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In Today’s Edition 

• What Are We Seeing As VCs: Summer 2024 

• The $600 Billion Digital Ad Business Is Hanging on a Few Words From Google 

• Fintech company Block is about to reorganize its entire internal reporting structure

• Illinois secured a $1B+ investment from PsiQuantum

• Apple Intelligence Delayed to iOS 18.1 in October

• Anthropic is under fire for aggressive data scraping

• Seventh patient ‘cured' of HIV: why scientists are excited

🚀Startups Nuts

What Are We Seeing As VCs: Summer 2024 

The AI startup landscape is experiencing a shift, with a decrease in the number of early-stage companies being funded, while large established players continue to attract significant investments. Venture dollars are still flowing into the space despite the cooling of the hype surrounding Generative AI, particularly toward companies with strong technical foundations, unique value propositions, and sustainable revenue streams. AI-native startups that have found product-market fit are scaling rapidly as the market continues to evolve, paving the way for potential IPOs.

Other News

• Micropep, a French pesticide company, raised $429m in Series B funding

• Astranis, an SF geostationary satellite maker, raised $200m in Series D funding 

• Applied Intuition, a Mountain View, Calif., autonomous driving simulation software startup, raised $200m 

• Kestra Medical Technologies, a Kirkland, Wash., cardiac arrest monitoring company, raised $196m in funding

• IntelePeer, a Dania Beach, Fla., customer service automation company, raised $140m in funding and debt financing 

• Cowbell, a Pleasanton, Calif. provider of cyber insurance for small and medium-sized enterprises, raised $60m in Series C funding

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🏭Business Nuts 

The $600 Billion Digital Ad Business Is Hanging on a Few Words From Google 

Google plans to introduce a prompt asking users to opt in or out of cookies in Chrome. The company's choice of wording for the prompt could have widespread implications for the industry. It could result in cookies being effectively deprecated because consumers opt out. Google still plans to develop and test its Privacy Sandbox, a suite of alternative technologies to the cookie.

Other News

• Fintech company Block is about to reorganize its entire internal reporting structure. The company has been conducting rounds of layoffs since the end of last year. CEO Jack Dorsey says the move may feel 'big and disruptive or uncomfortable'. 

• Stripe acquires payment processing startup Lemon Squeezy. Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country.

• New Jersey will provide $500m in tax credits for AI companies to operate in the state. To qualify, businesses must make a capital investment of $100m+, create 100+ new full-time jobs, and have 50% of employees working with AI or 50% of revenue coming from AI-related activities.

• Illinois secured a $1B+ investment from PsiQuantum, which will build a new quantum and microelectronics park in Chicago and create 154+ full-time jobs.

• Phoenix, Arizona, will be home to three of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s fabrication facilities, representing a $65B+ investment that will create 6k tech jobs and 20k+ construction jobs.

• Deadpool & Wolverine opened to $205m at the domestic box office, making it the eighth-best opening weekend ever and the best for an R-rated film.

• US home insurers report more than $15B in underwriting losses in 2023, more than double the previous year and the worst since 2000; analysts point to population growth in areas prone to natural disasters.

• Apple strikes contract with union organizers at Maryland store, its first collective bargaining agreement with employees at a company retail outlet.

📱Tech Nuts

Apple Intelligence Delayed to iOS 18.1 in October

Apple Intelligence is being delayed to give Apple more time to fix bugs. The company now plans to start rolling out the feature several weeks after the launch of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. There is concern about the stability of the feature and developers need more testing time. Apple Intelligence will still be made available to software developers as soon as next week with the first betas of iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1.

Other News

• Intel will issue a patch in mid-August, but it won't fix 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processors that are already crashing - any degradation of these processors is irreversible.

• Twitter is secretly feeding your posts to Grok. A new default setting silently opts you into using your posts and interactions to train the AI model, with the option to opt-out hidden on the web version only.

• Anthropic is under fire for aggressive data scraping! Websites like Freelancer.com and iFixit.com accuse it of bombarding their sites with bot armies to harvest training data (think 3.5M requests in 4 hours).

🎁Miscellaneous

Seventh patient ‘cured' of HIV: why scientists are excited 

A 60-year-old man in Germany is the seventh person with HIV to be announced free of the virus after receiving a stem-cell transplant. The patient received stem cells which only had one copy of a gene that has been suggested as the best target for an HIV cure. The findings widen the donor pool for stem-cell transplants - roughly 1% of people of European descent carry mutations in both copies of the gene, while 10% of people carry one mutated copy. The procedure, which is risky and offered to people with leukemia, is unlikely to be rolled out for most individuals with HIV.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• The New Internet

• Llama 3.1 Vs GPT-4o

• Solid-state batteries are finally making their way out of the lab

• Fear of over-engineering has killed engineering altogether

• Inside the new $1 billion campus that GM hopes will launch it into the future

• The dark side of workplace recognition 

• 7 signs you will be successful in life, according to psychology

• Robert Downey Jr. sets Marvel return as Doctor Doom in ‘Avengers: Doomsday’

😎Fun Fact

On this day: Today, 1890 Vincent van Gogh dies 

🔥 Few tools many people are finding useful

• Kotae - Smart chatbot for small businesses

• Articula - AI interpreter that can speak any language

• Sweetspot - Use AI to win state, local, and education contracts

• Klee Desktop - On-device AI processing with zero data collection

• LTX Studio - An AI-driven filmmaking platform for creators, marketers, filmmakers and studios

• Otio - This tool helps in summarizing and conversing with your documents and links, enabling you to write, edit, and paraphrase using AI 

• UI Wizard - Turn product ideas into concepts instantly with Generative AI. Visualize, communicate, and iterate on wireframes and prototypes in minutes

🐦Joke of the Day

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