ls ./category/startups
Funding, launches, shutdowns and the people behind them.
Oracle's quarterly report on 11 September disclosed a plan, adopted in June, letting Larry Ellison sell up to 50 million shares. On 12 September Oracle said it had been cancelled with nothing sold. Under the SEC's cooling-off rule it could not have executed a trade before 21 September, while ending a plan requires no waiting period at all.
Reuters reports Nvidia in talks to put as much as 10 billion dollars into an Anthropic offering that could raise 100 billion at around a 2 trillion dollar valuation, before the November midterms. Anthropic buys Nvidia chips. The money and the hardware would be moving in a circle.
The Office of Strategic Capital is in talks to lend Fluidstack about 5 billion dollars — roughly six times its previous largest commitment — for manufacturing capacity in data-centre components, not a facility. A defence industrial-base lender now files AI infrastructure alongside rare earths and drone parts.
Crusoe raised over 3 billion dollars at a 30 billion valuation, roughly tripling in eleven months. The catalyst reported days earlier was a 13 billion dollar, five-year contract for GPU capacity — signed not by an AI lab but by Jane Street.
The 12.93 billion dollar deal for Hugging Face is confirmed in an SEC filing, not a rumour. The company that already sells the hardware models train and run on now owns the place 3 million of them are distributed from — and a hub is not storage, it is the default resolver.
Almost everything people know about Facebook's founding comes from a film, and the film's opening premise is fiction: Erica Albright was written for the screenplay. What is documented is stranger — 450 visitors in four hours, a handwritten settlement, $200,000 for a domain name, and a legal fight to escape a payout that later multiplied.
Google IPO'd at roughly 24 times sales in 2004. Anthropic's $965bn private mark against a $47bn run rate is about 20 times. The 42x figure compares two dollar amounts twenty-two years apart, and $965bn is not an IPO price at all.
Sequoia, Khosla and Coatue backed a 2025-founded company whose pitch rests on one test: general-purpose models could run end-to-end attacks and failed to defend against the same attacks.
Between July 2025 and June 2026 Microsoft awarded more than $20 million across 2,531 eligible reports from 562 researchers. The averages are the interesting part, and so is what they say about who can actually make a living this way.
The week of 18–24 July 2026 was read as a physical-AI story, and Atoms' $1.7 billion made that easy. Underneath it, Cathedral, Glow and Neo Security took $360m between them, which says more about where security capital is going than any sector total does.
Nearly 140,000 US tech jobs went this year, and AI keeps appearing in the explanation. But only four employers said anything specific, and the Financial Times found firms citing AI underperformed the Nasdaq by around 10% in the following 30 trading days.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma left his first company two weeks before his shares vested, ran an astrology call centre to keep One97 alive, and was dodging his landlord at dawn. Paytm didn't arrive until 2010.
H1 2026 funding held up. Q2 didn't: $4.4bn, down around 30% on both Q1 and the year before, with round counts falling too. The total survived because eight companies took $100m or more.
The wall-of-rejections narrative gets attached to Zomato often enough to read as fact. It never happened: the founders ran it as a side project for eighteen months, bootstrapped for two and a half years, and nearly bought a $10 domain instead.