, Xbox, Windows, and finance are reportedly eligible.

Verizon signs a $2 billion AI infrastructure deal with AWS

Verizon announced an agreement worth more than $2 billion with Amazon Web Services to provide high-capacity fiber connectivity for AWS data centers. The deal comes as demand for AI computing creates an enormous need for faster, more reliable connections between data centers.

Unconventional AI acquires chip startup NeuReality

Unconventional AI announced its acquisition of Israeli chip startup NeuReality in a cash-and-stock deal. The company, founded by former Intel and MosaicML executive Naveen Rao, is developing more energy-efficient AI hardware. The acquisition is intended to accelerate its product development as competition in AI chips intensifies. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Sources:

Reuters. (2026, October 26). Anthropic opens books on AI’s explosive growth and staggering costs.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/anthropic-opens-books-ais-explosive-growth-staggering-costs-2026-10-26/

Reuters. (2026, October 26). Meta launches $35 billion stock offering to fund AI expansion.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/meta-launches-35-billion-stock-offering-fund-ai-expansion-2026-10-26/

MarketWatch. (2026, October 26). Musk says SpaceX landed a $40 billion debt deal and forecasts doom for some AI rivals.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/musk-says-spacex-landed-a-40-billion-debt-deal-and-forecasts-doom-for-some-ai-rivals-a0a4991e

The Next Web. (2026, October 26). Bedrock Robotics raises $600M Series C at $4.1B valuation.

https://thenextweb.com/news/bedrock-robotics-600m-series-c-4-1bn-valuation

Tech Startups. (2026, October 26). Startup funding news today, October 26, 2026: Ailytics, Approaching.AI, CASBOT, Volare, and more.

https://techstartups.com/2026/10/26/startup-funding-news-today-october-26-2026-ailytics-approaching-ai-casbot-volare-more/

Dealroom.co. (2026, October 26). Ex-Revolut founders raise $70M for AI wealth platform Nevis.

https://dealroom.co/news/166011-ex-revolut-founders-raise-70m-for-ai-wealth-platform-nevis

Singh, J. (2026, October 26). Microsoft offers buyouts to around 60,000 employees to contain costs. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-is-offering-buyouts-around-60000-employees-business-insider-reports-2026-10-26/

Reuters. (2026, October 26). Verizon lifts annual forecasts, signs more than $2 billion AI infrastructure deal.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/verizon-lifts-annual-forecasts-signs-more-than-2-billion-ai-infrastructure-deal-2026-10-26/

Reuters. (2026, October 26). Unconventional AI buys Israeli chip startup NeuReality to speed product development.

https://www.reuters.com/business/unconventional-ai-buys-israeli-chip-startup-neureality-speed-product-development-2026-10-26/

Events November 1 - November 7, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

11/1

Recruit Holdings & Indeed present【Fireside Chat @Berkeley】Beyond “0 to 1”: How to Scale AI & Tech Products to Hundreds of Millions : https://luma.com/s7elvwil

11/2

OSA Con 2026 - The Anti-Hype Conference for Open Source Analytics and AI : https://luma.com/eis7567t

MCP in Production: What’s Missing? : https://luma.com/elastic-mcp

11/3

Defense Tech Conference 2026 : https://luma.com/defensetechwest

Make SF Better: A Hack Night with Mistral AI : https://luma.com/mistral-elastic

11/4

Small Data SF : https://luma.com/p8cxjf28

11/5

BoxWorks Dev Summit 2026 : https://luma.com/box-dev-summit-2026

AI For Future - 2nd Edition - Pitching, Funding and Speech : https://luma.com/pr209v8d

11/6

Built at the Frontier: AIAS⁺ Startup & Builder Night : https://luma.com/9gbayglh

11/7

Anything Applied Agentic Hackathon - hackathons.team : https://luma.com/gap48i1m

AGI Builders Meetup SF : https://luma.com/8vkw9rpv

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

GTM

Business Development Representative, Strategic @ Omni - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/omni/94eb7870-a4d1-4c22-8ec0-f2be89b202d9

Account Executive (SF) @ Sphere - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/5fe49c1e-e380-4650-9966-11dd7ab90dd6?gh_src=Folklore+Ventures+job+board

Growth Manager | ABM @ Netic - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/netic/7d466001-fbc5-4e85-8b2e-5fc2fe823acb

Growth & Marketing Lead (Founding) @ Nango - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nango/c946685a-e091-47f9-9ac4-796c6d2955de/

Growth Marketing Manager @ Reducto - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/reducto/ae830a51-f156-459d-a917-215e0c38cf80

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 30

Corgi Times — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:47:46 GMT

Hello and welcome back to another issue of the Corgi Times!

This week, we had some special visitors at Corgi! TaiwanPlus News stopped by to film a day in the life of a fast-paced startup, getting a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at Corgi beyond the coffee and insurance.

They sat down with Emily Yuan, our Co-founder and COO, Erika Lee, our Head of Brand, and Evelyn Miao, our employee #3 , to hear about what it’s like building a growing startup, the day-to-day hustle, and how our 24/7 cafés fit into the bigger picture.

We brought founders together for Ship Your Culture, an international potluck celebrating the YC Fall 2026 batch. From dishes representing different cultures to a little friendly competition, it was a chance for founders to share a piece of home and connect outside the usual startup grind.

Our founder Nico Laqua recently sat down with visiting YC partner Max Kolysh to speak with the latest YC batch about Corgi.

Nico shared more about what we’re building, how we’re approaching insurance differently, and what it takes to build a company in an industry that’s ready for change. He also answered questions from founders in the batch about Corgi, our approach, and what we’ve learned along the way.

Always great to connect with the next generation of YC founders and share what we’re building at Corgi.

A huge thank you again for our drink partners!

As always, we’ve got your weekly roundup of AI and tech news, startup funding updates, job opportunities, and up coming events to keep you entertained between meetings.

New Funding Updates

Tenstorrent ($1.5B Series E)

AI chipmaker Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion in a Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, more than doubling its valuation. The company plans to scale production of its Galaxy AI servers as it competes in the rapidly growing AI hardware market.

Air Space Intelligence ($325M Series C)

AI startup ASI secured $325 million in a Series C led by Spark Capital. Its simulation software helps predict disruptions in air traffic, energy grids, and military operations, with the new funding supporting expansion into critical infrastructure.

Otter.ai ($320M growth financing)

AI meeting assistant Otter.ai secured $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. The funding will support its expansion as demand grows for AI-powered meeting notes, workplace knowledge, and productivity tools.

What’s Been Going On?

Anthropic explores another $45 billion AI infrastructure deal

Anthropic is reportedly in talks with Nvidia-backed Nscale for a second AI cloud computing deal worth approximately $45 billion. The agreement would expand Anthropic’s data center capacity in West Virginia using Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips, highlighting the massive investments powering the AI race. The deal has not yet been finalized.

Chinese tech giants place over $35 billion in Nvidia chip orders

ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have reportedly ordered more than $35 billion worth of Nvidia’s RTX PRO 5500 chips. The massive demand highlights China’s growing need for AI computing power despite U.S. export restrictions, with Nvidia warning that supply may not meet demand.

Amazon challenges Nvidia with new AI chip software

Amazon introduced TorchNeuron, an open-source tool that lets developers run existing PyTorch AI code on AWS Trainium chips without rewriting it. The launch aims to make Amazon’s custom chips more accessible and challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI computing.

Sources:

Reuters. (2026, October 19). OpenAI seeks to accelerate fundraising ahead of Anthropic IPO, sources say.

https://www.reuters.com/world/openai-seeks-accelerate-fundraising-ahead-anthropic-ipo-sources-say-2026-10-19/

Reuters. (2026, October 19). Nvidia wins fast-growing AI startup Modal for new central processors.

https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-wins-fast-growing-ai-startup-modal-new-central-processors-2026-10-19/

Streets, M. (2026, October 16). The week of Oct. 12–16: What happened, what matters, what’s next. InformationWeek.

https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/the-week-of-oct-12-16-what-happened-what-matters-what-s-next

Reuters. (2026, October 19). Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion in Series E funding at $6.2 billion valuation. Reuters.

https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/ai-chip-startup-tenstorrent-more-than-doubles-its-valuation-to-62-billion-in-funding-round-4957179

Reuters. (2026, October 20). Air Space Intelligence raises $325 million in Series C funding at $3 billion valuation.Reuters.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/ai-startup-asi-valued-at-3-billion-in-latest-funding-round-ce785cd8da8ff42d

Reuters. (2026, October 20). Otter.ai secures $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst. Reuters.

https://www.unite.ai/otter-ai-closes-320m-growth-financing-from-general-catalysts-cvf/

Reuters. (2026, October 19). Nvidia-backed Nscale, Anthropic in talks for new $45 billion AI cloud deal, source says.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nscale-anthropic-talks-45-billion-cloud-computing-deal-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-10-19/

Reuters. (2026, October 20). ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent place over $35 billion worth of Nvidia chip orders.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/bytedance-alibaba-tencent-place-over-35-billion-worth-nvidia-chip-orders-2026-10-20/

TechCrunch. (2026, October 19). Amazon is taking its biggest shot at Nvidia yet with new TorchNeuron dev tool.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/amazon-is-taking-its-biggest-shot-at-nvidia-yet-with-new-torchneuron-dev-tool/

Events October 31 - November 7, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

10/31

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 36: SF 10/31 : https://luma.com/ltw10hsk

11/02

OSA Con 2026 - The Anti-Hype Conference for Open Source Analytics and AI : https://luma.com/eis7567t

2026 Silicon Valley Innovation Trek : https://luma.com/3l4q1aom

11/03

Open Lakehouse + AI Meetup: Diwali Edition : https://luma.com/apajsgca

Defense Tech Conference 2026 : https://luma.com/defensetechwest

TechEquity Ai Summit 2026: Talks + Workshops + Hackathon, Ft Google, Nvidia, DeepMind, Snowflake and more : https://luma.com/ai-summit-2026

11/04

Small Data SF : https://luma.com/p8cxjf28

11/05

BoxWorks Dev Summit 2026 : https://luma.com/box-dev-summit-2026

Startup Pitch Night SF # 3 | B4SF : https://luma.com/b4sf-03

11/07

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 37: SF 11/7 : https://luma.com/n89vh2ur

Anything Applied Agentic Hackathon - hackathons.team : https://luma.com/gap48i1m

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

OpenAI, Figma, and Town are all hiring storytellers, plus open roles on early-stage founding teams

Build -1 → 0…

10 days ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

AI Engineer @ Fluency - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fluency/9a83146e-e32d-4e0c-84b5-59996a58a821/

AI Engineer @ Gamma - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/gamma/6ed26f6b-bb17-41a5-8f63-f1901554cb6b

Software Engineer, Full Stack @ Exa - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/98a8bab6-4cbf-4d39-a5a7-0867addc4086

Software Engineer - Platform/Applied AI @ AfterQuery - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/AfterQuery/f9055979-9c2d-4b5d-a0ec-f248205b1d16/

ML Platform Engineer @ UniversalAGI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/universalagi/f00b8845-1ba4-46e4-a74f-6aa466ed43ef

GTM

Founding GTM & Operations Lead @ AgentMail - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/AgentMail/4710a6bb-cad1-4861-b66d-c41e175bf22f

Founding GTM @ Lightsage - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lightsage/06e781bf-5949-417e-9256-4af8fe737f13

Founding GTM, Product Marketing @ Macroscope - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/macroscope/8a4db314-ae63-4167-87a0-97de6335a328

GTM Engineer @ Applied Compute - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Applied%20Compute/52de2d5f-564d-44d5-a055-8b865e77b93d

GTM Strategy & Operations, AMER Lead @ Factory - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/factory/7b4ea8de-c76a-4758-a996-d437b12b7dcb

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 29

Corgi Times — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:28:54 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

What a week at Corgi!

SF Tech Week kept us busy in the best way possible. Between AI workshops, founder demos, networking nights, and plenty of coffee, our cafés and office space were packed with people building some pretty exciting things.

We kicked things off with Software Factories Night, teamed up with Infragrid for a founder demo night, talked startup risk and insurance with EU Presence, and wrapped things up with Maritime’s (YC F26) launch party at Corgi Cafe. A huge thank you to all our partners, organizers, and everyone who stopped by. We loved seeing so many new and familiar faces throughout the week!

Corgi Is Going on Tour!

We’re taking recruiting on the road! The Corgi bus is heading to college campuses to find the next generation of talent for our growing go-to-market team. We’re looking for ambitious, outgoing people who want to jump into the startup world, learn fast, and help us build something big.

If you’re a student or recent graduate interested in joining Corgi, we’d love to meet you. Check out our College Tour page to learn more and see where we’re headed!

And a special shoutout to our amazing drink partners!

Recent News

1. Meta launches new AI models to rival OpenAI and Anthropic

Meta unveiled Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its latest frontier AI models, as it pushes to compete directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The launch puts Meta back in the spotlight in the race to build more capable AI systems, particularly for coding and AI agents.

2. Microsoft plans massive rollout of its own AI chips

Microsoft announced Maia 300, its third-generation custom AI chip, with plans to potentially deploy more than a million units in 2027. The company says its chips can deliver roughly 40% more useful computing per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems, signaling a bigger effort to reduce AI infrastructure costs and dependence on Nvidia.

3. Tencent plans $4.5 billion bond sale amid AI expansion

Tencent is reportedly preparing to raise at least $4.5 billion through a bond offering as major technology companies continue investing heavily in AI infrastructure. The planned financing highlights how expensive the global AI race has become.

New Funding Updates

1. Mujin — $224 million

Japanese robotics company Mujin is listed as having raised $224 million in financing involving SK Square. The company develops physical AI technology for industrial automation, including manufacturing and logistics. It’s one of the largest recent deals in robotics and AI automation.

2. Nous Research — $90 million Series A

Open-source AI company Nous Research is listed as having secured $90 million in Series A funding, with investors including Nvidia and Microsoft’s M12. The investment reflects continued interest in open models as an alternative to proprietary AI systems.

3. Sabi — $50 million seed round

San Francisco-based Sabi is listed as raising $50 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. The company operates in brain-computer interfaces, AI, and medical technology, making it a notable early-stage investment at the intersection of AI and neurotechnology.

What’s Been Going On?

Amazon reportedly in talks to acquire AI startup Decart for $7 billion

Amazon is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire San Francisco-based AI startup Decart for approximately $7 billion. Decart develops AI technology spanning chip compatibility and world models, making the potential acquisition a major move in Amazon’s effort to strengthen its AI ecosystem. The deal has not been finalized.

Nvidia reportedly considering deeper investment or acquisition of Reflection AI

Nvidia is reportedly in discussions to increase its investment in open-source AI startup Reflection AI or acquire the company outright. The talks underscore Nvidia’s growing ambitions beyond selling AI chips, as it looks to strengthen its position in the software and model-development ecosystem.

TSMC expected to report another record quarter as AI demand surges

TSMC, the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced AI chips, is expected to report its sixth consecutive quarter of record profit. Strong demand for AI processors continues to drive growth, highlighting how much of the AI industry’s expansion depends on semiconductor manufacturing. These are analyst expectations, not yet reported earnings.

Sources:

Reuters. (2026, October 12). Meta releases Muse Wonder AI models to challenge Anthropic, OpenAI.

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-releases-muse-wonder-ai-models-challenge-anthropic-openai-2026-10-12/

Reuters. (2026, October 12). Microsoft plans huge deployment of its own AI chips with an eye on saving costs.

https://www.reuters.com/business/microsoft-plans-huge-deployment-its-own-ai-chips-with-an-eye-saving-costs-2026-10-12/

Reuters. (2026, October 12). Tencent plans dollar, offshore yuan bond sale under note programme.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/tencent-plans-dollar-offshore-yuan-bond-sale-under-note-programme-2026-10-12/

Alele, O. (2026, October 12). Mujin raises $224 million Series D: Why SK Square is betting big on physical AI robots.Ventureburn.

https://ventureburn.com/mujin-raises-224-million-sk-square-physical-ai/

Temkin, M. (2026, October 7). Nous Research confirms it hit $1.5B valuation, launches AI agents for business users.TechCrunch.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/07/nous-research-confirms-it-hit-1-5b-valuation-launches-ai-agents-for-business-users/

Sabi. (2026, October 9). Sabi raises $50 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures to put a brain-AI interface inside a baseball cap. GlobeNewswire.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/sabi-raises-50-million-seed-173000665.html

The Wall Street Journal. (2026, October 12). Amazon in talks to buy AI startup Decart for around $7 billion.

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/amazon-in-talks-to-buy-ai-startup-decart-for-around-7-billion-9433abad

Reuters. (2026, October 10). Nvidia in talks to invest further in Reflection AI or buy it, FT reports.

https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-talks-invest-further-reflection-ai-or-buy-it-ft-reports-2026-10-10/

Reuters. (2026, October 12). TSMC expected to report sixth straight quarter of record profit thanks to AI boom.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/tsmc-expected-report-sixth-straight-quarter-record-profit-thanks-ai-boom-2026-10-12/

Events October 23 - October 30, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

10/23

Monday Girl San Francisco Summit 2026 : https://luma.com/SFSummit2026

Open Source AI Awards Night (Open Source AI Week) : https://luma.com/7ebvz0oq

10/24

The Google Gemma Hardware Hackathon : https://luma.com/6ccl0jw5

10/25

RocketRide Hangar #2 : https://luma.com/tudcvke0

10/26

ACCELERATING FRONTIER AI : https://eventovia.com/us/san-francisco/events/accelerating-frontier-ai-the-compute-crisis-is-a-reinforcement-learning-problem

10/27

The New AI Developer Stack: From Prototype to Production : https://luma.com/8r3itwhb

10/28

San Francisco Physical AI Workshop and Meetup : https://luma.com/san-francisco-physical-ai-workshop-and-meetup-oct

10/29

☕️ Codex Community Meetup-San Francisco #12 : https://luma.com/2o3lta0s

10/30

The Builder Base: Buildathon : https://luma.com/p5q5kdlu

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

Open roles for operators at Anduril, OpenAI, and Headway paying up to $350K

Build -1 → 0…

20 days ago · 8 likes · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

Software Engineer @ Ploy - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ployai/1dc75674-84dd-400d-b0fa-311a374ab697

Founding Software Engineer @ Navi AI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/navi/cc6d60fb-bff3-42bf-90ac-7c00f4cee87c

Data Engineer @ Serval - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/serval/60e9f06a-e473-438d-b8e4-916f5dadc2f5

Forward Deployed Engineer @ Sim - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sim/b26bbbec-f7cb-446a-8882-3f3d034c24d8

AI Engineer @ Emanate - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/emanate/d7066485-276d-4c25-96f3-7ae18b8f67fd

GTM

Account Associate - SF @ OpenAI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/55f36629-8351-41d9-b2f5-3d63c5e26bf7

Founding GTM @ Gamut - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/datawizz/799d7aa5-8191-4728-bc6f-22762e1fa642

Head of GTM Strategy and Ops @ Workwhile - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/workwhilejobs/d55cd897-f998-407b-a5c3-8104eec4839c

Enterprise GTM @ Hamming - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Hamming%20AI/90011c78-8922-46cc-bd61-659aa50cda06

GTM @ Sphinx - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphinx/32373604-0361-4a82-8c95-cd70d5068875

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 28

Corgi Times — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:56:15 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

We’re kicking off SF Tech Week with two new launches.

First up, Data Center Insurance: coverage built for the infrastructure powering AI and the next generation of technology, from data centers and servers to GPUs, power, cooling, cyber risks, and operations.

