SpaceX's Plans to Become a Mobile Carrier Heat Up

SpaceX's Plans to Become a Mobile Carrier Heat Up

SpaceX eyes Boost Mobile, Apple readies an AI-powered robot, and SF's dating scene descends into a 996 nightmare

Five in a row! 🏀 🌉

Top News

SpaceX is reportedly in talks to buy Boost Mobile from EchoStar or otherwise gain access to its network as Elon Musk seeks to build Starlink into a hybrid satellite-and-terrestrial wireless carrier that could compete with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; The Washington Post first reported the talks. TechCrunch has more here.

According to The Information, Apple is aiming to launch a roughly $1,000 AI-powered home robot as soon as 2027 that can roam around the house, follow users during FaceTime calls, switch on lights when someone enters a room, and potentially perform other simple household tasks. Ars Technica has more here.

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Anthropic Warns That It’s Very Close to RSI Capability, Aka Self-Building AI

By Julie Bort

While much attention has focused on the updated financials Anthropic revealed in its revised S-1/A on Monday (revenue is soaring, but so are expenses), the AI lab dropped another little bombshell in the fine print.

The filing seems to warn that the company is on the cusp of creating a model capable of recursive self-improvement (RSI).

RSI is the point at which AI gets so good at training itself that it spawns a dramatic acceleration of AI capabilities. To the AI doomers, RSI represents the cataclysm from which there is no return, in which AI builds itself into something powerful enough that it slips beyond human control and may be indifferent to the damage it causes while achieving its goals.

To AI enthusiasts, RSI, or some version of AI reliably using itself to improve, represents the technology’s promise, where it becomes a tool of unimaginable productivity, scientific discovery, and more.

Anthropic seems to believe that RSI is both a promise and a peril. It says in the S-1 that it uses AI in its R&D, but it cautions: “Using AI to help build more capable AI could also pose a considerable safety risk, particularly if it sharply accelerates the pace of progress. This is one of the areas covered by our Responsible Scaling Policy, which sets out our plans to monitor and mitigate the risks as we approach what has been termed ‘recursive self-improvement.’”

When the term RSI became popular earlier this year, many believed it was a buzzword or, at best, a goal too hard to achieve, define, or prove.

Massive Fundings

Casap, a four-year-old New York startup that uses AI agents to automate fraud investigations, disputes, collections, claims, and operational exceptions for financial institutions, raised a $56 million Series B round led by Base10 Partners, with Experian and Synchrony as well as previous investors Emergence Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners also investing. The company has raised a total of $90 million. More here.

Hypersonica, a three-year-old startup based in Feldkirchen, Germany, that develops hypersonic long-range missile systems for European governments and allied countries, raised a $111.8 million Series B round at an approximately $783 million valuation. The deal was co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst, with previous investors Plural and 201 Ventures also pitching in. The company has raised a total of approximately $140.9 million. Tech Funding News has more here.

Northwood Space, a four-year-old startup based in Torrance, CA, that designs satellite ground-station antennas and software that let operators buy capacity on a shared communications network, raised a $375 million Series C round at a $2 billion post-money valuation. The deal was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth, with Alpine Space Ventures, Washington Harbour Partners, Stepstone Activate, and In-Q-Tel also taking part. It also secured a separate multi-year credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking. TechCrunch has more here.

Tutor Intelligence, a five-year-old Boston-area startup that builds robots for warehouse and manufacturing work that learn from remote human operators and share improvements across the fleet, raised a $75 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, with previous investors Union Square Ventures and Neo also chipping in. The company has raised a total of $117 million. Forbes has more here.

Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings

42AI, an Israeli startup that builds AI models designed to predict how individuals will behave in changing circumstances, emerged from stealth after receiving $62.5 million over three years from its founders and Infinity Group, an investment firm founded by one of 42AI’s co-founders. TechCrunch has more here.

Emvolon, a five-year-old startup based in Woburn, MA, that converts methane-rich waste gases from landfills and other sites into methanol and other fuels using modular chemical plants, raised a $22 million Series A round. Investors included VX Ventures and Wagner Carbon as well as previous investor MassVentures. ESG Today has more here.

Larridin, a two-year-old startup based in South San Francisco, CA, that measures how companies’ AI spending affects employee and agent productivity, raised a $30 million Series A led by Pelion Ventures, with GFT, W23, Thayer, DG Daiwa Ventures, Cougar Capital, and Alumni Ventures as well as previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Gradient Ventures also pitching in. The company has raised a total of $47 million. SiliconANGLE has more here.

Lo:Tech, a three-year-old London startup that provides market making, data, and execution services across traditional, digital, and prediction markets, raised a $12 million Series A led by MMC, with Atka as well as previous investors Faction and 13 Books Capital also participating. Finextra has more here.

Trajectory, a six-month-old San Francisco startup that lets companies post-train AI models on their own tasks and continuously improve them from production use, raised a $45 million Series A led by Sequoia at a $300 million valuation, with NVIDIA, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures also investing. The company has raised a total of $60 million. More here.

Smaller Fundings

Marble Cognition, a one-year-old Munich startup that observes employee workflows and builds AI agents to automate business processes using companies’ existing tools, raised a $3.75 million pre-seed round co-led by Heartcore Capital and Seedcamp. Tech Funding News has more here.

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New Funds

Creandum, a 23-year-old pan-European early-stage venture firm, has closed its largest fund yet – a $750 million Fund VIII that will invest at seed and Series A – with half of the capital reserved for follow-on rounds. The firm has also opened a new San Francisco office as it expands further into the U.S. Tech.eu has more here.

