Happy Labor Day Weekend! As you all are, by now I hope, sailing into a weekend of barbecues, online shopping, and defenestrating white clothes, here are a couple of key thoughts I had around the news of this week.
Midterm watch… The Wall Street Journal reported that Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman are among those who’ve helped launch a new super PAC network, called Leading the Future. The focus, of course, is AI.
Ultimately, this isn’t a surprise—on one hand, the $100 million already mobilized to shape AI policy and regulation feels like a lot, but that number absolutely dwarfs the billions a16z manages and that OpenAI has raised. The intertwining of startups, the AI boom, and the federal government seems poised to continue, even accelerate in the coming years. The real question, to me, is who, in the midterms, will emerge as the new wave of AI’s biggest Washington advocates.
Tech earnings… There were quite a lot of them this week, from HP beating on strong demand for PCs to CrowdStrike topping expectations but seeing its stock drop on soft guidance for the year. The big-ticket event, of course, was Nvidia. The chip giant beat expectations on the top and bottom lines, but guidance was cautious and there were no China chip sales to speak of. (Recently, Nvidia and AMD struck a deal with the U.S. government to sell chips in China, giving the government 15% of that revenue in return. Nvidia says the deal has not been finalized.)
My guess? We’ll see some China chips sales soon from Nvidia, which could translate to billions in revenue. I just wonder how long it will stick, and how resilient the demand will be from China, a country adamant about controlling its own technological destiny.
The wedding of the century… I actually do think it’s still too early to call the wedding of the century. After all, who knows where we’ll be in 50 years? LLMs could be celebrities by then, for all I know. But so far, at least in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine a bigger wedding than that of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
And yes, I know, they just got engaged—but the engagement was truly a never-before seen social media juggernaut: According to Meta, their Instagram post announcing the engagement, with Swift glowing in a Ralph Lauren dress, saw one million reposts in just six hours, a new record. (That Ralph Lauren dress also sold out near-immediately.) I’ve been joking that I think Taylor Swift getting married is a bull market indicator—but maybe like any decent joke, it’s quite serious.
So, if you had a long week, shake it off, and I’ll see you Tuesday.
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Venture Deals
- Framer, an Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based website design platform, raised $100 million in Series D funding. Meritech and Atomico led the round.
- Rain, a New York City-based stablecoin infrastructure platform for enterprises, raised $58 million in Series B funding. Sapphire Ventures led the round and was joined by Dragonfly, Galaxy Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, Samsung Next, Lightspeed, and Norwest.
- aPriori, a San Francisco-based execution layer for on-chain markets, raised $30 million in funding from HashKey Capital, Pantera Capital, Primitive Ventures, IMC Trading, GEM, Gate Labs, Ambush Capital, Big Brain Collective, and others.
- Maisa, a Valencia, Spain and San Francisco-based developer of AI agents designed to be hallucination-resistant, raised $25 million in seed funding. Creandum and Forgepoint Capital led the round and were joined by NFX and Village Global.
- FriendliAI, a Redwood City, Calif.-based AI inference platform, raised $20 million in a seed extension. Capstone Partners led the round and was joined by Sierra Ventures, Alumni Ventures, KDB, and KB Securities.
- ALIGNMT AI, a New York City-based AI compliance platform for health care, raised $6.5 million in seed funding. AIX Ventures led the round and was joined by Sancus Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Dent Capital.
- Ordinal, a Bentonville, Ark.-based AI platform designed for government work, raised $1 million in seed funding. Plains Ventures led the round and was joined by Winrock International and The Venture Arkansas Fund.
Private Equity
- Nexus Capital Management and Aranda Principal Strategies agreed to acquire minority stakes in Post Advisory Group, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based asset manager. Financial terms were not disclosed.