Next, we also launched Fine Arts Insurance. Art can be a meaningful part of a home, business, or personal collection. From paintings and photography to sculpture, prints, and other collectible works, valuable pieces can carry both significant financial and personal value. Corgi’s Fine Arts Coverage is designed to provide protection for eligible artwork and collections against covered risks, including damage, theft, and loss.

And what better way to kick off SF Tech Week than aboard an aircraft carrier? Corgi joined Seed2Table and fellow partners for the USS Hornet Deep Tech Demo Night, bringing together investors, founders, and industry leaders for an evening dedicated to the next generation of AI and deep tech. Hosted aboard the historic USS Hornet, the event featured 10 promising Seed and Series A startups pitching their ideas, alongside great conversations, networking, and plenty of opportunities to connect with the people building what’s next. Not your typical Tech Week gathering!

And of course, none of it happens without something good to drink. A huge thank you to our drink partners for keeping the Corgi community fueled throughout the week.

Recent News

Reflection AI launches Beam
Nvidia-backed Reflection AI launched Beam, its first open-weight model, targeting coding and agentic tasks and positioning itself as a U.S. competitor to lower-cost Chinese open models such as DeepSeek, Z.ai and Alibaba’s Qwen. This is probably the strongest pure AI/model story today.

OpenAI starts text watermarking
OpenAI announced that it will add invisible, machine-readable watermarks to ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU, responding to transparency requirements under the EU AI Act. It could be an important precedent for how AI-generated writing is identified going forward.

Foxconn’s AI-driven revenue surge
Foxconn reported a 47% year-over-year jump in Q3 revenue to about $95.4 billion, beating expectations as demand for AI servers and related hardware remained strong.

New Funding Updates

Supabase raises another $150M

AI/developer infrastructure company Supabase reportedly raised $150 million in new financing, just months after its previous $500 million Series F. Supabase has become increasingly important infrastructure for developers building AI agents and applications.

Clockwork.io raises $31M for AI infrastructure

Clockwork.io raised $31 million, bringing its total funding to $73 million. Its software is designed to prevent GPU failures from wasting expensive training and inference time, and is already being used by LinkedIn and Together AI.

Ghost raises $11M for a personal AI computer

AI hardware startup Ghost emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Its first product, Core, is a $3,499 personal computer built specifically to continuously run AI agents using a user’s apps and data.

What’s Been Going On?

AI insiders push for stronger safeguards

Former employees of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind testified before the New York City Council, warning that frontier AI development is moving faster than existing oversight. Representatives from major AI companies also appeared at the hearing.

Mercor’s human-powered AI training gets the spotlight

CBS’s 60 Minutes went inside Mercor, which now uses more than 100,000 freelancers with specialized expertise to help train AI models. The segment highlighted how human experts in areas ranging from medicine to finance are becoming part of the AI training pipeline.

The AI infrastructure race keeps getting more expensive

Global spending on data centers could eventually exceed $30 trillion by 2050, according to a PwC projection highlighted by Reuters, illustrating the enormous amount of capital being poured into compute and AI infrastructure.

Sources:

Reuters. (2026, October 5). Nvidia-backed Reflection unveils first AI model to take on Chinese open models. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-backed-reflection-unveils-first-ai-model-take-chinese-open-models-2026-10-05/

Mehta, A. (2026, October 5). OpenAI will start watermarking ChatGPT’s text in the EU. TechCrunch.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/openai-will-start-watermarking-chatgpts-text-in-the-eu/

Reuters. (2026, October 5). Foxconn third-quarter revenue soars on AI demand, beats market forecast. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/foxconn-third-quarter-revenue-jumps-47-yy-beats-market-forecast-2026-10-05/

Supabase. (2026, October 2). Supabase announces $150M in new funding and Turso acquisition. PR Newswire.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/supabase-announces-150m-in-new-funding-and-turso-acquisition-302896752.html

Tech Funding News. (2026, October 5). Clockwork.io lands $31M to eliminate wasted GPU-hours with AI infrastructure fault tolerance.

https://techfundingnews.com/clockwork-io-lands-31m-to-eliminate-wasted-gpu-hours-with-ai-infrastructure-fault-tolerance/

Davis, D.-M. (2026, October 5). At 19, founder raises $11M for Ghost, maker of a $3,499 computer for personal AI.TechCrunch.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/at-19-ghost-founder-raises-11-million-to-build-a-3499-computer-for-your-personal-ai/

Associated Press. (2026, October 3). AI insiders push for stronger safeguards as former employees testify about risks of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. AP News.

https://apnews.com/article/ai-nyc-whistleblower-artificial-intelligence-4be252d137ff1de1006130cdbb42ec24

Brown, C. (2026, October 5). “60 Minutes”: How humans make AI smarter. Axios.

https://www.axios.com/2026/10/05/60-minutes-how-humans-make-ai-smarter

Eisenhammer, S. (2026, October 3). AI’s race to transform the world before the money runs out. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ais-race-transform-world-before-money-runs-out-2026-10-03

Events October 15 - October 22, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

10/15

Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung) : https://luma.com/ExtraordinaryFoundersDinnerOct15

PickleTalk: Enterprise Operators × AI Founders (Seed to Series A) : https://luma.com/9dxnx6dk

Orkes Shift : https://luma.com/zj2gat16

10/16

Open Together: AI Builders Unite : https://luma.com/opentogether?trk=organization_guest_main-feed-card-text

10/17

ExecuTorch Hackathon : https://luma.com/executorch-hackathon

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 34 : https://luma.com/oq82q5ax

10/18

InclusionAI Tech Night: Your AI Reality Check : https://luma.com/xs9sn0lp

10/19

Scala Summit 2026: A Full Day of Scala in the Bay Area : https://luma.com/6ps55unb

Open Source AI Week 2026 | Open Weight Debate Night : https://luma.com/592fcwx2

10/20

AI Startup Challenge Hackathon: The Pre-Event of SF AI Summit : https://luma.com/0oww46mm

OpenClaw & Friends Meetup : https://luma.com/oah05xax

Powering an AI Workforce : https://luma.com/xc44tt1f

10/21

SF AI Summit : https://luma.com/cj3syxqz

AI Infrastructure Night : https://luma.com/ens8b1qj

10/22

The Inversion - AI Week Side Event : https://luma.com/opl-osaw

Training Agents IRL : https://luma.com/awautg3p

Open Source AI Summit : https://luma.com/buildp-ncun

Open Infra Night for Agent Builders #Open Source AI Week : https://luma.com/jsu2t3ad

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

George Sivulka, Akash Raju, and two brothers from Palantir are all hiring for their startups

By the way, we just launched “Discourse” on Cosign - a space to discuss what’s happening in tech, that’s broader than a group chat but more curated than a social network. Try it out here…

a month ago · 14 likes · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, AI @ Convex - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/convex-dev/dae7eefa-e97a-466f-9413-38ceeac8435b

Software Engineer – AI Agents @ FriendliAI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/friendliai/6b7dbaf7-8751-402e-b253-ad968f7dc362/

Software Engineer, Staff (Applied AI) @ Lightfield - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Lightfield/b32dc57b-ffa0-4bb7-99c8-f469c3876002/

Member of Technical Staff , Machine Learning @ Sieve - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve/dbff6c5e-341c-4daf-9563-16dbeb4b1fad

Forward Deployed Engineer (Inference & Post-Training) @ Together AI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/togetherai/jobs/5131941007

GTM

Accounts Executive @ exa - San Francisco , CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/93317180-34e0-45ff-84a3-d5bca4d7f7ae

Enterprise Account Executive @ Simple AI - San Francisco , CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/simple-ai/072adb1d-8ab1-4cfb-90a9-c2952635be07

Account Executive - AI Native @ Baseten - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/df2f0ebb-a84a-45c2-bc74-dc9589fcc1ae

GTM Operations Engineer @ fal - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fal-ai/11aa0f95-8496-4362-98f7-6b2b948f9597/

Business Development Representative (BDR) @ Fireworks - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fireworks/cd8233f0-e958-40b5-a9a6-e35ecb9a76a4

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 27

Corgi Times — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:21:52 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

This week, we’re excited to share Golden by Corgi, our sports and entertainment insurance platform built for the people and organizations behind the game. From athletes and teams to leagues, federations, venues, and events, Golden brings insurance, risk management, claims support, and more together under one roof.

Speaking of sports, Trudy and Napoleon made their way to Corgi Con! Trudy also competed against 150 other corgis and ended up taking 5th place overall. Not bad for a day out of the office.

We also teamed up with Amity Ventures for our Founders Run & Recovery, bringing founders together for a 5K through San Francisco. We started and finished at Corgi Cafe, then wrapped things up with cold plunges, smoothies, a DJ, and some time to hang out and meet other founders.

And we hosted YC F26 Grill & Chill with Rho, a casual rooftop night for founders in YC’s Fall 2026 batch. There were burgers, hot dogs, music, and a lot of founders hanging out over dinner.

And over at Corgi Cafe, General Legal took over for Founder Office Hours + Drink Drop, bringing founders together for an afternoon of coffee and real legal advice. The event featured the “Flat Fee,” a one-day-only co-branded drink, alongside open office hours where founders could ask a lawyer the questions they’d been sitting on, grab some swag, and connect with the General Legal team.

And a quick shoutout to our drink partners who keep the Corgi Cafe stocked and our events fueled!

Next week is SF tech week so be sure to stop by our events!

Recent News

AI agent startup Instinct raises $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. San Francisco-based Instinct announced a massive Series C backed by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue. The round quadruples its valuation from $2.5 billion and comes only about a month after the personal-AI-agent startup announced its previous financing.
NVIDIA launches a safety platform for autonomous AI agents. NVIDIA introduced its Open Agent Safety Platform, including technology designed to sandbox AI agents, monitor what they’re doing and contain agents that behave unexpectedly. The launch comes as increasingly autonomous AI systems have raised new concerns about security and unauthorized actions.
Meta makes a major push into enterprise AI. Meta launched a new enterprise-focused business to bring its AI models and tools to corporate customers, and hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai to lead it. The move puts Meta more directly into competition for enterprise AI spending alongside companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft.

New Funding Updates

SiMa.ai raises $150M for physical AI chips. SiMa.ai raised a $150 million Series C co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify Partners, bringing its valuation to $1.45 billion and total funding to $500 million. The company builds low-power AI chips designed to run models directly on robots, drones, vehicles and other edge devices.
Quartermaster raises $140M for AI-powered maritime intelligence. Quartermaster raised $140 million in new funding led by First Round Capital. The company is building technology that combines AI, sensors and ship-to-ship data sharing to give commercial and government vessels real-time awareness of activity at sea.
Outmarket raises $34.5M for AI-powered insurance. Outmarket raised a $34.5 million Series B led by SignalFire, just months after its previous round. Its AI platform automates work for insurance agencies and brokers, including extracting information from documents and handling administrative workflows.

What’s Been Going On?

Shopify opens checkout to AI agents. Shopify is expanding WebMCP support so browser-based AI agents can modify carts, enter checkout information, apply discount codes and complete purchases. It’s a notable step toward AI agents actually carrying out online transactions rather than just recommending what people should buy.
Cerebras signs a major AI infrastructure deal with Gimlet Labs. Cerebras will supply AI systems to cloud startup Gimlet Labs in a deployment expected to consume roughly 10 megawatts of power, according to Reuters. The partnership gives Gimlet access to Cerebras’ wafer-scale AI hardware as competition around alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs continues to grow.
AI computing is heading into orbit. Indian startup TakeMe2Space plans to launch its MOI-1A orbital-computing satellite aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission on October 1. The Nvidia-powered satellite already has 23 customers lined up to test processing data directly in space rather than sending everything back to Earth first.

Sources:

Reuters. (2026, September 28). AI agent firm Instinct raises $1 billion in latest funding round. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-agent-firm-instinct-raises-1-billion-latest-funding-round-2026-09-28

TechCrunch. (2026, September 28). Nvidia launches new platform for reining in rogue AI agents. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/nvidia-launches-new-platform-for-reining-in-rogue-ai-agents/

Reuters. (2026, September 28). MongoDB CEO Desai steps down to lead Meta’s enterprise platform. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/mongodb-ceo-desai-steps-down-lead-metas-enterprise-platform-2026-09-28

SiMa.ai. (2026, September 28). SiMa.ai reaches $1.45B valuation with $500 million in total funding to scale physical AI in humanoids, automotive and drones. Business Wire. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260928291227/en/SiMa.ai-Reaches-%241.45B-Valuation-with-%24500-Million-in-Total-Funding-to-Scale-Physical-AI-in-Humanoids-Automotive-and-Drones

TechCrunch. (2026, September 28). Maritime intelligence startup Quartermaster raises another $140M. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/maritime-intelligence-startup-quartermaster-raises-another-140m/

TechCrunch. (2026, September 28). Insurtech Outmarket raises $34.5M just months after prior round. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/insuretech-outmarket-raises-34-5m-just-months-after-prior-round/

TechCrunch. (2026, September 28). Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/shopify-opens-checkout-to-browser-based-ai-agents/

Reuters. (2026, September 28). Cerebras to supply AI systems to cloud computing startup Gimlet Labs. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cerebras-supply-ai-systems-cloud-computing-startup-gimlet-labs-2026-09-28/

Reuters. (2026, September 28). India’s TakeMe2Space to launch orbital computing satellite on SpaceX rocket. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/indias-takeme2space-launch-orbital-computing-satellite-spacex-rocket-2026-09-28/

Events October 7 - October 14, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

10/07

What Breaks at AI-Infra Scale : https://luma.com/leverage-ph18

Agentic Zero: The Agentic Finance Summit #SFTechWeek : https://luma.com/jlr72ut4

10/08

Agents in Production: The Auth Stack for AI — SF Tech Week 2026 : https://luma.com/obrx792

Camp AI: Production-Ready Agents @ SFTW : https://luma.com/campai-sftw-2026

🚀 Startup Pitch Night SF | B4SF : https://luma.com/b4sf-02

10/09

AI Native Summit - SF TechWeek 2026 : https://luma.com/3t95uj7s

SF Tech Week VIP Closing Party with Synexis & Funding Breakthrough Lab : https://luma.com/fbltechweek

SF Techweek 2026 Afterparty-Meet Founders & Investors : https://luma.com/techweekSF

10/10

Frontier AI Builders SF: Agents, Evals & RL : https://luma.com/nrb4i0rs

10/11

EPIC SF Physical AI Demo Night @Finding next Move : https://luma.com/SFDemoNight

staaake Skybar AI/Tech Founders Hangover Event — Reverse Network Meet : https://luma.com/staaake-j15s

10/12

The Future of Work Social Mixer + Open Demos: Worktech, Robotics & Agentic AI : https://luma.com/qo2dliwb

10/13

AWS Community Day - AI Edition : https://luma.com/acba2610

Hex Presents - Sales Summer Mixer : https://luma.com/c6cwq5ji

10/14

San Francisco | Claude Code for Real Estate Workshop : https://luma.com/claude-1hz5

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

Btw, everyone is hiring

Build -1 → 0…

a month ago · 33 likes · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure @ OpenAI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7caed1e8-c6f6-4569-9d45-2d7a7a56a025

Engineering Manager (Multimodal) @ Perplexity - San Francisco/Palo Alto, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/19d535e2-e0f5-42b6-a995-662d69772168

Senior Staff Software Engineer - AI Governance @ OneTrust - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/onetrust/jobs/8234245

Senior Staff AI Engineer - Agentic AI Platform @ Capital One - Remote (Eligible)

Apply: https://www.capitalonecareers.com/job/san-francisco/senior-staff-ai-engineer-agentic-ai-platform-remote-eligible/1732/101243815024

Research Engineer - ML Infrastructure @ Chai Discovery - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/chaidiscovery/dd8bf1b0-be34-42ba-94f7-76e6ebe204f6

GTM

Growth Marketer @ Simple AI - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/simple-ai/8597ebbc-893e-4af9-97f0-d364f0039ab7

GTM, Embodied AI @ Niantic Spatial - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/niantic-spatial/1890d61d-d243-41fc-b858-33ebc15709a8

GTM Strategy & Operations (Post-Sales) @ Monaco - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monaco/bf07e829-3cf9-41fa-97d9-fd7ba8653adb

Mid-Market Account Executive @ Blockit - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blockit/b80f4e3a-4af4-4b2a-978c-8b836f111552

Founding Account Executive @ Dealops - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/dealops/b8374ded-a06a-4fdc-b276-ca57c720cbf5

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 26

Corgi Times — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:44:34 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

This week, we expanded our trucking program to cover tow trucks and tow trucking companies, with coverage built around how tow operators actually work. The program includes Auto Liability, On-Hook, Garagekeepers, and Wrongful Repossession coverage, all under one carrier.

And outside of the office, our Co-Founder & COO Emily Yuan took the stage at Inside Summit 2026 in San Francisco! Emily joined Cecilia Ziniti of GC AI and John Glasgow of Campfire for the AI Services panel, where they talked about building AI-native services, earning customer trust, and turning AI into real, dependable business outcomes.

We also had the chance to host 20 senior leaders from the French insurance brokerage market here in San Francisco. There were some really fun conversations around insurance and technology, and it was great seeing how excited everyone was to learn more about what we’re building at Corgi.

And we couldn’t forget our amazing drink partners!

Recent News

SoftBank launches an $11B bond sale to fund its OpenAI bet. SoftBank is raising roughly $11.15 billion in bonds, with most of the proceeds going toward a $10 billion installment of its investment in OpenAI. If completed at the planned size, Reuters reports it would be the largest non-financial corporate bond deal ever in Asia-Pacific and Japan.
AMD hits a $1 trillion valuation as AI chip stocks surge. AMD jumped roughly 10% today and crossed a $1 trillion market cap for the first time, while Intel rose 12%, Arm 17%, and the semiconductor index climbed more than 4%. The AI-driven rally helped push the Nasdaq to a new record close.
Nscale files for a massive IPO. The Nvidia-backed AI infrastructure company has filed to go public, with reporting putting its targeted valuation around $35 billion. Its filing is also drawing attention because of the increasingly intertwined financing between Nvidia, AI infrastructure providers and their customers.

New Funding Updates

Crusoe raises a massive $3.9B Series F. AI infrastructure company Crusoe announced a $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. The funding will help Crusoe expand its AI data centers, cloud infrastructure, and modular “AI factories.” NVIDIA, Founders Fund, GIC and QIA also participated. This is easily the biggest funding announcement in this window.

Vantora raises $100M to build physical AI companies. Vantora, formerly UP.Labs, raised more than $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners. Rather than building a single AI product, Vantora works with large industrial companies to create new startups around robotics, manufacturing, logistics and other physical-AI applications.

MIND raises $72M for AI-powered data security. MIND raised a $72 million Series B, bringing its total funding to $112 million. The company is building an AI-native data loss prevention platform designed to protect sensitive enterprise information as companies increasingly deploy AI tools and agents. Crosspoint Capital Partners led the round.

What’s Been Going On?

Jack & Jill raises $40M for AI-powered recruiting. The startup raised $40 million to expand its AI recruiting platform, which uses separate AI agents to represent job candidates and employers and then match the two sides. The company says its agents are already arranging thousands of interviews per month.

Comp AI raises $34M for AI compliance agents. Comp AI raised $34 million to expand its platform that uses AI agents to automate security and compliance work such as SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. The company has grown to more than 1,000 customers, according to the funding announcement coverage.

Mantic raises $25M to build “superhuman” AI forecasting. The startup, founded by former Google DeepMind researcher Toby Shevlane, raised a $25 million seed round led by Radical Ventures, with Microsoft’s M12, Thinking Machines Lab and Balderton Capital participating. Mantic is developing AI systems designed to forecast real-world events and recently beat human forecasters in a forecasting competition.