Steel Atlas, a New York venture firm focused on industrial technology, disclosed plans to raise up to $100 million for Steel Atlas Select Fund I, with $16.1 million reported sold so far. The SEC filing has more here.

Ballistic Ventures, a five-year-old San Francisco venture firm focused exclusively on cybersecurity, is seeking up to $360 million for Ballistic Ventures III. The SEC filing has more here.

Exits

Marvell agreed to acquire optical chip and networking equipment maker Lumentum in an all-stock deal valued at $115 billion including debt, or about $80 billion in equity value, creating one of the largest technology acquisitions ever. TechCrunch has more here.

Salesforce agreed to acquire Cresta, an AI customer-service company whose voice agents handle complex customer calls and whose software coaches human representatives and analyzes interactions in real time. Terms were not disclosed. Cresta has raised a total of $282 million from investors including Qatar Investment Authority, World Innovation Lab, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz. More here.

Omen AI, a two-year-old startup building real-time sensors to monitor data-center cooling fluids, is acquiring competitor Aquatic Labs for $16 million in cash and stock, combining complementary technologies that measure the chemistry of water used to cool AI infrastructure. TechCrunch has more here.

Going Public

Anthropic reported $17 billion in third-quarter revenue, 12 times its year-earlier total and up 47% from the second quarter, while posting a $23 billion net loss and disclosing roughly $895 billion in commitments for data centers, chips, and computing power as it prepares for an IPO that could value the company at as much as $2 trillion. The New York Times has more here.

Speaking of Anthropic, institutional investors are pushing the company to target a valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion in its planned IPO later this month, down from earlier expectations approaching $2 trillion, amid the recent tech selloff and growing concern about heavy AI exposure and infrastructure spending. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

And there’s still more on Anthropic: it turns out it spent $4.8 billion on employee compensation and benefits during the first nine months of 2026, equal to about 15% of its revenue. In the third quarter alone, those costs averaged more than $100,000 per employee per month. Business Insider has more here.

OPay, an eight-year-old Nigerian fintech, abruptly withdrew its $304 million U.S. IPO after an undisclosed foreign regulatory inquiry, hours after pricing its shares at $19 apiece for a valuation of just over $4 billion. OPay has raised $570 million in total venture capital funding from investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund, Meituan, IDG Capital, Source Code Capital, and HSG. Semafor has more here.

People

Elon Musk says SpaceX tightened weekly usage limits for Grok Bot because the cost of serving the AI agent had become “unsustainably high relative to revenue,” after some users found their allowances unexpectedly maxed out over the weekend. Musk has not said how subscriber limits will change going forward. TechCrunch has more here.

OpenAI has hired longtime Meta and Instagram cultural-relations executive Charles Porch to court Hollywood and other creative industries, effectively tasking the well-connected 45-year-old with making AI more culturally acceptable among celebrities, artists, and influencers who are often publicly skeptical of the technology. New York Magazine has more here.

The New Yorker profiles Terence Tao, the Fields Medalist who has embraced AI as a potentially powerful tool for mathematicians but is growing uneasy about the speed at which AI-generated proofs are arriving, warning that the deluge could overwhelm the field and erode the slow process through which mathematicians build understanding and generate new ideas. More here.

Jake Storm, who became a general partner at Felicis in 2024 after several years at IVP, has joined Headline as a general partner on its U.S. early-stage team, where he will focus particularly on cybersecurity and AI infrastructure. His past investments include Tines, Revel, Runlayer, Papaya Global, Lyra Health, Whoop, CircleCI, C1, and Artemis. More here.

Layoffs

Squarespace, the 22-year-old website-building and hosting company, is laying off roughly 19% of its workforce, or about 300 employees, as it restructures amid rapid changes in the website-building market driven by generative AI and “vibe-coding” tools. TechCrunch has more here.

SUSE, a German enterprise software company best known for its Linux operating system, plans to cut roughly 10% of its 1,900-person workforce, or about 190 jobs, with CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen telling employees that automation and AI are reducing the need for some roles and allowing teams to operate with less overhead and flatter reporting lines. The Register has more here.

Post-Its

Essential Reads

OpenAI wants to rebrand AI data centers as “compute campuses,” arguing that the term better captures the scale of the computing, energy infrastructure, and jobs involved, as the industry faces growing public concern about the environmental and community impact of the facilities. Business Insider has more here.

San Francisco’s AI boom is reshaping the city’s dating scene, with overworked founders and engineers treating first dates more like high-stakes job interviews — screening for everything from career ambition to family health history, outsourcing messages to ChatGPT, and in some cases paying dating coaches $5,000 a month. The New York Times has more here.

Detours

Brain Rot

Retail Therapy

Steve Yedlin, the cinematographer behind Knives Out and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, has released a $13 iPhone app called Chromagraph Camera with director Rian Johnson and programmer Eric Cameron that applies movie-style color processing to RAW photos. It’s already the top paid app in Apple’s App Store.

TechCrunch’s Lauren Forristal reviews Ninja’s $449.99 Crispi Microwave and Air Fryer, which combines a 1,000W microwave with a 1,700W air fryer in one appliance and uses its FusionCrisp system to heat food quickly while preserving a crisp exterior.

Apple’s $2,000 iPhone Duo won over TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez, who found that despite its smaller outer screen, weaker camera, and frustrating return to Touch ID, the foldable’s durability, polished design, and more deliberate feel made it surprisingly hard to give up.

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