SpaceX's Coding Land Grab
How a rocket company's $60 billion move into AI software — and its rebuffed approach to Cognition — is redrawing the map of who owns the tools that write code.
Topic
Startups
Funding rounds, valuations and go-to-market bets at technology startups — read through the terms, not the press release.
Nvidia's $6B Non-Acquisition
How Nvidia's Poolside deal — a license, an investment, and 109 job offers — became the new template for buying AI without buying the company.
The DOJ Comes for Venture Capital
How a probe into two board seats could rewrite the rules for how VCs back competing AI startups.
Stripe's $7 Billion Bet on AI's Toll Booth
How Stripe's purchase of OpenRouter turns AI model routing into a payments-style infrastructure play.
SpaceX's $60 Billion Detour
How SpaceX turned a rocket company into an AI powerhouse by paying a record $60 billion for the maker of Cursor—and what the price says about the value of code.
Pony.ai's Global Robotaxi Push
How Pony.ai's overseas robotaxi pipeline crossing 4,000 vehicles — and robotaxi revenue leaping nearly 700% — signals that the self-driving contest is going global, with China's autonomous-vehicle champions riding Uber's platform into Europe and the Middle East.
Etched's $21 Billion Bet Against Nvidia
How Etched's $700 million raise at a $21 billion valuation — double its price a month earlier — turns a bet that inference will dwarf training into the most serious startup challenge Nvidia has faced at the chip level.
Unitree's Robot IPO Frenzy
How Unitree's Shanghai listing — oversubscribed thousands of times over — turns humanoid robotics from a venture-capital story into a public-market referendum on physical AI, and hands China the first mover's spotlight.
The Money Moves to Inference
How venture capital's center of gravity shifted from training new AI models to profitably running the ones that already exist.
Cognition's $40 Billion Question
How an AI coding startup nearly doubled its valuation in three months — and what a 40x revenue price says about the state of AI funding.