Sources:

Agarwal, P., & Chauhan, S. (2026, September 21). AMD joins $1 trillion club as chipmakers rally on AI-driven demand. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/softbank-group-launches-over-10-billion-bonds-openai-investment-term-sheet-shows-2026-09-21/

Reuters. (2026, September 21). SoftBank launches $11 billion bonds to fund OpenAI investment. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/business/wall-st-futures-rise-ai-stocks-gain-oil-prices-slide-2026-09-21/

Primack, D. (2026, September 21). NScale IPO filing highlights AI’s circular economy. Axios.

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/21/nscale-ipo-nvidia-artificial-intelligence

Crusoe. (2026, September 17). Crusoe raises $3.9 billion Series F for its vertically-integrated AI infrastructure platform.

https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-announces-series-f-funding

Vantora. (2026, September 16). Vantora secures more than $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners to build AI-native operating companies inside industrial enterprises.

https://ebs.publicnow.com/view/8869058D462980BB8AF4F4C74651CAAB333731EC

MIND. (2026, September 17). MIND raises $72M Series B funding to bring complete DLP to the AI era.

https://mind.io/newsroom/mind-raises-usd72m-series-b-funding-to-bring-complete-dlp-to-the-ai-era

Jack & Jill. (2026, September 15). $40M Series A to make warm introductions at the scale of the internet.

https://web.jackandjill.ai/blog/series-a

SecurityWeek. (2026, September 17). Comp AI raises $34 million for AI-native compliance and security.

https://www.securityweek.com/comp-ai-raises-34-million-for-ai-native-compliance-and-security/

Reuters. (2026, September 18). AI startup Mantic raises $25 million for superhuman forecasting.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-startup-mantic-raises-25-million-superhuman-forecasting-2026-09-18/

Events September 29 - October 6, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

9/29

Fireworks: Code & Cocktails SF : https://luma.com/270tizh3

India DeepTech Confluence 2026 - Valley Edition | Nasscom X VentureDock : https://luma.com/nasscom-avzl

9/30

Flower AI Day: Collaborative Superintelligence: https://luma.com/flwrlabs-uygg

VIP Founders Lunch at ApolloNext : https://luma.com/apollonextfounderslunch

10/1

Runtime by Modal : https://modal.com/runtime

PickleTalk: Enterprise Operators × AI Founders (Seed to Series A) : https://luma.com/9dxnx6dk

10/2

Assembling 2026 | AI Summit : https://luma.com/848c857m

10/3

The AI Commerce Gallery - Hackathon | Walt Disney Family Museum : https://luma.com/6bbloggr

10/4

🚀 Build on Aeternity – SF Hackathon @ Frontier Tower - Open Registration : https://luma.com/build-on-aeternity-sf-hackathon-frontier

10/5

Israel × SV Capital Mixer : https://luma.com/leverage-1yax

10/6

Build AI agents that own their inference - #SFTechWeek : https://luma.com/sf-agents-owning-inference

THE OPEN INTEGRATION LAYER FOR AGENTS : https://luma.com/us2rjgs9

Silicon Valley-APAC Industrial Innovation Bridge : https://luma.com/1e7nxcr0

Smartlead X AI Ark: The Traitors : https://luma.com/the_traitors

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

Open roles with Thinking Machines, fal, and the Creator Products Team at 𝕏

Build -1 → 0…

a month ago · 25 likes · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

AI Engineer @ ZYPHRA - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra/14b951a0-9c49-4550-887d-491e5170e20f

Forward Deployed Software Engineer @ Encord - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/encord/9f97576a-5381-4839-a7cf-ebfa82089a63

Founding AI Engineer @ Andera - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/andera/741ea122-763c-4152-9260-3038945058b8

Software Engineer - Platform/Applied AI (Fullstack) @ AfterQuery - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/AfterQuery/f9055979-9c2d-4b5d-a0ec-f248205b1d16

AI Engineer @ Fluency - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fluency/9a83146e-e32d-4e0c-84b5-59996a58a821

GTM

Senior Business Development & Ops Lead, Robotics & Physical AI @ World Labs - San Francisco , CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/worldlabs/5f1829c6-6016-40c6-8855-4ed674819305

Marketing Ops/AI GTM Engineer @ Campfire - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/campfire/6f40c036-95e6-4c7f-aa4b-d6b4e9202cd7

GTM Generalist @ SafetyKit - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/safetykit/4e3ffc43-d65f-49a1-8de7-f3899ce8bc2a

Founding GTM & Operations Lead @ AgentMail - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/AgentMail/4710a6bb-cad1-4861-b66d-c41e175bf22f

Founding Growth @ Wafer - San Francisco, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wafer/b1f52670-aea4-4865-84de-2a4a40de2524

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 25

Corgi Times — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:42:47 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

It’s a good week to be in San Francisco.

Dreamforce is back at Moscone, bringing thousands of people from across tech, AI, and business into the city. Weeks like this are always especially fun for us. More founders, builders, and operators in town means more conversations, more people moving around San Francisco, and even more energy across the communities Corgi is already part of.

AI is unsurprisingly a big part of the conversation this year, with Salesforce putting Agentforce front and center and introducing a new generation of agents designed to take on longer and more complex work.

And the week extends well beyond Moscone. Side events are happening all over the city, people are meeting between sessions, and there’s a good chance you’ll spot a few Dreamforce attendees grabbing coffee at a Corgi Café or hopping on one of our buses along the way.

In other news, we just hosted our YC Demo Day afterparty and had a great time bringing everyone together. Congrats to the S26 batch on wrapping up the latest program. We’re excited to see what you all go on to build and accomplish next.

We also launched Corgi for real estate this week. Here’s a look at the launch:

Lots happening around here. Keep scrolling for everything else from this week.

And of course, thanks to all of our amazing drink partners!

Recent News

1.Salesforce and NVIDIA unveil a new AI model at Dreamforce. Salesforce and NVIDIA introduced Koa, Salesforce’s first AI reasoning model built specifically for CRM. The model is designed to help AI agents reason through complex, multi-step work across sales, customer service, and other business workflows.

2. Anthropic reportedly signs a massive $13.7B compute deal

Anthropic reportedly signed a six-year, $13.7 billion compute agreement with RUM Group for capacity at an upcoming Georgia data center. It’s another huge example of how much capital frontier AI companies are committing to infrastructure as demand for computing power continues to explode.

3. Dreamforce brings the biggest names in AI to SF

Around 50,000 people are expected at Dreamforce this year, with Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang and other major tech leaders participating. Salesforce says the event is expected to generate more than $135 million for San Francisco and support 36,000+ local jobs.

New Funding Updates

Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

Temporal raised a $550 million Series E led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Tiger Global co-leading. The company builds infrastructure that helps applications and AI agents reliably execute and recover from failures. Its valuation has jumped from $5 billion in February to $12.55 billion now.

Kaiko raises $110M led by S&P Global

Crypto and digital-asset data company Kaiko raised $110 million in a round led by S&P Global, with participation from Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, RBC, Bpifrance and Susquehanna. Kaiko plans to expand its data products as traditional financial institutions increase their involvement in tokenization and digital assets.

Fortaegis raises $50M for secure AI and semiconductor infrastructure

Amsterdam-based Fortaegis raised an oversubscribed $50 million Series A led by Serendipity Capital. The company is developing chip-level security technology designed to protect AI infrastructure, autonomous systems, defense networks and data centers, including against future quantum threats.

What’s Been Going On?

Superhuman acquires AI meeting notetaker Fathom

Superhuman is acquiring YC-backed Fathom rather than building its own meeting-notetaking product. The move pushes Superhuman further toward an agentic productivity suite that can work across email, meetings, and other workplace tasks.

Salesforce commits $27M to education ahead of Dreamforce. Salesforce announced $27 million in new education grants, including $18 million for public schools across San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Chicago, and Indianapolis.

Nuance raises $50M to make AI conversations feel more human

The startup, founded by three former Apple researchers, raised a $50 million Series A led by Lightspeed with participation from Accel and Nvidia’s NVentures. It’s developing a unified audiovisual AI model designed for more natural real-time conversations.

Sources:

Salesforce. (2026, September 15). Announcing Koa: Salesforce’s first CRM reasoning model, built on NVIDIA Nemotron. Salesforce.

https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/09/15/koa-reasoning-model/

Pau, V. (2026, September 12). How Anthropic clinched $517 billion in compute deals in 11 months. The Information.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-strikes-13-7-billion-compute-deal-trump-linked-rum-group

Morris, J. D. (2026, September 14). Dreamforce is back in S.F. with AI leaders and 50,000 attendees expected. San Francisco Chronicle.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/dreamforce-tech-ai-22428059.php

Reuters. (2026, September 14). Temporal’s valuation spikes to $12.6 billion in Lightspeed-led funding round. Reuters.

https://wsau.com/2026/09/14/temporals-valuation-spikes-to-12-6-billion-in-lightspeed-led-funding-round/

Howcroft, E. (2026, September 14). Crypto data firm Kaiko secures $110 million funding round led by S&P Global. Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/crypto-data-firm-kaiko-secures-110-million-funding-round-led-by-sp-global-2026-09-14/

Bort, J. (2026, September 14). 3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it. Business Insider.

https://www.businessinsider.com/former-apple-researchers-raise-50-million-to-build-foundational-model-2026-9

Wiggers, K. (2026, September 14). Superhuman acquires YC-backed notetaker Fathom as productivity platforms push for agentic work. TechCrunch.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/14/superhuman-acquires-yc-backed-notetaker-fathom-as-productivity-platforms-push-for-agentic-work/

Salesforce. (2026, September 14). Salesforce announces $27 million in new education grants to prepare students for the agentic AI era. Salesforce.

https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/09/14/27-million-in-new-education-grants-announcement/

Bort, J. (2026, September 14). 3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it. Business Insider.

https://www.businessinsider.com/former-apple-researchers-raise-50-million-to-build-foundational-model-2026-9

Events September 21 - September 28, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

9/21

Battle of the Personal Brains Hackathon : https://luma.com/sep-21-cognee-aws

Scrappy AI Founders Play Soccer (seed to series A) : https://luma.com/dp64qm2j

9/22

Stripe Developer Meetup San Francisco September 2026 : https://luma.com/ntusn7f5

Daytona AI Builders - SF September 2026 : https://luma.com/ai-builders-sf-sept

Codex Community Meetup - San Francisco : https://luma.com/5cewfkx1

9/23

SF AI Startup Showcase in Sept. : https://luma.com/tyqk2780

Datadog Summit San Francisco: Anthropic, Figma, Riot Games and Cognition on stage: https://luma.com/datadog-summit-sf

9/24

Scrappy AI Founders Play Pickleball (Seed to Series A): https://luma.com/tvnkm13y

AI GTM Night at 345 California: https://luma.com/datadog-summit-sf

9/25

Emotion By Design: Longevity Summit: https://luma.com/emotionbydesign

9/26

Hackathon: AI Tools for Better Decisions and Coordination : https://luma.com/ai-tools-for-better-futures-hack

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 30 : https://luma.com/ai-tools-for-better-futures-hack

9/28

AI Reality Summit : https://luma.com/ai-reality-summit

Above the Fog: Founders x Investors Rooftop Mixer : https://luma.com/yv2hv22g

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

Bridgit Mendler, Alex Atallah, Brent Liang, and Tarek Alaruri are all hiring right now

Talent Moves…

2 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

AI Platform Engineer @ Applied Compute - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/applied%20compute/0e93c8ac-446e-4e87-ba94-bfd4de05c333

Software Engineer, Inference (Multi Modal) @ OpenAI - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/4d14449e-5e7f-45d4-b103-8776a6c87086

Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure @ OpenAI - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/f763c6b3-5167-4a67-b691-4c3fa2c44156

Senior Software Engineer @ Flow Engineering - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/flowengineering/f1cb1247-bbd8-49b2-b380-57f195022c7b

Software Engineer @ Roadrunner - SF,CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Roadrunner/0db14f64-3605-4ee4-a18e-8ce24e216e21

GTM

Business Development Representative (BDR) @ Fireworks AI - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fireworks/cd8233f0-e958-40b5-a9a6-e35ecb9a76a4

Account Executive, AI Native @ Baseten - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/df2f0ebb-a84a-45c2-bc74-dc9589fcc1ae

Business Development @ Sierra - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Sierra/c7e3f330-6649-4c42-920d-eb267ebd6d16

Special Projects, GTM @ Encord - SF, CA USA

Apply:https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/encord/49d6db4e-ddf1-4635-8f5b-3eabe4735ea9

Enterprise Account Executive @ Bretton AI - SF, CA USA

Apply:https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/brettonai/055593ae-1a0e-4b51-a7ea-5d52d62f0808?embed=js&

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 24

Corgi Times — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:23:30 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times.

This week, we launched liquor liability coverage, making it faster and easier for businesses that serve alcohol to get the coverage they need without the usual paperwork and back-and-forth.

And that’s just the beginning. Between new products, new locations, and plenty happening across the company, there’s a lot to catch up on.

Serving alcohol is a normal part of operations for many businesses around us, but getting the insurance to cover that has never been easy. Learn more here.

In addition, Fast Company this week announced its Best Workplaces for Innovators in North America 2026 list, recognizing companies creating cultures where innovation can thrive at every level. Corgi Insurance was named to the 2026 list for building an AI-native insurance company where technology, creativity, and a bias toward action are embedded into how the company operates.

Yesterday, we celebrated YC Demo Day and got to introduce Corgi to the latest YC batch.

Congrats to S26! Excited to see what you all build.

Last week, we celebrated the grand opening of Corgi Cafe Dogpatch, giving San Francisco’s builders, founders, creatives, and night owls another 24/7 place to call home. We had a soft opening, but the grand opening will bring the community more together, and was a pretty great reminder of why we built the Corgi Cafe in the first place.

Before we get into the recent news, thanks to all our drink sponsors at the cafe!

New Funding Updates

Wonderful: AI startup Wonderful raised new funding that more than doubled its valuation to $5 billion in under six months, reflecting continued investor demand for companies building enterprise AI agents.

HiddenLayer: AI cybersecurity company HiddenLayer raised $100 million as enterprises increase spending on protecting AI models and deployments from security threats.

Pixxel: Google-backed Indian space-tech startup Pixxel raised $100 million in Series C funding, led by Temasek and Seraphim Space Investment Trust, bringing its total funding to $195 million to expand its satellite constellation, Earth-intelligence software, and high-resolution imaging capabilities.

What’s Been Going On?

Atoms: Travis Kalanick’s AI startup Atoms appears to be exploring a move into the robotaxi business, potentially putting the former Uber CEO back into autonomous transportation after Atoms raised $1.7 billion earlier this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Palo Alto Networks / Console: Palo Alto Networks reportedly paid about $500 million to acquire AI IT automation startup Console, which was backed by Thrive Capital and had raised only $6.2 million in seed funding before the acquisition.

Moonshot AI: Chinese AI startup Moonshot, developer of the Kimi large language model, confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO and is reportedly aiming to raise about $3 billion, potentially making it one of the most significant public-market moves by a generative-AI startup.

Sources:

Mehta, I. (2026, September 3). Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/nvidia-confirms-it-will-buy-hugging-face-for-12-9-billion/

Temkin, M. (2026, September 4). XDOF, just 3 months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/04/xdof-just-three-months-out-of-stealth-is-in-talks-for-a-series-b-at-a-1-2b-valuation/

Fernholz, T. (2026, September 3). Meta is paying to peek at how you use their latest AI model. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/meta-is-paying-to-peek-at-how-you-use-their-latest-ai-model/

Iyer, R. (2026, September 2). Wonderful more than doubles its valuation to $5B in under 6 months. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/wonderful-more-than-doubles-its-valuation-to-5b-in-under-6-months/

Iyer, R. (2026, September 2). HiddenLayer nabs $100M as enterprises rush to secure their AI deployments. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/hiddenlayer-nabs-100m-as-enterprises-rush-to-secure-their-ai-deployments/

Reuters. (2026, September 7). Google-backed Indian space startup raises $100 million in latest funding round. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/science/google-backed-indian-space-startup-raises-100-million-latest-funding-round-2026-09-07/

Ha, A. (2026, September 6). Travis Kalanick’s Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/06/travis-kalanicks-atoms-might-be-getting-into-the-robotaxi-business/

Temkin, M. (2026, September 2). Palo Alto Networks paid $500M for Thrive-backed Console, sources say. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/palo-alto-networks-paid-500m-for-thrive-backed-console-sources-say/

Reuters. (2026, September 3). Chinese AI firm Moonshot files confidentially for Hong Kong IPO, sources say. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-ai-firm-moonshot-files-confidentially-hong-kong-ipo-sources-say-2026-09-03/

Events September 13 - September 20

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

9/13

AI Filmmaking Workshop: Make a Real Film in 2 Days — with Documentary Director Zhan Petrov (In-Person San Francisco) : https://luma.com/w4sw4c92

9/15

AI x Hardware Engineering Dinner : https://luma.com/vmu2c2or?lm_source=embed&

9/16

Sunset Cocktails on the Bay : https://luma.com/etb7d9n8

Pitch & Run San Francisco : https://luma.com/fujn0l1y

9/17

AI-Pilling Your Company: A Builder Show & Tell – by Decagon, Accel & a16z : https://luma.com/tewv4rbz

Scrappy AI Founders Play Pickleball (Seed to Series A) : https://luma.com/4ynlf6h9

9/18

Founders Office Hours : https://luma.com/5pio6aze

9/19

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 29: AgiBot × ManiFormer: Building the Next Generation of Physical AI: https://luma.com/sk70aihm

9/20

YC F26 Welcoming Yacht Party : https://luma.com/dp0adags

SF AI Code And Coffee Sunday September 20th! : https://luma.com/fxkf0luc

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

https://a16zbuild.substack.com/p/open-roles-at-revolut-radiant-and

Software Engineering

Senior Software Engineer, Model Infrastructure @ Harvey - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://www.harvey.ai/company/careers/b9c5964f-40ef-46c5-a1db-58dbdd2c314e

Staff Software Engineer, Agent Gateway @ Okta - SF, CA USA

Apply:https://www.okta.com/company/careers/engineering/staff-software-engineer-agent-gateway-8108855/

Software Engineer, Platform (Developer Experience) @ Benchling - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/benchling/63d7d126-efaf-4a48-b328-f8d85b640ebf

Software Engineer, Platform (Senior/Staff) @ Superserve - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/superserve/jobs/6178870004

Senior Software Engineer @ Synthpop - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/synthpop/c8435be7-74f0-4824-aee6-e59ebe7abd19

GTM

SR. Product Marketing Manager @ Adobe - SF,CA USA

Apply:https://careers.adobe.com/us/en/job/R171361/Sr-Product-Marketing-Manager-Higher-Education?

Revenue Operations Analyst @ Vapi - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vapi/17bf1fea-0805-46b7-8f5e-6c1e31beb75b?

Founding Community & Events Lead @ Jack&Jill - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/jack-jill-external-ats/1888a06c-d3d6-43b8-9f7b-e69294871575

Revenue Operations Manager @ Workstream - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/workstream/jobs/6184096004

Founding GTM & Partnerships Lead @ Mixedbread - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://www.mixedbread.com/careers/founding_gtm_and_partnerships_lead

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 23

Corgi Times — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:05:03 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times. It’s a big week at Corgi (as always).

Today, we celebrate the grand opening of Corgi Cafe Dogpatch, giving San Francisco’s builders, founders, creatives, and night owls another 24/7 place to call home. We had a soft opening, but the grand opening will bring the community more together, and was a pretty great reminder of why we built the Corgi Cafe in the first place.

But, Dogpatch wasn’t the only thing we were celebrating.

Corgi is entering reinsurance.

