Tuesday, October 27, 2026

Re:Build, which spun out Slate Auto, raises $2.1B (opens techcrunch.com)

The manufacturing accelerator, which spun out Slate Auto, bills itself as "America's answer to Shenzhen."

Toronto-based fintech Wealthsimple raised up to CA$425M led by GIC at a post-money valuation of CA$13.8B (opens techmeme.com)

GIC led the round at a CA$13.8B post-money valuation, up from CA$10B in 2025.

Infisical, which helps companies use AI agents without handing over their private credentials, raised a $40M Series B led by Elad Gil at a $600M valuation (opens forbes.com)

Infisical keeps companies' private credentials away from AI agents; customers include Airbus and Volkswagen. Elad Gil led the round at a $600M valuation.

Disruptive raises $10B fund to make big bets on at least 10 companies (opens techcrunch.com)

Disruptive has backed companies like chip startup Groq and voice AI startup ElevenLabs.

Whop raises $200M at $5.1B valuation after shipping three products in three months (opens thenextweb.com)

Sequoia Capital and Shopify Ventures led the Series D; Whop plans offices in Europe and Colombia, Bloomberg reported.

General Compute raises $100 million Series A, countering the neocloud disaster narrative (opens techcrunch.com)

General Compute is betting on inference chips from outside the Nvidia ecosystem.

Guidewire buys Hyperexponential for $1.7B in cash (opens techcrunch.com)

Guidewire is paying cash for the insurance pricing startup; the deal is expected to close next year.

Applied Kinetics: AI-native manufacturing for data center and energy projects (opens ycombinator.com)

Critical equipment, without the multi-year wait.

Anduril, Qualcomm launch BlueChip, a new kind of US-made laptop (opens techcrunch.com)

Anduril founder Palmer Luckey is vowing to bring computer manufacturing back to the U.S., and by that he doesn't just mean assembly, but every individual component, some of which are exclusively made in China today.

Build specialized multimodal models with LFM3 (opens huggingface.co)

Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books (opens stanforddaily.com)

Source: OpenAI, a major Nvidia customer, plans to buy Google's TPUs (opens theinformation.com)

Source: OpenAI, a major Nvidia customer, plans to buy Google's TPUs; a job listing shows it seeks an engineer to “lead the optimization” of its models on TPUs — OpenAI plans to buy Google's AI chips, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a boost for a rising competitor to OpenAI backer…

Expanding our partnership with GSA to bring Claude to all levels of government (opens anthropic.com)

Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure (opens futurism.com)

Nvidia, AMD to buy $4B in Meta shares as part of expanded chip partnerships (opens siliconangle.com)

The chipmakers' purchase is part of Meta's planned stock sale of up to $95 billion to fund its data center buildout.

Retell uses OpenAI models to help power 100M monthly calls (opens openai.com)

OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra tops Retell's voice-agent benchmark and Codex helps it reach a $1.6M annual revenue run rate per employee.

VCs will make billions on Anthropic’s IPO, but Amazon is set to make much (much) more (opens techcrunch.com)

Massive note conversions reveal the true extent of Amazon's ownership in Anthropic.

How Anthropic ships Claude with Claude: Separating the Brain from the Hands (opens latent.space)

Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, the Claude Platform, and the engineering behind AI agents.

New founder archetypes in the AI era (opens andrewchen.substack.com)

What types of founders will thrive in the new cycle