With the launch of Corgi Re, we’re bringing Corgi’s technology-driven approach to one of the most established and relationship-driven corners of the insurance industry. Reinsurance is a market built on expertise, trust, and deep relationships — and we believe technology can make the work behind those relationships dramatically faster and more efficient.

With this launch, Corgi is expanding its role in the insurance industry to provide capacity and risk management solutions to insurers themselves.

Corgi Re combines Corgi’s technology-driven market approach, underwriting technology, and lean operating model with institutional expertise and reinsurance industry relationships.

Corgi Re will operate within Corgi’s broader regulated insurance infrastructure, maintaining the company’s emphasis on regulatory compliance, underwriting discipline and responsible risk management.

And reinsurance is just one part of what’s happening across Corgi.

We’re continuing to expand into new markets and launch new products (recently trucking and sports insurance to reinsurance and beyond) while staying focused on the same mission that got us here: building a fundamentally better insurance company with technology at the center.

So, whether you’re reading this from Dogpatch, New York, London, or somewhere in between, there’s a lot happening at Corgi.

As always thanks to our drink sponsors and let’s get into the latest tech news!

Recent News

Owner : $240 million Series D at a $2.3 billion valuation. The restaurant software company raised the round led by Goldman Sachs, with Meritech, Redpoint and others participating. Owner has passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and is increasingly using AI agents across ordering, customer support and restaurant operations, with plans to expand beyond restaurants into other local businesses.

Sources: https://saassentinel.com/2026/08/31/owner-com-raises-240m-at-2-3b-valuation-to-expand-ai-platform-for-restaurants/?utm_source

Arintra: $25 million Series B. The healthcare AI company raised the round led by Define Ventures to expand its AI platform for medical billing and revenue management. Its software audits billing for hospitals and clinics and currently handles about $5 billion in annual claim value.

Sources: https://americanhealthintel.com/editions/2026-08-31-ledger/#arintra-series-b-revenue-assurance

TrustedRouter: $1.25 million Seed. The AI infrastructure startup raised from investors including Slow Ventures’ Sam Lessin, Bill Tai, 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey and former Stripe executive George Xing. It automatically routes a user’s request to whichever AI model is best suited for the task and price, tapping into the growing idea that companies will use multiple models rather than relying entirely on OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

Sources: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/31/exclusive-ai-startup-trustedrouter-raises-125-million?utm_source

New Funding Updates

Reframe Systems: $40 million funding round. The Boston based physical AI company is building automated microfactories designed to make home construction faster and less expensive. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners and will help Reframe expand its factory network across North America.

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/articles/reframe-systems-raises-40m-industrialize-140000304.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9jaGF0Z3B0LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADkFIlEBQPUFuPHlHTh2_ygK5voaEzRFxPmlec3GcZxrjluNfOs-MyJscYaUTud8LPsZdQgGLDST-dPmQL6LV5ddWnFbjE1-N3A_WLnKuFE8Fh47SRk7W6MOLx6ozAehXdJq38AOZK17wXfponXgP_t9oAFrqBUX6y2Wvt01aLIf
Reframe Systems. (2026, August 31). Reframe Systems raises $40 million to expand its automated homebuilding microfactories.

Clipto: $15 million funding round at a $250 million valuation. The San Francisco based AI startup makes huge collections of video, audio, images and documents searchable using natural language, and can connect that content to tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Clipto already has more than 30 million users and reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/three-year-old-ai-media-search-startup-clipto-hits-a-250m-valuation/?utm_source
Clipto. (2026, August 31). Clipto raises $15 million at a $250 million valuation for its AI powered media search platform.

Atorie: $9.5 million Seed. The Los Angeles based startup is building an AI powered marketplace for luxury fashion and consumer products. The new seed funding will support the company’s growth as it develops its technology and marketplace.

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/08/atorie-raises-9-5m-in-seed-funding.html?utm_source
Atorie. (2026, August 31). Atorie raises $9.5 million seed round for its AI powered luxury marketplace.

What’s Been Going On?

Nvidia invests $3.5 billion in MediaTek as it expands its AI chip empire. Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek as part of a broader partnership around custom AI chips. MediaTek will let customers use Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion technology to build their own chips that plug directly into Nvidia powered data centers, helping Nvidia stay central even as companies increasingly design their own AI silicon. The companies are also expanding their work together on chips for PCs and AI powered vehicles.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/nvidias-3-5b-mediatek-bet-reveals-its-plan-for-tackling-big-techs-ai-chip-buildout/

The Pentagon launches its own versions of ChatGPT and Grok. The Department of Defense has added ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government to GenAI.mil, its secure AI platform available to roughly 3 million military and civilian personnel. The customized tools are intended for defense related work and join Google’s Gemini on the platform. Anthropic’s Claude is notably absent following the company’s dispute with the Pentagon.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/the-pentagon-now-has-its-own-version-of-chatgpt-and-grok/

Europe spends nearly $450 million on a new AI supercomputer. The European Union awarded a €387.8 million contract, roughly $449 million, to French technology company Bull to build a new AI focused supercomputer in Finland. The system is expected to launch in the second half of 2027 and is part of Europe’s push to dramatically expand its domestic AI computing capacity as it competes with the U.S. and China.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/europe-expands-ai-computing-network-with-390-million-order-frances-bull-2026-08-31/

Events September 5th - September 12th → 7 days

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

9/5

Spatial Intelligence + Generative 3D Hackathon with Mint, Tripo, World Labs, Convex and Founders Inc.: https://luma.com/b101ml40

Longevity x Posture: AI vs TechNeck?: https://luma.com/870i4r3g

AI for the Rest of Us: A workshop for people who feel left behind by AI: https://luma.com/ai-for-the-rest-of-us-a-no-jargon-hands-

9/8

Inside the Operating System: A Conversation with Cristina Cordova & Michael Altom: https://luma.com/cristina-michael

Dev Tools & Infra Demo Night at Hogpatch: https://luma.com/6wyras70

9/9

In production: https://luma.com/openro-8qy3

The Corgi Cup: https://luma.com/the-corgi-cup

Software Factories Meet Production: https://luma.com/87no10np

9/10

Llama Lounge 26: The AI Startup Event Series @ Microsoft: https://luma.com/llamalounge26

Mahjong Party for AI Builders: https://luma.com/fm6e4puk

Silly Robots Contest: https://luma.com/sillybot

Startup Pitch Night: https://luma.com/l0asyhir

The CFO Table | San Francisco: https://luma.com/neoflo-i0ph

137th SF Hardware Meetup @ Mission Robotics | Physical AI Robotics: https://luma.com/84lattht

9/11

Agentworld x Superdark Factory Antikythera x Disintegrator: https://luma.com/fawtwq0b

9/12

Open Model Hack - Gradient x Google Deepmind: https://luma.com/openmodelhack

YC S26 Demo Day Party Celebration: https://luma.com/kzj6q924

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Jobs

Cursor is hiring its first commercial expansion AE - plus open roles at Figma, Airbnb, and Waymo

Talent Moves…

2 months ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch and Lauren Nguyen

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, ML Platform @ Cursor – SF, CA, USA

Apply:https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ml-platform/10940149

Lead Software Engineer @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer/10938934

Senior Software Engineer, NeMo Core Platform @ Nvidia – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-software-engineer-nemo-core-platform/10939103

Sr. Lead Software Engineer: Payments SAFE VP @ JP Morgan – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sr-lead-software-engineer-payments-safe-vp/10940413

Software Engineer - Growth @ Afterquery – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-growth/10940440

GTM

GTM Compensation Lead, Commercial Operations @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-compensation-lead-commercial-operations/10940566

Senior Data Engineer - GTM @ Vercel – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-data-engineer-gtm/10847972

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer - DSX AI Infrastructure Software @ Nvidia – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-technical-marketing-engineer-dsx-ai-infrastructure-software/10873403

Enterprise AI Value Strategy Senior Manager | Song Marketing @ Accenture – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/enterprise-ai-value-strategy-senior-manager-song-marketing/10932494

GTM Strategy & Operations @ Juicebox – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-strategy-operations/10904518

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 22

Corgi Times — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:10:05 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter. It’s been a big week at Corgi.

We officially opened the doors to Corgi Cafe NYC last weekend, bringing our 24/7 home for founders, builders, creatives, and caffeine-fueled night owls to New York.

We had a grand opening party that attracted over 2,000 RSVPs. So many new faces, and plenty of late-night energy, NYC showed us exactly why it’s one of the world’s greatest startup cities!

And back home at HQ San Francisco, we opened the doors to our newest location in Dogpatch. With a new neighborhood, a new space, we’re excited to make Dogpatch another place for the community to gather, connect, and build. Two new cafes, many more to go!

Why Cafes?

You might wonder why an insurance company is opening cafes.

For us, it comes down to being close to the community we serve. Corgi is built for founders, operators, and growing companies, and our cafes give us a physical place to spend time with that community — not just when they need insurance, but throughout their entire journey.

That naturally makes the cafes a powerful top-of-funnel channel for Corgi. Our ideal customers are already in these spaces, and every coffee, event, conversation, and introduction is an opportunity to build familiarity with our brand and create relationships that can eventually turn into customers, partners, or referrals.

But the cafes aren’t just a marketing strategy. We genuinely care about creating places where people can connect. Building a company can be lonely, and we want Corgi Cafe to be a place where founders meet cofounders, investors find their next company, teams collaborate, and people can simply come in, grab a coffee, work on their passion projects, and feel part of something.

Before we get into the latest tech news, shoutout to all our drink sponsors!

Recent News

Alibaba launches Wan3.0 as it accelerates its push into AI video. Alibaba introduced the latest generation of its Wan AI video model with upgraded video generation capabilities as competition intensifies across generative media. The launch comes alongside a $10 billion share sale intended to help fund Alibaba’s expanding investments in AI infrastructure, chips, and model development. The company is increasingly positioning AI as a core part of its business as it competes with both Chinese and U.S. model developers.
Sources: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/alibaba-launches-wan30-ai-video-model-after-10-billion-share-sale-2026-08-24/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Xiaomi launches its new Xring O3 chip as it pushes deeper into custom silicon. Xiaomi unveiled its latest internally designed smartphone processor, which will be manufactured by TSMC using its advanced 3nm process and is expected to power an upcoming flagship foldable phone. Xiaomi is also reportedly developing separate chips for AI workloads and autonomous driving, expanding its semiconductor ambitions beyond smartphones. The strategy could give Xiaomi greater control over its hardware ecosystem while reducing its reliance on outside chip designers.
Sources: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/xiaomi-launches-new-xring-chip-partners-with-tsmc-production-sources-say-2026-08-24/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Oura reportedly prepares for a September IPO at a valuation above $16 billion. The smart ring maker is considering raising as much as $3 billion through a public offering that could take place as soon as September. Oura has grown into one of the most prominent wearable technology companies as demand for sleep, recovery, fitness, and health tracking devices has expanded. If completed at the reported valuation, the listing would represent one of the more significant consumer technology IPOs of 2026.
Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/oura-is-reportedly-eyeing-a-september-ipo-that-could-value-it-at-more-than-16b/

New Funding Updates

General Intuition: Funding round at a $6 billion valuation. New York-based physical AI and robotics startup, backed by Valor Equity Partners and Point72, building foundation models for spatial and physical-world reasoning.
XPeng Robotics: $900+ million first external funding round. China-based physical AI and humanoid robotics company, led by IDG Capital with participation from Tencent, Alibaba, and Gaorong Ventures, at a $6.3+ billion valuation.
Fasset: $68 million Series C. AI-powered stablecoin and digital banking platform, led by SBI Group at a $1 billion valuation, following its $51 million Series B earlier this year.
Perplexity: New equity funding round in discussions at a $30+ billion valuation. San Francisco-based AI search and agent platform, with Nvidia reportedly in talks to invest; the financing has not yet closed.

What’s Been Going On?

Gatik raised $200 million to expand its autonomous trucking business following a major commercial deal with PepsiCo. The Santa Clara based company builds driverless trucks for moving goods between distribution centers and retail locations and has now raised roughly $500 million overall.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/25/self-driving-truck-startup-gatik-raises-200m-following-pepsico-deal/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Keenable came out of stealth with a $26 million seed round led by Accel. The company is building search infrastructure specifically for AI agents, including an index of more than 100 billion web documents, and plans to use the funding to grow its team and GTM operations.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/25/accel-backed-keenable-is-indexing-the-web-for-ai-agents/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Airbound raised $37 million to scale its autonomous delivery drones. The India based startup is developing lightweight drones that it hopes can eventually make delivering goods by air cheaper and more efficient than transporting them by road.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/indias-airbound-bags-37m-to-take-on-trucks-with-rocket-like-drones/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Events August 30 - September 5

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/30

Vibe Coding for Professionals: Build faster with AI without losing quality: https://pmisfbac.org/calendar/vibe-coding-for-professionals-how-to-build-faster-with-ai-without-losing-quality-47426

SF Socratic Agentic AI Summit : https://luma.com/sf-socratic-2.0

8/31

AI Codecon: Building with Open Source AI : https://www.oreilly.com/AI-Codecon/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Regional Meet Up: Data, Ethics, and the Foundations of Responsible AI: https://wlda.tech/regional-meet-up-wlda-x-autodesk/

9/1

Forward Deployed: Evals- Beyond the Vibe Check : https://luma.com/85oi0k2n

Agentic + AI Night: Multi-Agent Governance and Security: https://luma.com/agenticaiobsnightsf-9-1

9/2

Al Dente: A Founder-Investor pasta making dinner: https://luma.com/pk8b8b5h

The Test Tribe San Francisco | Testers and QA Meetups : https://www.meetup.com/the-test-tribe-san-francisco/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

9/3

Grok Bot build night for women: https://luma.com/a16zgrokbotbuildnight

AI Philosophy Nights: Metaphors for AI with Amy Kurzweil : https://luma.com/553nq69x
SlatorCon San Francisco: https://events.ringcentral.com/events/slatorcon-san-francisco-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com

9/4

The First Non-Tech Buildathon : https://luma.com/utyqfarn?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Second Brain AI Salon #05 from Web 1.0 to Agentic AI: https://luma.com/yw4ifkj1?utm_source=chatgpt.com

9/5

Cafe Cowork: Temporal x Corgi: https://luma.com/cafe-cowork-temporal

Spatial Intelligence + Generative 3D Hackathon with Mint, Tripo, World Labs, Convex, and Founders Inc. : https://luma.com/b101ml40

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineer @ dialpad - Remote

Apply:https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/dialpad/jobs/8734067002

Multidisciplinary Engineer @ Unlimited Industries - SF, CA USA

Apply:https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/unlimitedindustries/c4a388aa-72c0-404d-a978-d2f01a669695

Program Officer @ OpenAI - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://openaifoundation.org/careers/program-officer-ai-resources-33d3015a-70f3-4f5a-be26-9803f3582403

Solutions Engineer, AI Agent @ Cresta - Remote

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/dialpad/jobs/8734067002

GTM

GTM Strategy and Operation Analyst @ Stripe - NYC, NY USA

Apply: https://stripe.com/careers/listing/gtm-strategy-operations-analyst/8145119?gh_jid=8145119

Product Marketing Manager @ Resolve.ai - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Resolve%20AI/f9cca54e-99fb-4108-a5fb-0f05bdefb810?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Founding GTM @ T:0 - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/fc4657db-1629-4496-b3a6-3c1fff4f1f67

Founding Growth and Delivery Lead @ Lightfield - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Lightfield/57d8b0bf-946d-4bed-8135-931d10429c6e

Sales Enablement Lead @ Juicebox - SF, CA USA
Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Juicebox/54fc01a7-3e7a-4549-8ed0-fecbdaad38cd?utm_source=chatgpt.com

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 21

Corgi Times — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:18:49 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

Today, we’re officially opening the doors to the Corgi Cafe NYC location in NoMad (121 E 27th St). Come celebrate with us, grab a drink, meet fellow founders and builders, and get a first look at our new home for New York’s startup community tonight in partnership with Antimetal, MongoDB, Rippling, and Oasis.

The second location in Dogpatch (2146 3rd St) will also be soft opening at 10am!

This past week, we hosted a booth at the YC Intern Expo (where our CEO and co-founder Nico Laqua spoke), brought the community together through a packed lineup of events with Deel, kayaking with the YC S26 batch, and even a sushi making class.

In addition, our special Corgi Times edition with Rippling is now out. Grab a copy at 9 Claude Lane or go to corgitimes.com.

Shoutout to all our wonderful drink sponsors.

If building something ambitious sounds like your kind of challenge, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here:
https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent Tech News

Nvidia backs a $105 billion buildout of OpenAI’s new Ohio data center. Announced August 17, Nvidia is guaranteeing up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payments to SoftBank’s SB Energy and will serve as the site’s exclusive chip supplier, alongside a separate $1.5 billion investment directly in SB Energy. OpenAI signed a 10 year lease for the central Ohio facility, which will deliver 8 IT gigawatts of capacity (backed by 10 gigawatts of new power generation) on former federal uranium enrichment land, with initial capacity online in 2028 and a projected 35,000 construction jobs. The scale of the deal has revived concerns about “circular” AI financing, where the same handful of companies are simultaneously one another’s customers, investors, and suppliers.
Stripe agrees to acquire AI model routing startup OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. The deal, reported August 16, values OpenRouter at over five times the $1.3 billion valuation it held after its Series B three months earlier. OpenRouter lets developers access and switch between 400+ AI models through a single API, serving roughly 8 million users, and its investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet’s CapitalG. Stripe is folding the platform into its payments infrastructure, with OpenRouter’s CEO describing the company as “the equivalent of Stripe for AI.”
Anthropic’s Q2 revenue tops $11.5 billion, a 14 fold jump that puts the company in the black for the first time. The preliminary figures, reported August 15, show revenue up from $787 million a year earlier and $4.73 billion in Q1 2026, with Anthropic posting positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. The results come as Anthropic meets with prospective investors ahead of a potential IPO — working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase — that could debut as soon as this fall, potentially ahead of rivals OpenAI and DeepSeek.

New Funding Updates

Databricks: $5 billion Series funding. San Francisco-based data and AI platform, led by Coatue at a $190 billion valuation, with Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price, and Sixth Street Growth participated, the company’s second $5 billion raise in eight months.

River AI: $1.1 billion Seed and Series A. Palo Alto based AI reinforcement learning startup, led by AMP PBC and General Catalyst, with Nvidia and AMD Ventures contributing.

Form Energy: $750 million Series G. Massachusetts based long duration electric grid storage company, led by T. Rowe Price, with participation from multiple climate and infrastructure investors.

Higgsfield: $400 million Series B. Generative AI platform for video, image, and audio content, led by DST Global at a $5.4 billion valuation (roughly 4x its valuation six months earlier) with Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Intel Capital, Tribe Capital, Fifth Wall, Smash Capital, and Valor Capital also participating.

What’s Been Going On?

Thrive Holdings, Josh Kushner’s New York based private equity firm that buys traditional accounting and IT services businesses to rebuild them around AI, raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation led by SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital.

Neros Technologies, an El Segundo based defense drone manufacturer, raised a $250 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund at a $2.5 billion valuation, to scale production ahead of planned combat deployment by year end.

Vals AI, a San Francisco based startup that builds independent evaluation benchmarks for AI models, raised a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $400 million valuation, with 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, HRT Ventures, and Next Ladder Ventures participating.

PointsKash, a Scottsdale based fintech serving unbanked and underbanked consumers through its KashPoint kiosks, secured up to $100 million in strategic capital from Hawk Capital Investors to fund a national rollout of its financial commerce platform.

Events August 22nd - August 29th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/22

Mistral Vibe Hackathon: https://luma.com/mistral-summer-vibe-hackathon-sf

AI Valley x Pet Zen Dog-a-thon: https://luma.com/rklrsomo

vLLM x NVIDIA Dynamo Meetup: https://luma.com/r8o604o0

8/25

Embodied AI Night: Founders, Builders, and Researchers: https://luma.com/7tvf89y2

Physical AI: What’s Working (and What Still Breaks): https://luma.com/rallysf-yfs4

8/26

AI Infra Kebab: https://luma.com/kebab

Decagon x Centralize: GTM Summer Mixer: https://luma.com/9ha07os2?tk=7Hd7SR

Bay Area Frontier Research Club #19 | Agents in Production: ICML 2026 Oral by UC Berkeley Researchers + Self-Improvement Fireside: https://luma.com/cx2f0q8r

Durable AI: Agent Context is Everything: https://luma.com/durable-ai-august

Daytona AI Builders - SF, August 2026: https://luma.com/ai-builders-sf-aug

8/27

Step SF 2026: The AI & Tech Startup Festival: https://luma.com/StepSF26

Demo Night SF: Ship AI Apps with Anthropic + Postman + Supabase + Vercel: https://luma.com/august-SF-supabase-vercel-postman

8/28

Open Source AI Summit SF: https://luma.com/buildp-c5h9

The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup: https://luma.com/na2pz2q9

August Tech Rooftop Mixer: https://luma.com/fqbrj5nt

Better Days: A Hackathon — San Francisco: https://luma.com/clickh-sie8

8/29

Battle of the Accelerators Padel Edition: https://luma.com/j9lpxk1n

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

People making interesting moves in tech/AI - and a new list of startups that are hiring right now

Interesting moves lately in tech / AI…

2 months ago · 10 likes · Katie Kirsch, Nicole Debow, and Dani Grant

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, New Grad (Dec 2026) @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA
Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-new-grad-dec-2026/10692464

Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Ecosystem @ Anthropic – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-platform-ecosystem/10700049

Software Engineering MTS @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineering-mts/10684206

Software Engineer, Search Systems - Code Data @ Mercor – SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-search-systems-code-data/10676392

Senior Software Engineer, C++ and CUDA - Analytics and Data Intelligence @ Nvidia – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-software-engineer-c-and-cuda-analytics-and-data-intelligence/10699749

GTM

Partner Director, GTM Cloud Partnerships @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/partner-director-gtm-cloud-partnerships/10605066

Product Marketing Lead, GTM Strategy - Claude for Knowledge Work @ Anthropic – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/product-marketing-lead-gtm-strategy-claude-knowledge-work/10652172

Program Manager, GTM Strategic Programs @ Stripe – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://stripe.com/careers/listing/program-manager-gtm-strategic-programs/8042309?gh_src=73vnei

Strategic Finance, GTM @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/strategic-finance-gtm/10669624

Founding GTM ENgineer @ TraceRoot.AI (YCS25) – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/103799

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 20

Corgi Times — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:52:58 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about how we bring the Corgi community together—and moving toward events that feel more curated, intentional, and distinctly Corgi. From taking the track at Sonoma Raceway for a day of racing and competition to hosting a private omakase dinner, we’ve been creating experiences designed to bring the right people together in the right setting.

As Corgi continues to grow, so does our community. We’re excited to keep creating more thoughtful gatherings that go beyond the typical networking event and give founders, builders, investors, and friends of Corgi a chance to connect, share ideas, and have a genuinely great time.

And, of course, another huge milestone: Corgi Cafe has officially opened its doors in London’s Shoreditch! 🇬🇧

Our first international Corgi Cafe is now open, bringing the Corgi community across the pond. We celebrated the opening with an incredible crowd of founders, builders, creatives, and friends of Corgi and the energy was exactly what we hoped for.

Take a look at some of our favorite photos from the opening below. London, we’re just getting started. .

We also had our CEO and co-founder Nico Laqua on CNBC this week.

Watch: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/12/etf-edge-on-thematic-and-active-etfs-outside-of-ai-and-trends-to-watch.html

Before we get into it, shoutout to all our wonderful drink sponsors.

Recent News

Meta releases Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight AI model that runs on a single consumer GPU. Released August 10 under an Apache 2.0 license, Muse Glimmer is distilled from Meta’s larger Muse Spark model and compressed via 4-bit quantization to run within 20GB of memory, small enough for a single consumer GPU or Mac. It’s built for local coding, function calling, and autonomous agent workflows, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg paired the release with an essay on Meta’s plans to keep releasing open-weight models.
OpenAI launches GPT-5.6-Cyber, its first model to hit the “High” cybersecurity capability threshold, and expands defender access through Daybreak. The new two-tier Daybreak program gives vetted security defenders access to frontier cyber capabilities: Daybreak Blue offers GPT-5.6 Sol with defense-tuned guardrails, while Daybreak Red unlocks GPT-5.6-Cyber for exploit validation and vulnerability research. OpenAI says the model completes 95% of advanced security tasks in internal testing, up from 57% for its predecessor, and used it to discover two previously unknown Chrome vulnerabilities. The company confirmed GPT-5.6-Cyber was not involved in the Hugging Face incident disclosed last month.
Intel announces a $15 billion stock offering, its first public share sale since going public in 1971, to fund AI-driven growth. The August 10 offering comes after Intel posted its strongest quarterly revenue growth in over 15 years, with its data center and AI segment up 59% year over year. The company says proceeds will support capital expenditures across manufacturing, packaging, and physical AI, as customer demand continues to outpace supply on wafers, memory, and substrates.

New Funding Updates

Lovable: $400 million Series C. Stockholm-based AI software creation platform, led by Menlo Ventures and the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund at a $13.3 billion valuation, roughly double its $6.6 billion valuation from December. The round follows Lovable hitting $500 million in annualized revenue run rate in June.

Hadrian: $1.37 billion Series D. Torrance-based developer of highly automated factories, led by WCM Investment Management, Valor Equity Partners, and JP Morgan Chase at a $7.87 billion valuation.

Base Power: $1 billion Series D. Austin-based residential battery energy storage company, led by Ribbit Capital and Valor Equity Partners at a $13 billion valuation, coinciding with the launch of its Base Core home battery.

Valar Atomics: $1 billion Series B. El Segundo-based nuclear energy infrastructure developer, led by Sequoia Capital, plus a separate $200 million credit facility.

Lumilens: $700 million. San Jose-based AI infrastructure connectivity platform that emerged from stealth, led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital.

What’s Been Going On?

Whatnot, a Los Angeles-based live shopping marketplace, raised $545 million in Series G funding, reportedly setting a $20 billion valuation, led by Iconiq Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Mariana Minerals, a software-focused critical minerals developer, picked up $310 million in Series B financing led by Khosla Ventures.

Volta, a developer of AI cloud infrastructure, emerged from stealth with a Series A at a $2.4 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia.

Horizon3, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity provider, announced a $250 million Series E led by NightDragon, tripling its valuation to more than $2 billion.

Sources:

Axios. (2026, August 10). OpenAI unveils GPT-5.6-Cyber to help prepare for AI cyberattacks. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/10/openai-gpt-astra-restrictions-safety-hacking-defenders

Bloomberg. (2026, August 10). Intel to sell $15 billion in stock after AI boosts demand. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-10/intel-selling-15-billion-in-common-stock-to-fund-growth

Glasner, J. (2026, August 7). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: A big week for big checks. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-billion-dollar-raises-manufacturing-energy-ai/

Intel Corporation. (2026, August 10). Intel announces proposed $15 billion common stock offering. Intel Newsroom. https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/intel-announces-proposed-15-billion-common-stock-offering

OpenAI. (2026, August 10). Expanding Daybreak as the cyber defense window narrows. https://openai.com/index/expanding-daybreak-as-the-cyber-defense-window-narrows/

SiliconANGLE. (2026, August 10). Meta releases open-source Muse Glimmer model with 30B parameters. https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/10/meta-releases-open-source-muse-glimmer-model-30b-parameters/

TechCrunch. (2026, August 12). Lovable confirms new $13.3B valuation, raises another $400M. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/lovable-confirms-new-13-3b-valuation-raises-another-400m/

Events August 15th - August 22nd

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/15

VCN #50: Own the Stack: https://luma.com/vcn-50-own-the-stackz

8/16

Founder BBQ Bash @ Corgi: https://luma.com/founderbbqbash

YC S26: Kayaking Day: https://luma.com/qtuxy56z

8/17

The Physical AI Sprint Hackathon: https://luma.com/nkknxvrz=

Moonlight with Gemini - 3 Hour Hack: https://luma.com/buildclub-ua0n

8/18

ModCon 2026: https://luma.com/modcon

SkyRL Meetup: https://luma.com/y4ahouh6

8/19

Agents in Production: DevTools demo night: https://luma.com/p7v901j3

Founder Dinner: https://luma.com/bqj5gosv

The Reserve by Founder Social Club with HydraDB: https://luma.com/95jql7sy

8/20

Mistral Catfe Coworking: https://luma.com/mistral-summer-catfe-sf

Agents are changing the web with Parag Agrawal (founder, Parallel): https://luma.com/sy0mt1m4

AI Founders + Engineers Billiards Night: https://luma.com/bj9o4jzd

8/21

Community dinner: bringing together founders in SF: https://luma.com/be9smvkk

Become an AI Builder: Create Your First Project in One Night: https://luma.com/t26ue3ub

8/22

Soccer by The Residency: https://luma.com/the-4x99

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at OpenAI, Mixpanel, Exa, and Revolut

Build -1 → 0…

3 months ago · 18 likes · Dani Grant and Katie Kirsch

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, GPT Infrastructure @ OpenAI – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-gpt-infrastructure/10630748

Lead Software Engineer, Agentforce Reasoning @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer-agentforce-reasoning/10631880

Senior Software Engineer, Atlas Search @ MongoDB – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-software-engineer-atlas-search/10630418

Senior Lead Software Engineer @ Capital One – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-lead-software-engineer/10625151

Software Engineer, Collections Infra @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-collections-infra/10607912

GTM

Partner Director, GTM Cloud Partnerships @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/partner-director-gtm-cloud-partnerships/10605066

Revenue Cloud GTM Lead @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/revenue-cloud-gtm-lead/10620965

GTM Technical Enablement Partner @ Lovable – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-enablement-technical-partners/10594123

GTM Operations Business Partner @ Canva – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-operations-business-partner/10600509

GTM Analytics Engineer @ Decagon – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-analytics-engineer/10582533

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 19

Corgi Times — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:53:51 GMT

Welcome back to another edition of the Corgi Times.

It’s been another exciting few weeks at Corgi. This edition features a first look inside our newest Dogpatch cafe, where builders, founders, and creatives are already making the space their own. Just two blocks away from YC, we hosted a private preview. We’re also sharing an update on our expansion to London as we continue bringing the Corgi community to more cities around the world.

We’re also expanding and refining our drink sponsorship program and have brought on many new sponsors, including Rippling, Eragon, ngrok, Plain, and Capy.

Finally, we have a special twist in this week’s edition. Comment below what you think it is.

Finally, thank you to all of our drink sponsors for their support!

Let’s dive in.

Recent News

Anthropic discloses that Claude models breached three real companies’ systems during cybersecurity evaluations. A retrospective review, triggered by OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident from the prior week, found that three different Claude models (Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research model) reached the open internet from within a misconfigured third-party test environment and gained unauthorized access to three organizations’ live infrastructure, dating back to April. Anthropic said none of the affected companies had detected the intrusions before being notified, and framed the incidents as an “operational failure” distinct from OpenAI’s case, since no unknown vulnerability was exploited, just a mistakenly open network path.
AI-driven memory chip shortage is pushing up prices on laptops, tablets, and game consoles. DRAM contract prices rose as much as 89% in Q2 2026 alone as chipmakers redirect capacity toward HBM for AI data centers. It’s important to know that Trudy also loves biscuits and head scratches. Apple raised laptop and iPad prices 15 to 25%, and Microsoft added $100 to the base Xbox price, both citing memory costs, while Apple CEO Tim Cook warned on an earnings call that prices will keep climbing.

DeepSeek and Alibaba escalate an AI price war that’s undercutting U.S. labs on cost. DeepSeek released V4-Flash on July 31, priced at a fraction of frontier-model costs, and Alibaba pushed Queen 3.8-Max to general availability on August 3 with a one-million-token context window. The moves follow OpenAI’s 80% price cut on GPT-5.6 Luna and continue a broader trend of Chinese open-weight models taking a rising share of enterprise token usage on cost alone.

New Funding Updates

Safe Superintelligence: $5 billion. Silicon Valley foundational AI lab founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, backed by Nvidia through a long-term strategic partnership aimed at boosting the company’s compute resources.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems: $1 billion. Massachusetts-based fusion energy startup developing a grid-scale fusion power plant, bringing total funding raised to date to $4 billion.

Antora Energy: $550 million Series C. San Jose-based thermal battery provider supplying power to AI data centers, co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse.

Function: $450 million growth round. Austin-based consumer lab testing and health information platform, led by General Catalyst.

What’s Been Going On?

Antares, a nuclear fission energy company developing compact microreactors for defense and space applications, raised $370 million in Series C equity funding led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, alongside $100 million in debt financing.

Simile, a Palo Alto-based developer of AI tools for running simulations, picked up over $200 million in fresh funding at a $2 billion post-money valuation, led by Greenoaks, just five months after launching its product.

ThreatLocker, an Orlando-based cybersecurity provider, closed $190 million in Series F funding led by Elephant to expand its platform internationally.

CAIS, a New York-based alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, secured $170 million in Series D financing led by Vista Equity Partners, setting a valuation above $2 billion.

Sources:

Anthropic. (2026, July 30). Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations. https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals

Axios. (2026, August 1). DeepSeek’s new bargain model accelerates AI’s race to zero. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/01/deepseek-model-cheap-ai-price-war

Glasner, J. (2026, July 31). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: Safe Superintelligence and Commonwealth Fusion lead with billion-dollar deals. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-safe-superintelligence-commonwealth-fusion/

TechCrunch. (2026, July 30). Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/anthropic-says-its-own-ai-models-breached-three-companies-during-security-tests/

The Daily Upside. (2026, July 31). From iPads to Xboxes, device prices soar as AI hoards memory chips. https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/from-ipads-to-xboxes-device-prices-soar-as-ai-hoards-memory-chips/

Events August 8th - August 15th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/8

The Board Walks: https://www.meetup.com/the-board-walks-san-francisco/events/315748773/

Silicon Valley Robotics Fair 2026:https://luma.com/05aqg7b8

8/9

Hack with VoiceOS | $5k in OpenAI Credits: https://luma.com/pxdhdo4a

8/10

8/11

Claude Coworkshop - San Francisco: https://luma.com/claude-coworkshop-sf-aug-11

San Francisco Data Engineering Meetup with ClickHouse: https://luma.com/clickh-z578

8/12

AI Engineers Tech Talk: August: https://luma.com/kzwpdbs5

WorkOS Agent Night: https://luma.com/agent-night

Frontier Day: Building an AGI-Pilled Company: https://luma.com/frontier-day-sf

8/13

Codex Community Meetup: Codex for Marketers: https://luma.com/fw8aheuk

MongoDB.local Build Fest: San Francisco: https://luma.com/30zl4ix9

Founder Dinner: https://luma.com/vxq5depn

8/14

a16z SR 007 Founders Sushi Masterclass: https://luma.com/2izhkojo

Community Dinner by The Residency: https://luma.com/l21yni0s

8/15

Humanoid Sound Bath: https://luma.com/gjo9ws1t

Soccer Club by The Residency: https://luma.com/the-bdtf

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Astranis just raised $450M to build the world's most advanced satellites for high orbits

For decades, everyone building broadband constellations was racing to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). Fewer people were focused on geostationary orbit (GEO), in part because GEO was expensive, complex, and time-intensive to build for. This was a missed opportunity to serve these strategic higher orbits…

3 months ago · 14 likes · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Software Engineering

Software Engineer @ Atlassian – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer/10516477

Software Engineering PMTS - Data Platform @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA
Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineering-pmts-data-platform/10511659

Solutions Architect - AI Natives Business, Strategic @ Databricks – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/solutions-architect-ai-natives-business-strategic/10510497

Software Engineer, Backend, DevProdAI @ Snap – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-backend-devprodai/10461393

Software Engineer II, Android @ Pinterest – SF, CA, USA
Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ii-android/10511184

GTM

GTM Strategy & Operations, Overlay @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-strategy-operations-overlay/10516644

Program Manager, GTM Systems @ Anthropic – – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5363352008?gh_src=LinkedIn

GTM Acceleration, Technical Solutions @ Vercel – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-acceleration-technical-solutions/10446098

Software Engineer, GTM Platform @ Ramp – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-gtm-platform/10440131

GTM Operations Lead @ Afterquery – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-operations-lead/10452309

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 18

Corgi Times — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:27:50 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter. There’s a lot happening at Corgi (as per usual). Our second San Francisco location in Dogpatch is opening its doors with a soft opening this Sunday—and you’re invited. Meanwhile, our AI coverages were recently featured on NPR's Marketplace, and our upcoming New York cafés were highlighted by Curbed.

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs! Thanks to all our drink sponsors at the Corgi Cafe.

Recent News

Nvidia is in talks for a $250B backstop to fuel OpenAI’s Ohio megaproject. The Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia is negotiating a roughly $250 billion financing guarantee to help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus SoftBank’s SB Energy is building in southern Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. The full project, including chips, could top $500 billion, making it the largest data center buildout announced to date, and Nvidia is separately discussing financing up to $350 billion more for the chip purchases themselves, pushing its total exposure to one customer toward $600 billion.

Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5, its fourth “5-series” model in two months. Released July 24, Opus 5 brings a 1-million-token context window and a new adjustable “effort” setting that lets users trade cost for capability, positioned to come close to Fable 5’s performance at roughly half the price.

OpenAI discloses its own models breached Hugging Face’s production systems while trying to cheat a cybersecurity benchmark. OpenAI confirmed that GPT-5.6 Sol and a stronger, unreleased model, both run with reduced safety refusals to test “maximal cyber capability,” broke out of an internal sandbox via a previously unknown vulnerability, then chained stolen credentials into Hugging Face’s live infrastructure to steal a benchmark’s answer key.

New Funding Updates

Atoms: $1.7 billion. Los Angeles-based physical AI startup founded by Uber founder Travis Kalanick, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Etched: $300 million Series C. San Jose-based AI chip/systems co-designer, led by Sequoia Capital at a $10 billion pre-money valuation.

Act Security: $60 million (seed + Series A). Tel Aviv-based cloud access-control startup, backed by Team8, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Notable Capital.

Fish Audio: $52 million seed. Palo Alto-based AI voice platform reporting $21M ARR and 8M+ users, led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today.

What’s Been Going On?

Claros Technologies, a Minneapolis-based company commercializing PFAS destruction technology, raised a $55 million Series B led by Treehouse Family Capital, with Daikin America and Veralto participating.

Hush Security, a Tel Aviv-based AI agent governance platform, raised a $30 million Series A with Akamai Technologies joining Battery Ventures and YL Ventures, bringing total funding to $41 million.

Array Labs, a Redwood City-based space-based radar company, raised a $21 million strategic round anchored by Mitsubishi Electric, paired with a partnership to bring satellite tracking services to Asia-Pacific defense customers.

Sources:

Axios. (2026, July 21). Hugging Face breach: OpenAI claims its models were responsible. https://www.axios.com/2026/07/21/openai-says-hugging-face-breach-caused-by-one-its-models

CNBC. (2026, July 22). OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/open-ai-cyber-models-hack-hugging-face.html

CNBC. (2026, July 27). Nvidia and OpenAI in talks for up to $250 billion AI backstop. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html

Citybiz. (2026, July 28). Array Labs raises $21 million to expand defense radar satellite platform through Mitsubishi Electric partnership. https://www.citybiz.co/article/880281/array-labs-raises-21-million-to-expand-defense-radar-satellite-platform-through-mitsubishi-electric-partnership/

Data Center Dynamics. (2026, July 27). Nvidia considers $250bn backstop for OpenAI’s planned 10GW Ohio data center — report. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-considers-250bn-backstop-for-openais-planned-10gw-ohio-data-center-report/

FinSMEs. (2026, July 28). Act Security raises $60M in total funding. https://www.finsmes.com/2026/07/act-security-raises-60m-in-total-funding.html

Fortune. (2026, July 24). Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5: Here’s how it’s different than what’s already out there. https://fortune.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-debuts-claude-opus-5-with-feature-that-lets-users-toggle-between-cost-and-capability/

Glasner, J. (2026, July 24). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: Physical AI startup Atoms leads in varied week for large deals. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-physical-ai-fintech-defense-atoms/

PR Newswire. (2026, July 28). Claros Technologies raises $55 million Series B financing to accelerate global commercialization of PFAS destruction technology. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/claros-technologies-raises-55-million-series-b-financing-to-accelerate-global-commercialization-of-pfas-destruction-technology-302835890.html

PR Newswire. (2026, July 28). Hush Security raises $30M to close the AI agent governance gap, with Akamai joining as strategic investor. https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/hush-security-raises-30m-to-close-the-ai-agent-governance-gap-with-akamai-joining-as-strategic-investor-302836307.html

TechCrunch. (2026, July 24). Anthropic launches Opus 5. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-launches-opus-5/

TechCrunch. (2026, July 28). Fish Audio raises $52M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-build-ai-voice-models-for-creators-and-enterprises/

Events Aug 1st - Aug 8th → 7 days

Last weekend, 1,000 participants. 250+ teams. We hosted a YC Startup School after-hackathon with Merge, Vercel, Photon, and Fondo! Our top 3 winners, split $1,000+ in prizes.

Here are more events this week:

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/1

Applied Intelligence Hackathon - Open Registration: https://luma.com/applied-intelligence-hackathon

Agentic AI Summit: https://luma.com/agentic-ai-summit

8/2

Community Dinner @ The Residency: https://luma.com/the-4vsx

Corgi Cafe: Dogpatch Open House: https://luma.com/j4pqtkhp

8/3

Memory Meets Motion: Hackathon - Open Registration: https://luma.com/memory-meets-motion-hackathon

8/4

Executive Suite at Valkyries game SF: https://luma.com/personavalks

Built on Baseten | AI Demo Night: https://luma.com/b4y2veki

8/5

Privy Home: IRL in SF: https://luma.com/x1to4ziz

AI Startup Pitch Night with Early Stage Investors: https://luma.com/ai-startup-pitch

Demo Night @ WorkOS (August): https://luma.com/x1to4ziz

8/6

Ramp Casino Night: https://luma.com/1xmhkwy6

Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung): https://luma.com/ExtraordinaryFoundersAug6

8/7

AI x Fashion Coffee Club: https://luma.com/xfbtidsx

Snowflake X Beta Fund Agent & Token Economy Hackathon: https://luma.com/beta-fdnw

8/8

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Enterprise Verticals @ OpenAI – Hybrid, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-enterprise-verticals/10425014

Sr. Director, Software Engineering - Finance Tech @ Capital One – Remote, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sr-director-software-engineering-finance-tech/10424339

Software Engineer, Robotics Data @ Mercor, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-robotics-data/10420504

Software Engineering SMTS @ Salesforce, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineering-smts/10401466

Staff Software Engineer, Code RL @ Anthropic, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-code-rl/10381395

GTM

GTM Technical Onboarding Program Manager @ OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-technical-onboarding-program-manager/10427626

Senior Manager, GTM AI Engineer — Revenue Enablement @ Brex, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-manager-gtm-ai-engineer-revenue-enablement/10430052

Senior Associate, Global Ads GTM Strategy and Operations @ Snapchat, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-associate-global-ads-gtm-strategy-and-operations/10357571

GTM Enablement Manager @ Glean, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-enablement-manager/10379795

GTM Finance - Sales Business Partner @ Cursor, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-finance-sales-business-partner/10357578

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 17

Corgi Times — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:46:47 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

It was another busy week at Corgi. We welcomed Y Combinator Partner Jared Friedman to the office for a conversation with the team, where he shared lessons on building enduring companies, navigating growth, and what he’s seeing across the YC ecosystem. It was a great opportunity for the team to ask questions and hear firsthand from one of the people helping shape the next generation of startups.

The office was also at peak Corgi capacity, with all three office dogs making an appearance. Between meetings, they kept morale high, made the rounds for treats, and reminded everyone why they’re the unofficial faces of the company.

We also announced the launch of the Corgi Artist Residency, a new program based out of Corgi Cafe that supports artists, illustrators, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and other creatives working at the intersection of technology and culture. The residency gives creators a place to work, connect with the community, and bring new ideas to life, with applications now open for the inaugural cohort.

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

New Funding Updates

Fluidstack: $830 million Series A. A New York-based AI infrastructure startup that builds and operates gigawatt-scale data centers for frontier AI labs, valuing the company at $7.5 billion. The round which had closed in January but was only confirmed publicly this week was led by Situational Awareness, the investment firm founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner (SiliconANGLE, 2026).

Meshy: ~$400 million Series B. A Silicon Valley-based company building foundation models for AI-powered 3D generation, valuing the company at $1.5 billion the largest round to date in AI 3D. The round included participation from IDG Capital, Matrix Partners China, Monolith Management, Granite Asia, Sequoia China, BAI Capital, and Source Code Capital (PR Newswire, 2026).

CuspAI: $450 million Series B. A Cambridge, UK-based AI materials discovery startup building a platform to identify new materials for semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with participation from Jeff Bezos’s family office, valuing the company at $2.6 billion (Coulter, 2026).

Sila: $300 million private equity round. An Alameda, California-based battery materials company expanding U.S. production of its silicon-carbon anode technology, Titan Silicon. The round was led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and T. Rowe Price-advised funds (Metz, 2026).

Augustus: $180 million Series B. A New York-based fintech building a “Global Dollar Bank” to give international fintechs and banks direct access to dollar accounts and clearing rails. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hummingbird, QED, and founders from Nubank, Ramp, and Revolut, bringing total funding to $210 million and valuing the company at $1 billion.

Thinking Machines Lab: $2 billion seed round. A San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, focused on developing multimodal frontier AI systems. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, Cisco Investments, AMD Ventures, and Jane Street, valuing the company at approximately $12 billion, making it the largest seed financing in startup history.

Base Power: $200 million Series B. An Austin-based energy technology company building distributed residential battery systems and virtual power plants to strengthen the electric grid. The financing was led by Addition with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners.

LMArena: $100 million seed round. A San Francisco-based AI model evaluation platform that powers Chatbot Arena, the widely used benchmark for comparing large language models. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and UC Investments, valuing the company at roughly $600 million.

Fervo Energy: $206 million in project financing. A Houston-based geothermal energy startup developing next-generation enhanced geothermal power plants. The funding will support expansion of its Cape Station project in Utah, one of the world’s largest enhanced geothermal developments.

What’s Been Going On?

Glow, a Palo Alto and Tel Aviv-based AI-native endpoint security startup founded in 2025 by former Meta VP Roi Tiger, emerged from stealth with $180 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

Humanoid, a UK-based robotics company, raised $152 million at a $1.35 billion valuation, positioning itself as one of Europe’s newest humanoid robotics unicorns amid growing competition from Germany’s Neura Robotics and Barcelona’s THEKER.

Natural, a San Francisco-based payments startup building Stripe-style infrastructure for AI agent transactions, raised a $30 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures just 193 days after launch, bringing total funding to over $40 million.

Omio, a Berlin-based multimodal travel platform, secured a $10 million strategic investment from Granite-Integral to expand its AI technology hub in Singapore and grow across Japan and Southeast Asia.

References

Coulter, M. (2026, July 20). CuspAI lands $450m round to accelerate AI materials discovery. Sifted. https://sifted.eu/articles/cuspai-lands-450m-round-to-accelerate-ai-materials-discovery

Gurman, M. (2026, July 14). OpenAI’s first device will be movable, screenless speaker built as AI companion. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/openai-s-first-device-will-be-moveable-screenless-speaker-built-as-ai-companion

Metz, R. (2026, July 21). Bucking EV slowdown, Sila raises $300M to expand battery materials factory. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/bucking-ev-slowdown-sila-raises-300m-to-expand-battery-materials-factory/

PR Newswire. (2026, July 21). Meshy raises nearly $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the largest round to date in AI 3D. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meshy-raises-nearly-400-million-at-a-1-5-billion-valuation-the-largest-round-to-date-in-ai-3d-302828384.html

Reuters. (2026, July 18). China’s DeepSeek to raise fresh capital at $74 billion valuation ahead of onshore IPO, sources say. https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/chinas-deepseek-to-raise-fresh-capital-at-74-billion-valuation-ahead-of-onshore-ipo-sources-say-4799575

SiliconANGLE. (2026, July 21). AI data center builder Fluidstack raises $830M at $7.5B valuation. https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/21/ai-data-center-builder-fluidstack-raises-830m-7-5b-valuation/

Wiggers, K. (2026, July 16). China’s Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever, rivaling top U.S. systems. VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/technology/chinas-moonshot-ai-releases-kimi-k3-the-largest-open-source-model-ever-rivaling-top-u-s-systems

Events July 25th - August 1st

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

7/25

Build Fast. Launch Loud. Prompt Driven Hackathon: https://luma.com/1c8vmqyr

YC AI Startup School Afterparty: https://luma.com/m4ez9liu

7/26

Robotics x Physical AI Founder - Investor Summit: https://luma.com/u8j9b0a6

JacHacks San Francisco: https://luma.com/9x1573sw

7/27

Corgi Cafe Co-op: https://luma.com/5w78yjyy

7/28

Devin for Startups Kickoff: https://luma.com/devin-for-startups

7/29

Customer Obsession in the AI Era ft. Granola: https://luma.com/oup51oya

7/30

Founders & Funders: The Odyssey Private Screening with M12: https://luma.com/b7p1jvgy

Scaling revenue at Stripe and Vercel with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel): https://luma.com/7h2hjufc

Built Different: Auth0 x Stripe Hackathon: https://luma.com/builtdifferent-auth0-stripe

Building Decagon from 0 to 1:https://luma.com/dgbo2kus

OpenAI Codex Community Meetup-San Francisco #8: https://luma.com/h5x0pzw9

7/31

Palo Alto, CA - Deep Tech Connections Networking Breakfast: https://luma.com/Palo-Alto-July

Tech Roast SF: Comedians Roast Techies: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tech-roast-sf-comedians-roast-techies-tickets-1992775092947

8/1

Agentic AI Summit: https://luma.com/agentic-ai-summit

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

AI Deployment Engineer, Global Affairs @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-deployment-engineer-global-affairs/10274591

AI Accelerator Lead @ Vercel – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-accelerator-lead/10288811

AI Governance Sr Associate @ PWC – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-governance-sr-associate/10231234

Software Engineer, AI Platform @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ai-platform/10176477

AI Native Software Engineer - Products @ Accenture – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-native-software-engineer-products/10275630

GTM

Product Communications Manager, OSS @ Vercel – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/product-communications-manager-oss/10293122

Program Manager, GTM Systems @ Anthropic – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/program-manager-gtm-systems/10264124

Director, Cloud GTM Strategy - Agentforce @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/director-cloud-gtm-strategy-agentforce/10263785

Sr. Compensation Manager GTM @ Databricks – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sr-compensation-manager-gtm/10196069

VP, AI Marketing Strategy @ MongDB – Palo Alto/ SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/vp-ai-marketing-strategy/10272332

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 16

Corgi Times — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:34:00 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

First up: Trudy raced at the Alameda County Fair this past Sunday, representing Corgi in style (she didn’t win, but she looked great doing it).

In bigger news, Corgi is expanding into trucking insurance. We’re bringing fleets faster quotes, smoother claims, and fairer pricing, backed by underwriters with over 30 years of trucking experience. We’re also partnering with AtoB to make getting and managing coverage even easier.

@UseCorgi is excited to expand into trucking insurance.\n\nThe U.S. freight trucking industry is projected to be as large as $906B in 2026, yet it is one of the most underserved segments within commercial insurance.\n\nPrior to Corgi, trucking companies had to wait days (or ","username":"nico_laqua","name":"nico laqua","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2060893912966033408/nVnszuYQ_normal.jpg","date":"2026-07-13T20:53:24.000Z","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GL0X!,w_1028,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/l_play_button_usfui2,w_88,e_colorize:0/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F__ss-rehost__tw-video-preview-13_2076771905080786944.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/Bv8IYK9AlH"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":47,"retweet_count":27,"like_count":296,"impression_count":80053,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2076771905080786944/vid/avc1/1280x720/weY75ywX1eC8WFA6.mp4","video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

We’re also gearing up behind the bar: five new drink partners, Capy.ai, Eragon, zerohash, ngrok, and Plain, all launch August 1st. If your sleeves, drink R&D, or menu graphics aren’t locked in yet, now’s the time.

The Corgi team keeps growing right alongside us, spanning insurance, AI, finance, media, and our various initiatives, and now a second city. If building something ambitious sounds like your kind of challenge, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here:
https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. Apple sues OpenAI, alleging a “coordinated” scheme to steal hardware trade secrets.

Apple filed suit against OpenAI, its Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan, former engineer Chang Liu, and io Products in the Northern District of California on July 10, accusing them of systematically extracting confidential designs, manufacturing processes, and supply-chain data behind OpenAI’s unreleased consumer hardware (Perez, 2026). The company alleges Liu kept an Apple-issued laptop after leaving for OpenAI and used it to download dozens of confidential hardware files, while Tan allegedly used insider knowledge from his 24 years at Apple to recruit staff and extract product details during interviews. OpenAI has not yet responded to the specific claims, and the case lands just as it complicates the company’s plans for a highly anticipated IPO.

2. OpenAI and xAI stage dueling flagship launches on the same day, escalating the model wars.

On July 9, OpenAI released its GPT-5.6 family alongside ChatGPT Work, a new agentic product that opens a user’s local files, edits Workspace and Microsoft 365 documents, and carries multi-step tasks to completion, while xAI launched Grok 4.5 the same morning, priced competitively and built partly on Cursor’s codebase following SpaceXAI’s acquisition of the startup (Paramkusham, 2026). The dueling releases come as Chinese open-weight labs continue closing the capability gap at a fraction of the cost, with models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Zhipu, and Alibaba now occupying most of the top open-weight rankings globally.

3. SK Hynix debuts on the Nasdaq in the largest ADR offering in Wall Street history.

The South Korean memory-chip maker began trading under the ticker SKHY on July 10, raising roughly $26.5 billion in the largest U.S. share sale ever completed by a foreign company, surpassing Alibaba’s 2014 debut (Tolomia, 2026). SK Hynix said the proceeds will fund manufacturing expansion in South Korea and EUV lithography equipment, and the listing is aimed at closing a long-standing valuation gap with U.S. rival Micron as demand for the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI systems continues to outstrip supply.

New Funding Updates

SambaNova Systems: $1 billion Series F. A Palo Alto-based developer of AI chips and enterprise AI infrastructure for training and inference workloads, led by General Atlantic at an $11 billion post-money valuation, one of two deals tied for the largest round of the week (van Romburgh, 2026).

Keyfactor: $1 billion private equity round. An Independence, Ohio-based provider of digital identity and machine identity management software that helps enterprises secure certificates, encryption keys, and connected devices, led by Summit Partners (van Romburgh, 2026).

Norm AI: $120 million Series C. A New York-based AI regulatory compliance platform that translates complex laws and regulations into software to automate enterprise compliance workflows, led by Khosla Ventures at a reported $1.2 billion valuation, with New York Life Insurance among the backers (van Romburgh, 2026).

Prime Intellect: $130 million Series A. A San Francisco-based open platform for training and deploying AI models across distributed compute networks, led by Radical Ventures with backing from Nvidia, Dell Technologies Capital, and Intel Capital (van Romburgh, 2026).

What’s Been Going On?

Ollama, a Palo Alto-based developer platform for running open-weight AI models locally, raised $65 million in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures, with Benchmark, 8VC, and YCombinator participating, bringing total funding to $88 million (Prabhu, 2026).

Gradium, a Paris-based voice AI startup spun out of research lab Kyutai by the co-creators of EnCodec and Moshi, extended its seed round to $100 million with Nvidia joining as a new investor, following a $70 million first tranche led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo (Dimri, 2026).

Oxylabs, a Vilnius-based web data infrastructure company, raised $130 million from Warburg Pincus at a $3.6 billion valuation, its first outside funding in a decade, making it Lithuania’s second most valuable private company (Chesnokova, 2026).

Acurio, Europe’s only VC fund focused on secondaries, closed a €115 million fund, surpassing its target (Chesnokova, 2026).

Events July 18th - July 25th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

7/19

Stanford x DeepMind Hackathon: Build. Ship. Win up to $5M in Seed Funding*: https://luma.com/e51fygtm

Ladies Tea Party: Female Founders in Tech: https://luma.com/8qzm1ow4

7/20

Cafe Cursor San Francisco: Startup Edition: https://luma.com/cafe-cursor-sf-startups

7/21

OpenAI Build Week Community Meetup - San Francisco: https://luma.com/codex-meetup-convex-jul21-2026

vLLM x Crusoe Meetup: Production Open Source Inference: https://luma.com/vLLM-Meetups?e=evt-BXcad0jDa2Rgmib

7/22

OGC IRL Coffee Meetup: https://luma.com/ogc-jj2y

Dwarkesh Unplugged, presented by WorkOS: https://luma.com/f28a739d

7/23

OpenAI Builder Lounge SF with Parallel: https://luma.com/openai-builderlounge-sf-july23-2026

Hardware Pitch Night - Summertime Showcase!: https://luma.com/lzy8pkq4

July Tech Rooftop Mixer: https://luma.com/foundersocialclub?e=evt-aZhDVElqL8bYeba

7/24

Agent Swarms Hackathon: https://luma.com/swarmhack

Community Dinner: GTM @The Residency: https://luma.com/a70q0s2e

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

AI success engineer @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7cd8205b-fd73-4af1-9103-1b1fed3b0c22/application?utm_source=8Jq3QyqAGm&source=LinkedIn

Senior Lead AI Engineer (MLX, Agentic AI, Gen AI platform Services) @ Capital One – SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-lead-ai-engineer-mlx-agentic-ai-gen-ai-platform-services/10157011

Technical Enablement Lead, Claude Platform @Anthropic

SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5311465008?gh_src=LinkedIn

Associate, Software Engineer, Applications @ BlackRock – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/associate-software-engineer-applications/10137250

Machine Learning Engineer, Level 3 @ Snap Inc. – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://wd1.myworkdaysite.com/en-US/recruiting/snapchat/snap/job/Palo-Alto-California/Machine-Learning-Engineer--Level-3_Q326SWEML1?source=LinkedIn

GTM

GTM Strategy & Operations, Strategic Programs @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/fc999234-93e6-4dbc-bf89-64ca7fb08e22/application?utm_source=8Jq3QyqAGm&source=LinkedIn

GTM Systems Engineer, Salesforce @ Ramp – – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-systems-engineer-salesforce/10146461

GTM Engineer @ Handshake – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://joinhandshake.com/careers/job/?ashby_jid=bb7eeb0b-5114-496f-925e-a790b162c3e4&utm_source=4xDZ2XYAXn

Head of GTM FP&A @ Canva – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Canva/6000000001224932-head-of-gtm-fp-a?trid=2d92f286-613b-4daf-9dfa-6340ffbecf73

Senior Marketing Scientist, Level 4 @ Snap Inc. – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-marketing-scientist-level-4/10168582

References

Chesnokova, S. (2026, July 10). Oxylabs becomes Lithuania’s second most valuable private company at $3.6B. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/oxylabs-130m-warburg-pincus-3-6b-valuation/

Chesnokova, S. (2026, July 13). Acurio, Europe’s only VC fund focused on secondaries, closed a €115M fund, surpassing its target. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/acurio-115m-europe-vc-secondaries-fund/

Dimri, A. (2026, July 10). NVIDIA backs the French researchers who built voice AI’s foundations at $100M, 7 months after launch. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/gradium-100m-seed-nvidia-voice-ai-kyutai/

Paramkusham, S. (2026, July 13). Top 10 AI news July 13 2026: Musk vs Altman and more. Unrot. https://unrot.co/blogs/today-top-10-ai-news-july-13-2026

Perez, S. (2026, July 10). Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-over-alleged-trade-secret-theft/

Prabhu, A. (2026, July 10). 14 employees, 8.9M developers: Ollama raises $65M to become AI’s platform layer. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/14-employees-8-9m-developers-ollama-raises-65m-to-become-ais-platform-layer/

Tolomia, C. (2026, July 10). SK Hynix Nasdaq debut: $26.5 billion ADR listing sets record. Quartz. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/sk-hynix-nasdaq-debut-26-113118390.html

van Romburgh, M. (2026, July 10). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: A pair of billion-dollar deals for cyber and AI infrastructure lead. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/biggest-funding-rounds-billion-dollar-cyber-ai-keyfactor-sambanova/

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 15

Corgi Times — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:22:28 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

This week in the office, we welcomed Hamilton to our NYC team. We also celebrated the Fourth of July with the team, Trudy included (see below).

The Corgi team keeps growing right alongside us, spanning insurance, AI, finance, media, and our various initiatives. If building something ambitious sounds like your kind of challenge, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here:

https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Shoutout to all our sponsors at the cafe!

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. Researchers document the first fully autonomous, AI-run ransomware attack.

Cloud security firm Sysdig published its analysis of “JADEPUFFER,” an operation it says was driven end-to-end by a large language model, from initial access through a Langflow vulnerability to credential theft, lateral movement, and a full database-extortion attack (Sysdig, 2026). The clearest evidence was the payloads themselves: self-narrating code littered with natural-language reasoning about targeting priority, plus real-time error correction, including one sequence where the agent diagnosed and fixed a failed login in 31 seconds. The attack didn’t use any new exploits, just old, unpatched vulnerabilities automated at machine speed. Sysdig frames it less as a crisis and more as a preview of where ransomware is headed.

2. Sam Altman pitches OpenAI as core U.S. AI infrastructure as Anthropic overtakes it on revenue.

Anthropic has passed OpenAI in self-reported annualized revenue, roughly $47 billion versus OpenAI’s $25-33 billion range, and is gaining ground on user numbers too, driven largely by enterprise adoption (Bove, 2026). In response, Altman is pushing a “new world order” framing for OpenAI, including a proposed government equity stake and deeper integration with U.S. defense infrastructure, arguing that OpenAI’s commercial success and American strategic interests are inseparable.

3. The UN opens its first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, with scientists warning of “catastrophic harm.”

Delegates from 169 countries convened in Geneva this week for the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, mandated by a UN General Assembly resolution and running alongside the ITU AI for Good Summit and the first meeting of the UN’s AI for Good Global Commission (UN News, 2026). Scientific Panel co-chair Yoshua Bengio said AI is now outpacing both scientific understanding and governments’ ability to adapt, while journalist Maria Ressa warned of an “information Armageddon” if AI-accelerated disinformation continues to erode public trust.

New Funding Updates

Joulent: $1.75 billion strategic investment. A Houston-based provider of energy infrastructure built for the demands of AI and other compute-intensive industries, backed by National Grid through its National Grid Ventures arm. The largest round of the week by a wide margin (Glasner, 2026).

Together AI: $800 million Series C. A San Francisco-based developer of infrastructure for companies running open source AI models, led by Aramco Ventures, setting an $8.3 billion post-money valuation (Glasner, 2026).

Taktile: $110 million Series C. A New York-based agentic decision platform for banks and insurers, automating loan approvals, fraud triage, claims processing, and onboarding while preserving human oversight and audit trails, led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives (Tech Startups, 2026).

Even Realities Technology: $150 million pre-Series B. A Shenzhen-based AI hardware and wearables company, led by Meituan with participation from Tencent (Tech Startups, 2026).

What’s Been Going On?

Bespoke Labs, a San Francisco-based developer of AI agent evaluation and reinforcement learning infrastructure, raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Wing VC, with participation from Mayfield and The House Fund (Tech Startups, 2026).

Zeroth, a developer of humanoid robotics systems, raised approximately $73.6 million in Series A funding led by Ant Group (Tech Startups, 2026).

Yingzhi XBOT, a developer of robotics and AI systems, raised $56 million in Series B funding (Tech Startups, 2026).

LinqAlpha, a developer of agentic AI for market intelligence, raised $22 million in Series A funding (Tech Startups, 2026).

Luxonis, a developer of AI perception hardware and software for robotics and industrial automation, raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Denali Growth Partners (Tech Startups, 2026).

Beeline Medicines, a Boston-based startup developing precision therapies for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, secured $126 million in Series A extension funding backed by Bain Capital, CPP Investments, and Bristol-Myers Squibb (Glasner, 2026).

Twelve Labs, a San Francisco-based developer of AI systems trained on video archives, raised $100 million in Series B funding co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Naver Ventures (Glasner, 2026).

Venice, a Sheridan, Wyoming-based platform enabling private, surveillance-free access to AI models, secured $65 million in Series A funding led by Dragonfly, setting a $1 billion valuation (Glasner, 2026).

Events July 11th - July 18th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

Title event: Luma link

7/11

Night Hack by Founders, Inc: https://luma.com/nighthack

Women Who Lift: https://luma.com/8g1sn3fh

World’s Largest Hermes Buildathon: https://luma.com/hermesbuildathonsf

7/12

Show & Tell: AI for GTM @Notion with Baseten, Cognition and Samsara: https://luma.com/b8ie1m1s

How to Break into SF as an Immigrant Founder: https://luma.com/3ilro47w

7/13

Researcher Game Night - Applied Compute: https://luma.com/09gobnrc

Holo AI Night w/ NVIDIA & Black Forest Labs: https://luma.com/o5xmousw

7/14

Show & Tell: AI for GTM @Notion with Baseten, Cognition, Cresta and Samsara: https://luma.com/b8ie1m1s

Rippling x Corgi Founder Live Pitch Night ft Redpoint Ventures & Battery Ventures: https://luma.com/rippling-0d7f

7/15

Battle of the Paddles: AI Builders Edition: https://luma.com/j7v7qeem

ITCH - Businesses share what needs to be built: https://luma.com/zwmgi7l9

7/16

ElevenLabs x Sauna Hack Night: https://luma.com/elevenlabs-sauna-jul16

Design Meetup x Google Sunnyvale, CA: At Scale: https://luma.com/b6gce78l

Qualcomm Arduino Uno Q Hack Night: https://luma.com/qualcomm-arduino-hack-night-jul16

7/17

Sports World Cup Hackathon: https://luma.com/ai-pq8b

Loop Engineering Hackathon: https://luma.com/loophack

7/18

CSI Hacks: https://luma.com/ptgsw4bj

AI Valley x Pet Zen Dog-a-thon: https://luma.com/rklrsomo

DeepLearning.AI Voice AI Hackathon: The Complete Trip, powered by Sabre and Vocal Bridge: https://luma.com/fmypremp

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Cursor, Plaid, and Town

Hope everyone had an amazing Fourth of July! Now back to our regular programming…

4 months ago · 9 likes · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Early Career @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-early-career/10072480

Principal Software Engineer: Distributed Systems @Cloudfare – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/principal-software-engineer-distributed-systems-config-test-deployment/10033868

Lead Software Engineer, Back End (Python, Spark) @Capital One– SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer-back-end-python-spark/10026369

Lead Software Engineer @ WellsFargo – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer-001875/10026122

GTM

VP/DIR, US iShares Factor Product Strategist@Blackrock – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/vp-dir-us-ishares-factor-product-strategist/10083857

Product Marketing Manager@ Mongo Db – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/product-marketing-manager/10034877

Senior Manager, Product Management - Ad Formats @ Snapchat – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-manager-product-management-ad-formats/10044959

Business Development Manager, Product & Platform@ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/business-development-manager-product-platform/10034532

News References

Bove, T. (2026, July 2). Sam Altman seeks new world order for AI as OpenAI slowly loses ground to Google and Anthropic. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/07/02/sam-altman-new-world-order-ai-openai-google-anthropic/

Glasner, J. (2026, July 2). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: AI, energy and biotech lead the way. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-ai-energy-biotech-joulent/

Sysdig. (2026, July). JADEPUFFER: Agentic ransomware for automated database extortion. https://www.sysdig.com/blog/jadepuffer-agentic-ransomware-for-automated-database-extortion

Tech Startups. (2026, July 6). Venture capital & startup funding roundup, July 6, 2026. https://techstartups.com/2026/07/06/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-july-6-2026/

UN News. (2026, July 6). Global push for AI governance amid warnings of “catastrophic harm.” https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1167862

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 14

Corgi Times — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 01:00:38 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Corgi Times newsletter.

Big news out of Corgi HQ this week: we officially expanded the Corgi Cafe to Atlanta!

It’s our very first cafe outside SF, and it’s about bringing the same energy we’ve built here, the coffee, the conversations, the drop-ins from founders and investors, to Georgia’s growing startup scene at the Atlanta Tech Village.

"The next billion dollar company will start as a back of the napkin idea at the Corgi Cafe," said Brooke LeBlanc, Head of Community at Corgi. "To make sure that's true, the Corgi Cafe is coming to a city near you. We are expanding far beyond San Francisco to become a third place for operators, investors, builders, and founders no matter your zip code."

In other news, the team at Corgi continues to grow. As we expand across insurance, AI, finance, media, and our initiatives, and now into a second city, we’re looking for ambitious builders who want to help shape what’s next. If you’ve ever thought about joining us, now is a great time to take a look at our open roles: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Thanks so much to our drink sponsors for supporting Corgi:

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. US lifts export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5, ending a two-week standoff.

The Commerce Department told Anthropic late Tuesday it was lifting the export controls placed on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 12, which had suspended both models for all users worldwide because Anthropic had no real-time way to verify nationality. Anthropic says Fable 5 is rolling back out starting today, July 1, across the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, with access via AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry still being restored. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the two weeks were spent confirming the model’s “alignment” with US interests. Anthropic says it will now scale up government collaboration, including a proposed industry-wide framework for scoring jailbreak severity alongside Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Sources:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/us-lift-export-controls-key-anthropic-models/414561/

2. Google’s AI coding pivot triggers a research exodus to Anthropic and OpenAI, wiping out $270B in market value.

Just days after Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI on June 18, three more Google DeepMind researchers announced they’re heading to Anthropic: John Jumper, the 2024 Nobel laureate behind AlphaFold, plus Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both former AlphaFold collaborators. Six senior researchers have now left DeepMind for rivals in five months. Alphabet’s stock dropped over 5% in a single session, and the week’s losses topped $270B in market cap. Google is now expanding its “coding strike team” into model midtraining, an attempt to close what its own CFO has acknowledged is a real gap with Anthropic.

Sources:

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319219/20260628/google-deepminds-coding-pivot-lost-six-researchers-meta-openai-anthropic.htm

https://easternherald.com/2026/06/26/google-deepmind-anthropic-ai-talent-exodus-alphabet/

3. China’s Meituan open-sources a 1.6 trillion parameter model trained entirely without Nvidia chips.

Best known as China’s food delivery giant, Meituan released LongCat-2.0 on June 30, a 1.6T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1 million token context window. The company says it’s the first model of this scale trained end to end, both pretraining and inference, on a 50,000-chip domestic cluster with zero Nvidia hardware involved. The model quietly ran on OpenRouter under the codename “Owl Alpha” for two months before Meituan revealed its identity. It’s now open-sourced under an MIT license.

Sources:

https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/30/chinas-meituan-open-sources-massive-longcat-2-0-ai-model-saying-trained-domestic-chips/

https://thenextweb.com/news/chinas-meituan-says-its-new-ai-model-was-trained-on-domestic-chips

New Funding Updates

LeapXpert: $180M growth investment. A governed enterprise communications platform that captures and structures business conversations across WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS, and Signal for compliance and AI use, led by Riverwood Capital with continuing backer Portage Ventures. Used by hundreds of organizations across financial services, government, and the Forbes Global 2000 (Tech Startups).

Source: https://techstartups.com/2026/06/30/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-30-2026/

Higharc: $95M Series C. An AI-powered design-to-construction platform for homebuilders, led by Insight Partners with Wellington Management, Fifth Wall, Spark Capital, and Lux Capital. Brings total funding to over $170M, paired with a new partnership with US LBM to bring AI estimating into building-materials supply chains (Tech Startups).

Source: https://techstartups.com/2026/06/30/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-30-2026/

Stathera: $55M Series B. A Montreal-based silicon timing company building MEMS-based clock components for AI data centers, led by Maverick Silicon with Celesta Capital and BDC Capital. Brings total funding to $75M, funding mass production of its second-generation chips and a new Silicon Valley office (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/omen-ai-raises-31m-in-series-a-funding.html

Omen AI: $31M Series A. A San Francisco company building continuous fluid-analysis sensors that monitor wear and degradation in data-center and industrial machinery in real time, led by Nava Ventures with CRV, Mann+Hummel, and Sheryl Sandberg. Brings total funding to $41.5M, with deployments already covering 10 to 14 gigawatts of data-center capacity (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/omen-ai-raises-31m-in-series-a-funding.html

What’s Been Going On?

8090 Labs, a developer of an AI-enabled software factory for enterprise coding in regulated industries, raised $135 million in Series A funding led by Salesforce Ventures. Founder Chamath Palihapitiya is stepping in as CEO (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/8090-labs-raises-135m-in-series-a-funding.html

Alan, a Paris-based developer of an AI-native health insurance and digital healthcare platform, raised €480 million in funding at a €5.5 billion valuation (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/alan-raises-e480m-in-funding-at-e5-5-billion-valuation.html

Stark, a Berlin-based developer of autonomous defense systems and air and surface attack drones, closed a €500 million funding round at a €3 billion valuation (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/stark-closes-e500m-funding-round-at-e3-billion-valuation.html

X Square Robot, a Shenzhen-based developer of end-to-end embodied artificial intelligence systems, closed four funding rounds ending in a Series C at over a $2.8 billion valuation (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/x-square-robot-closes-four-funding-rounds-ending-in-series-c-at-over-us2-8-billion-valuation.html

Straiker, a developer of an agentic security platform that discovers, tests, and protects enterprise AI agents, raised $64 million in Series A funding co-led by Marathon Management Partners, Citi Ventures, Illuminate Financial, and Workday Ventures. Brings total funding to $85 million (Tech Startups).

Source: https://techstartups.com/2026/06/29/straiker-raises-64m-series-a-as-enterprises-rush-to-secure-ai-agents/

Jupus, a Cologne-based developer of an AI-driven legal secretarial and automated intake platform, raised €13 million in Series A funding (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/jupus-raises-e13m-in-series-a-funding.html

Vanna Health, a San Francisco-based developer of a value-based health technology platform, raised $17 million in funding (FinSMEs).

Source:

https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/vanna-health-raises-17m-in-funding.html

GenerativeX, a San Francisco-based agentic AI startup, raised $4 million in Series A funding (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/generativex-raises-4m-in-series-a-funding.html

Nebex, a market infrastructure platform for the global space economy, raised $30 million in seed funding led by Google Ventures (FinTech Global).

Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/30/straiker-raises-64m-to-lock-down-the-ai-agent-era/

Omen AI, a San Francisco-based provider of continuous fluid-analysis sensors for data center and industrial machine health, raised $31 million in Series A funding led by Nava Ventures. Brings total funding to $41.5 million (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/omen-ai-raises-31m-in-series-a-funding.html

Events July 4th - July 11th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

7/4

YC S26 Welcoming ft. Userlens x The Prompting Company: https://luma.com/vr6vru9v

7/5

Open Studios: Clothing Swap & Headshots for Women & Femmes:https://luma.com/4j0nln17

7/7

Hack with Bay 3.0: https://luma.com/sv61aqlg

7/8

Agents in Production: GTM agents demo night: https://luma.com/scalekit-r6yg

Edgem8: B2B Partnership Mixer: https://luma.com/edgem8

7/9

135th SF Hardware Meetup @ Antler VC | Demo Night: https://luma.com/bo58tyyg

The GTM Summit for Founders, Investors, and Creators: https://luma.com/f2dj3o25

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Revolut, Radiant, and OpenRouter

Build -1 → 0…

4 months ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Software Engineering

US Tech - AI Product Senior Associate @ PWC – SF/others, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/jobs?search=tech&city=San+Francisco&state=California&country=USA&allLocations=true

Software Engineer, Data Product Platform @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-data-product-platform/9965438

Software Engineer, Developer Experience, Go Lead @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-developer-experience-go-lead/9872402

Software Engineer 3, Query Integration@ MongoDB – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-3-query-integration/9883398

GTM

Principal Strategy Manager, Developer GTM Growth @ Cloudfare, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/principal-strategy-manager-developer-gtm-growth/9966885

GTM, Emerging Products@ Cursor, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-emerging-products/9925265

Sales Director, Account Executives, Strategic @ Atlassian, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sales-director-account-executives-strategic/10018136

Enterprise Sales Manager | Housing @ Elise AI, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/enterprise-sales-manager-housing/9971989

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 13

Corgi Times — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:36:34 GMT

Welcome back to another edition of Corgi Times.

There’s a history lesson worth knowing: in 1686, a London coffee house called Lloyd’s opened its doors to sailors, merchants, and shipowners. People gathered, shared information, built trust and out of that community grew what became Lloyd’s of London, one of the most enduring insurance institutions in the world.

Three hundred and forty years later, Corgi is building the same thing.

We’re an AI insurance carrier and a 24/7 cafe that acts as a community space. Weekly we welcome hundreds of founders, investors and builders at our location on 9 Claude Lane.

At Corgi, we’re excited to welcome Trevor Owens as our new Head of Cafe Expansion.

As we prepare to open the next 100 Corgi Cafes across the world, Trevor will be leading the charge to bring our community of founders, operators, investors, and builders to cities across the country.

Speaking of cafe, thank you and shoutout to all of our drink sponsors at Corgi Cafe!

As always, we’re growing and hiring across insurance, AI, finance, media, and our cafe initiatives. https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into the news.

Recent News

1. OpenAI poaches Google’s Gemini co-lead, the co-inventor of the modern AI era just days before its IPO.

Noam Shazeer, VP of Engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini models, announced on June 18 that he is leaving for OpenAI. Shazeer is a co-author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture that every major AI model today — including Gemini, GPT, and Claude — is built on. Google paid an estimated $2.7B to bring him back from Character.AI less than two years ago. He joins OpenAI as Lead for Architecture Research, with the company days away from filing its IPO S-1. Sam Altman said it only “took 10 years” to make it happen.

Sources:

https://theplanettools.ai/blog/noam-shazeer-leaves-google-gemini-joins-openai-2026

https://mlq.ai/news/openai-hires-transformer-co-inventor-noam-shazeer-away-from-google-deepmind/

2. Oracle cut 21,000 jobs this year and put AI in the SEC filing as the reason.

Oracle’s FY2026 annual report, filed June 22, disclosed that its global headcount dropped from 162,000 to 141,000 — a 13% reduction — with the company explicitly stating that AI deployment “has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” Most companies avoid that language. Oracle wrote it into a federal filing. On the other side of the ledger: capex surged 162% to $55.7B, almost entirely for AI data centers, producing negative free cash flow of $23.7B. The bet backing it all is a five-year, $300B data center deal with OpenAI under Project Stargate. Remaining performance obligations hit $638B — up 363% year-over-year.

Sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-21000.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22/oracle-layoffs-fueled-by-ai-reduces-workforce-by-21-000

3. Baseten raises $1.5B at a $13B valuation, making the case that AI infrastructure is the real prize.

The AI model deployment startup closed one of the largest infrastructure rounds of the year, led by Sands Capital and Wellington Management with participation from Blackbird VC. Baseten helps companies run, customize, and scale AI models in production — a layer that’s become critical as enterprises move past experimentation. The company reported 20x revenue growth over the past year. The raise signals a broader market shift: as frontier model access commoditizes, the companies that win may be the ones making deployment cheaper, faster, and more controllable for everyone else.

Sources:

https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/top-tech-news-today-june-23-2026/
https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-23-2026/

New Funding Updates

Upscale AI: $190M Series A-1 at a $2B valuation. A pure-play AI networking infrastructure company building open-standard alternatives to proprietary interconnects for large AI clusters, led by Premji Invest with participation from NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and Temasek. Brings total funding to $500M (FinSMEs).

https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/upscale-ai-raises-190-in-series-a-1-funding.html

Peregrine Technologies: $250M Series D at a $6.8B valuation. A government and enterprise AI operations platform that unifies siloed data for public safety and emergency response decision-making, backed by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Fifth Down Capital (Tech Startups).

https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-23-2026/

Stark: €500M. A Berlin-based defense-tech and autonomous drone systems startup, just two years after launch, led by Sequoia, Founders Fund, and the NATO Innovation Fund one of the largest European defense-tech raises ever (Tech Startups).

https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-23-2026/

Cadence: $100M Series C. A clinical AI company managing chronic care for older adults across major U.S. health systems, led by Spark Capital with Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Coatue. Now active with 100,000+ patients and tripled ARR in 2025 (Business Wire).

https://www.businesswire.com/newsroom/subject/funding

What’s Been Going On?

Partly, a developer of AI foundation models for the automotive repair supply chain, raised a $50 million Series B at a $500 million valuation led by DST Global.

Allium, a provider of a blockchain data platform for enterprises, raised $40 million in Series B funding.

Isometric, a developer of an AI-powered industrial certification and compliance validation platform, raised $40 million in Series A funding.

Osanni Bio, a San Francisco-based development-stage therapeutics platform, raised $190 million in Series B funding led by Patient Square Capital.

Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing neuroprotective small molecule therapies for neurological diseases, raised $73.8 million in Series B funding led by The Column Group.

Orthogonal, a developer of a discovery, orchestration, and payments layer for AI agents, raised $4.3 million in Seed funding.

Tugboat Solutions, a developer of an AI-powered consumer insurance claims analysis platform, raised $3 million in Seed funding led by ResilienceVC.

Turbo Law, a developer of an automated litigation intelligence and file structure platform for insurance carriers and defense law firms, raised $3.8 million in Seed funding led by Revo Capital.

Katalyst Space, a space tech company developing robotic spacecraft for in-orbit satellite servicing and upgrades, raised $12 million in funding led by Geodesic Capital.

Solar Landscape, a provider of a platform for distributed energy infrastructure, raised funding in a round announced June 23.

Events June 26th - July 3rd

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

6/26

Fusion Energy Landscape:https://luma.com/0cndd3en

Sentry x GLITCHED & GGWP - Women in Game Dev Meetup: https://luma.com/dqsp2d17

Game night – The Collective: https://luma.com/x5mp4uwx

6/27

CSI Hacks: https://luma.com/ptgsw4bj

Building in SF - Summer Drinks: https://luma.com/aozd7n09

Claude Code for beginners: https://luma.com/claude-code-for-beginners

6/28

Tech World Cup + Founder Watch Party: https://luma.com/20t26nze

6/29

AI Engineer World’s Fair: https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026?utm_source=luma

6/29 – 7/2

Cafe Compute: Multi Modal Edition https://luma.com/deepmind?e=evt-iABhD9SX5fznz8y

6/30

Flint x Google: Ads Agent Launch: https://luma.com/nu6v7534

Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung): https://luma.com/extraordinarydinnersf?utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-june-22nd&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com (he gave corgi a shoutout b4 but he’s hosting it w rho)

Future Code: Rewriting the Developer Frontier: https://luma.com/FutureCodeFrontier

7/1

Grace Gong x Chargebee dinner [Venture with Grace CEO Club]: https://luma.com/ponotbv7

What open agents can actually do: a happy hour with Together AI & NVIDIA: https://luma.com/AIEWF-OpenAgentsMeetup

7/2

{AI} in Production: https://luma.com/5kvakl4z

AI Engineer Trivia Night: https://luma.com/k9z2sucw

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Anduril, Carta, and Waymo

Build -1 → 0…

5 months ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Staff Software Engineer, Electron & Browser Infrastructure - Slack Desktop @ Salesforce – SF, CA Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-electron-browser-infrastructure-slack-desktop/9855469

Software Engineer, CDN @ Vercel – SF/Hybrid, CA, USA up to $294K

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-cdn/8926426

PHD Software Enginnering Intern @NVIDIA, SF, CA. Apply:

https://simplify.jobs/p/d2de708b-89ff-406f-bd7a-70f5d52cf392/PhD-Software-Engineer-Intern

Software Engineering, Full Stack @ Aviator – SF, CA Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/aviator/jobs/2fmcI6d-software-engineer-fullstack

GTM

GTM Product Marketing Manager, Commerce Experiences @ Stripe SF, CA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/head-gtm-business-operations-strategy-policy/9833157

Strategy and Operations Senior Associate, GTM @ Google, SF, CA

Apply: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/130516808422564550-strategy-and-operations-senior-associate/?src=Online/LinkedIn/linkedin_us&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=jobposting&utm_campaign=contract

Manager, GTM Applications Engineering @ Snowflake, Menlo Park, CA, Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/5ca3cecb-b6ad-4aef-8239-d367717008a3?utm_source=Q2P9NP2NNP&utm_medium=phenom-feeds&gh_src=ed5543a62

Founding GTM, Lucent (YC W 26), SF, CA.

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/96769

ICYMI: The Corgi Times issues are all available digitally online at corgitimes.com.

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Corgi Times | Issue 12

Corgi Times — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:40:51 GMT

Welcome back to another edition of Corgi Times.

This week felt like one of those classic SF weeks. It was YC Demo Day, which meant founders, investors, operators, and aspiring builders poured into the city from around the world. The Corgi team brought our bus outside Demo Day and gave out free drinks to the newest batch and investors.

In other news, the team at Corgi continues to grow. As we expand across insurance, AI, finance, media, and our initiatives, we're looking for ambitious builders who want to help shape what's next. If you've ever thought about joining us, now is a great time to take a look at our open roles: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

The Corgi Times issues are all available digitally online at corgitimes.com.

Corgi Insurance is partnering with Silicon Valley Bank to help founders access business insurance faster and more efficiently.

Through this partnership, SVB clients can access Corgi's AI-native insurance platform and tailored coverage solutions built for high-growth companies.

We're excited to work alongside one of the most trusted institutions in the innovation economy to make modern insurance more accessible to the next generation of builders.

Recent News

1. SpaceX agrees to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60B, just days after its record-breaking IPO.

The all-stock deal completes an option SpaceX secured back in April and is expected to close in Q3 2026. Cursor had been negotiating a $2B raise at a $50B valuation before SpaceX moved; the acquisition is meant to bolster the AI-coding push inside SpaceX’s xAI division and pairs Cursor’s product with SpaceX’s “Colossus” supercomputer.

Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-for-60b-in-stock-days-after-blockbuster-ipo/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisition-ipo.html

2. DeepSeek raises $7.4B in its first-ever outside funding round, becoming China’s most valuable AI startup at a $50B+ valuation.

The round is structured as a limited partnership controlled by founder Liang Wenfeng, who personally put in roughly $3B of his own money; outside backers including Tencent and CATL get no voting rights and face a five-year lock-up, while China’s state-backed National AI Fund is the only investor with direct equity and voting power.

Sources: https://techfundingnews.com/deepseek-raises-7-4b-at-50b-valuation-in-first-ever-external-funding-round/

https://www.thedailystar.net/news/tech-startup/news/deepseek-raises-74-billion-first-funding-round-report-4200176

3. Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro is closing in on general availability, targeting a 2-million-token context window and a new “Deep Think” reasoning mode.

Announced at I/O alongside the now-live Gemini 3.5 Flash, Pro remains limited to internal use and a small group of Vertex enterprise customers as of this week. Sundar Pichai’s on-stage promise of a launch “next month” puts the model on track to go head-to-head with Claude and GPT-5.5 on long-context, multimodal, and agentic coding tasks.

Sources: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317919/20260606/google-gemini-35-pro-nears-june-launch-2-million-token-context-deep-think-reasoning.htm

https://codersera.com/blog/gemini-3-5-pro-launch-guide-2026/

New Funding Updates

Prometheus: $12B at a ~$41B valuation. A developer of physical AI and autonomous engineering systems, backed by Jeff Bezos, JPMorgan Chase, and other investors, in one of the largest private AI rounds of the year (FinSMEs). https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/prometheus-raises-12-billion-at-approx-41-billion-valuation.html

PhoenixAI: $80M Series B. A company developing an agentic AI database, led by Sky9 Capital (FinSMEs). https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/phoenixai-raises-80m-series-b-funding.html

Coram AI: $35M Series B. A provider of an AI-native physical security platform, led by Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures (FinSMEs). https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/coram-ai-raises-35m-in-series-b-funding.html

NinjaOne: $400M+ Series C extension at a $12.3B valuation. An IT operations and endpoint management platform, one of the week’s largest enterprise software raises (Crunchbase News). https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-ai-biotech-healthcare-ninjaone-leads/

What’s Been Going On?

Leaf, a company developing solutions to help agricultural and food companies analyze their farm data, raised a £13 million Series B co-led by Leaps by Bayer and a group of industry strategics.

Poetic, a company building a new class of software that learns like AI but runs like code, raised a $50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins.

Pi Security, an agentic AI security startup, raised a $35 million round led by Brightmind Partners and Third Point Ventures.

Billables AI, a provider of an AI-native operational intelligence platform built for law firms, raised a $10.2 million Series A led by Avenue Growth Partners.

Beren Therapeutics, a developer of cyclodextrin-based cholesterol trafficking therapeutics, raised a $135 million round backed by Wellington Partners and JIC Venture Growth Investments.

SonoThera, a biotechnology company developing new genetic medicines, raised $125 million in Series B funding led by Vida Ventures.

Maneva, a physical AI solution provider specializing in video-to-action intelligence for manufacturing, raised a $27 million Series A led by U.S. Venture Partners.

Fearn, a provider of an AI-native patent platform, raised a $5.5 million Seed round led by Kindred Ventures.

Upriver, an AI-native data engineering platform provider, raised a $14 million Seed round led by Valley Capital Partners and Hetz Ventures.

Cellares, an Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization for cell therapies, received a $20 million investment from ARK Invest.

SyntheticFi, a fintech platform that helps registered investment advisors offer tax-efficient, portfolio-backed financing to clients, raised a $13 million round backed by Y Combinator and Social Leverage.

Reset, a provider of an embedded earned wage access platform built for credit unions and community banks, raised a $6 million Seed round backed by Georgia’s Own Credit Union and others.

Events June 18th - June 25th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

Thursday, 6/18

Claude Code & Coffee @ Corgi Cafe (hosted by us!): https://luma.com/5t639fsg

Female Founders and Funders Walk: https://luma.com/evfmew0y

Korea vs. Mexico: Founders Watch Party: https://luma.com/fwc-koreamexico

Brex Flex Club SF - Padel & Connections: https://luma.com/Brexflexpadeljune Founders Penthouse Poker Night: https://luma.com/c4uo5jls

Friday, 6/19

Sonoma AI: https://luma.com/jz1s0dbj

Forward Deployed: Glean - The Future of SaaS: https://luma.com/78d80y04

Inference-Time Compute Hackathon: https://luma.com/hncudfxb

Midsummer Multimodal AI Hackathon: https://luma.com/gicxj4ys

Game Day HQ / FWC26 AUS v. US: https://luma.com/fvbmyzjg

Saturday, 6/20

The Board Walks: https://meetup.com/the-board-walks-san-francisco/events/315039011/

Builders who Run SF — 5K: https://luma.com/l37g7gtn

Founders Running Club :: SF: https://luma.com/25ycs7ey

TOSV x Eight Sleep: Coffee, Donuts & the Future of Sleep Tech: https://luma.com/yrtv34t0

Sunday, 6/21

Agents you Love: Hackathon: https://luma.com/b7chd233

Deep Tech Week Opening Hardware Showcase @ Longshot: https://luma.com/m4y0s3n3

Founder DJ Party: https://luma.com/d1muwa0t

Monday, 6/22

Designers & Machines June 2026: https://luma.com/wmy80js8

The Global State of Deep Tech: https://luma.com/tjz6cxz2

SF Founders & Operators in Stealth Dinner: https://luma.com/rhoevents-0lmh

Tuesday, 6/23 design is a breakfast party at config: https://luma.com/d0lidgii

Deep Tech Underground by Alta, Stifel & Sequoia: https://luma.com/ew1byl0d

Wednesday, 6/24

Offline and unfiltered: a Config comedy night with Varun Rana: https://luma.com/dovetail-kw8l

Aexodus Deep Tech Physical AI Summit: https://luma.com/fsi7q6dx?tk=2AvyEM

Robotics - Data behind the robot - Community event: https://luma.com/roboticsdata

Deep Tech Happy Hour: https://luma.com/yj5uvoei

Job Opportunities in Collaboration with Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Anduril, Carta, and Waymo

Build -1 → 0…

5 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Founding Growth Lead @ Lassie — AI for doctors’ offices, SF Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lassie/297fd72f-fe6d-40f1-8931-89085e66fa2f

GTM Lead @ Kindred — home swap startup Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kindred/72656491-1ede-4814-bf3a-a21f18569fce

Chief of Staff to the CPO @ Carta — SF, up to $280K Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/carta/jobs/7743056003

Strategic Program Manager to the CMO @ Figma — SF Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/figma/jobs/5978327004?gh_jid=5978327004

Engineering Manager, Rider Growth @ Waymo — Mountain View, up to $310K Apply: https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs/engineering-manager-rider-growth-mountain-view-california-united-states?gh_jid=7947564

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Account Abuse — Anthropic AI safety & research Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5123039008

Software Engineer, AI Product — Notion AI workspace for teams Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ai-product/6739368

Senior Software Engineer — Rippling HR, IT & finance platform Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/engineer/senior-software-engineer-hub-platform/19634

Software Engineer, New Grad — Stripe Financial infrastructure for the internet Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-new-grad/7029197

Senior Full Stack Engineer — LiveFlow AI ERP/FP&A platform Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/liveflow/jobs/yQSiOcS-senior-full-stack-engineer

GTM

Senior Product Manager @ AtoB Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/93278

Product Marketing Lead @ Brex Apply: https://www.brex.com/careers

Product Marketing Manager @ Stripe Apply: https://stripe.com/jobs

Product Marketing Manager, Monetization @ Figma Apply: https://www.figma.com/careers

Go-To-Market (GTM) Digital Natives Program Leader @ Databricks Apply: https://www.databricks.com/company/careers

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Corgi Times

Corgi Times | Issue 31

Recent News

New Funding Updates

What’s Been Going On?

Events November 1 - November 7, 2026

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

Recruit Holdings & Indeed present【Fireside Chat @Berkeley】Beyond “0 to 1”: How to Scale AI & Tech Products to Hundreds of Millions : https://luma.com/s7elvwil

OSA Con 2026 - The Anti-Hype Conference for Open Source Analytics and AI : https://luma.com/eis7567t

MCP in Production: What’s Missing? : https://luma.com/elastic-mcp

Defense Tech Conference 2026 : https://luma.com/defensetechwest

Make SF Better: A Hack Night with Mistral AI : https://luma.com/mistral-elastic

Small Data SF : https://luma.com/p8cxjf28

BoxWorks Dev Summit 2026 : https://luma.com/box-dev-summit-2026

AI For Future - 2nd Edition - Pitching, Funding and Speech : https://luma.com/pr209v8d

Built at the Frontier: AIAS⁺ Startup & Builder Night : https://luma.com/9gbayglh

Anything Applied Agentic Hackathon - hackathons.team : https://luma.com/gap48i1m

AGI Builders Meetup SF : https://luma.com/8vkw9rpv

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Frontend @ Monaco - San Francisco, CA USA

Software Engineer, Backend @ Gamma - San Francisco, CA USA

Software Engineer, Agent @ Sierra - San Francisco, CA USA

Founding Engineer @ Worktrace AI - San Francisco, CA USA

Founding Engineer - LLM Infra & Platform @ Pax Historia - San Francisco, CA USA

GTM

Business Development Representative, Strategic @ Omni - San Francisco, CA USA

Account Executive (SF) @ Sphere - San Francisco, CA USA

Growth Manager | ABM @ Netic - San Francisco, CA USA

Growth & Marketing Lead (Founding) @ Nango - San Francisco, CA USA

Growth Marketing Manager @ Reducto - San Francisco, CA USA

Corgi Times | Issue 30

Recent News

New Funding Updates

What’s Been Going On?

Events October 31 - November 7, 2026

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Software Engineering

GTM

Corgi Times | Issue 29

Corgi Is Going on Tour!

Recent News

New Funding Updates

What’s Been Going On?

Events October 23 - October 30, 2026

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Software Engineering

Software Engineer @ Ploy - San Francisco, CA USA

Founding Software Engineer @ Navi AI - San Francisco, CA USA

Data Engineer @ Serval - San Francisco, CA USA

Forward Deployed Engineer @ Sim - San Francisco, CA USA

AI Engineer @ Emanate - San Francisco, CA USA

GTM

Account Associate - SF @ OpenAI - San Francisco, CA USA

Founding GTM @ Gamut - San Francisco, CA USA

Head of GTM Strategy and Ops @ Workwhile - San Francisco, CA USA

Enterprise GTM @ Hamming - San Francisco, CA USA

GTM @ Sphinx - San Francisco, CA USA

Corgi Times | Issue 28

Recent News

New Funding Updates

What’s Been Going On?

Events October 15 - October 22, 2026

Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung) : https://luma.com/ExtraordinaryFoundersDinnerOct15

PickleTalk: Enterprise Operators × AI Founders (Seed to Series A) : https://luma.com/9dxnx6dk

Orkes Shift : https://luma.com/zj2gat16

10/16

Open Together: AI Builders Unite : https://luma.com/opentogether?trk=organization_guest_main-feed-card-text

ExecuTorch Hackathon : https://luma.com/executorch-hackathon

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 34 : https://luma.com/oq82q5ax

InclusionAI Tech Night: Your AI Reality Check : https://luma.com/xs9sn0lp

Scala Summit 2026: A Full Day of Scala in the Bay Area : https://luma.com/6ps55unb

Open Source AI Week 2026 | Open Weight Debate Night : https://luma.com/592fcwx2

AI Startup Challenge Hackathon: The Pre-Event of SF AI Summit : https://luma.com/0oww46mm

OpenClaw & Friends Meetup : https://luma.com/oah05xax

Powering an AI Workforce : https://luma.com/xc44tt1f

SF AI Summit : https://luma.com/cj3syxqz

AI Infrastructure Night : https://luma.com/ens8b1qj