Aug 29, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Bottled Stars

Futures Built on Forgotten Foundations

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

From fast-food windows to currency rails to bottled stars, the future is really the same rehearsal: how to reprogram the infrastructures we once took for granted.

NUCLEAR

Gates, Google, and Nvidia Bet $863M on Bottled Stars

👀 What’s the move: Commonwealth Fusion Systems just pulled in $863M from a who’s-who of tech and Wall Street — Nvidia, Google, Bill Gates, Druckenmiller — to fund its Sparc reactor and set the stage for Arc, a commercial-scale fusion plant. Unlike science-fair fusion projects, CFS is blending cutting-edge superconducting magnets with AI-driven modeling to compress plasma at industrial scale.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t another “fusion in 30 years” meme. CFS is treating fusion like a hardware startup — prototype, breakeven demo, then scale to product. The magnet tech gives them a compact design edge, the investor syndicate doubles as future customers, and Google already signed up for 200MW of power. If Sparc works, CFS becomes the first credible path to selling grid-scale fusion.

⛵ Key takeaway: Fusion just stopped being a science project and started looking like a supply chain.

TOGETHER WITH QODER

Qoder Repo Wiki: Weaponize Your Codebase with Free Claude 4

Nobody wants to write documentation. Yet every project drowns without it. Qoder Repo Wiki is the jailbreak. It rips through your codebase and spits out a living Wiki: architecture maps, module overviews, dependency graphs — the knowledge your team needs but never has time to create.

No more tribal knowledge. No more onboarding nightmares. No more “ask the senior dev.” The truth of your repo is finally visible — instantly, automatically, relentlessly.

And during Qoder’s free preview, you don’t just get Repo Wiki. You also get free Claude 4 credits, so you can interrogate your codebase with one of the world’s sharpest LLMs, right inside your IDE.

Documentation isn’t a side task anymore. It’s your repo’s nuclear option.

Weaponize Now 👉

RETAIL

Taco Bell’s AI Drive-Thru Dream Meets 18,000 Water Cups

Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg via Getty Image

👀 What’s the move: Taco Bell rolled out AI voice assistants in 500+ drive-thrus, betting on automation to cut costs and speed service. Instead, the bots got hijacked by trolls (“18,000 waters, please”) and stumbled on basic customer orders. Even Taco Bell’s own tech chief is rethinking where, and whether, this tech should actually run.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Retail AI is booming—from McDonald’s testing Google AI on fry timers to Wendy’s automating order lanes—but this fiasco shows the limits. Customers aren’t just users; they’re stress testers, pranksters, and critics with TikTok accounts. Automation in retail is less about replacing humans and more about managing messy human behavior—something current AI still struggles to contain.

⛵ Key takeaway: Fast food chains want robots on the headset, but for now, AI is just learning that humans don’t always order fries—they order chaos.

STABLECOINS

M0 Wants to Unbundle the Dollar Stack

👀 What’s the move: M0 just raised $40M to let developers mint their own stablecoins — not by piggybacking on USDC or Tether, but by separating the reserve layer (assets like Treasuries or USD) from the programmable layer. Instead of Circle or Tether acting as gatekeepers, apps can launch bespoke “digital dollars” tuned to their own ecosystems.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This flips the stablecoin order. Today’s hierarchy is dominated by a handful of issuers controlling liquidity and policy. M0 shifts power downstream, letting MetaMask, Playtron, or any fintech run their own monetary stack. If it works, stablecoins stop being a commodity and start looking like SaaS infrastructure — which undermines Circle’s moat and creates a Cambrian explosion of app-native money.

⛵ Key takeaway: The next stablecoin war won’t be USDC vs. Tether — it’ll be every app with its own dollar.

STARTUP SPOT

🧠 Framer
“AI-powered design to website.”
No-code builder with true design canvas, CMS, SEO, and AI prompt-to-page creation.
→ Founded by ex-Facebookers Koen Bok & Jorn van Dijk in Amsterdam; 500K+ MAUs incl. Miro, Perplexity, Scale AI, 40% of YC batch. Aug 2025 raised $100M Series D at $2B valuation (Meritech, Atomico); ARR ~$50M; launched On-Page Editing for non-designers.

🪙 M0
“Build custom stablecoin rails.”
Infra for app-specific stablecoins—programmable, interoperable, reserve issuance decoupled from smart contracts.
→ Founded 2023 by ex-MakerDAO & Circle veterans; powers MetaMask token, Noble, Usual Labs, Playtron. Aug 2025 raised $40M Series B led by Polychain, Ribbit, Endeavor (total ~$100M).

🪐 Commonwealth Fusion
“Commercial fusion, fast-forward.”
Compact tokamak (SPARC) with MIT high-temp superconducting magnets; ARC grid-scale plant in pipeline.
→ Founded 2018 out of MIT by Bob Mumgaard; 1,000+ staff; DOE-backed; SPARC first plasma 2026, gain 2027. Aug 2025 raised $863M (NVentures, Google, Gates, Breakthrough, Druckenmiller); ~$3B total raised; Google to buy 200MW from ARC, Virginia plant early 2030s.

BAY AREA MEMOS

The Trump administration's recent deal with Intel is structured to prevent the company from selling its struggling foundry unit
AI-powered website builder Framer secures $100 million from existing investors at $2B valuation to fuel its enterprise growth.
American Bitcoin, a mining firm backed by Donald Trump's sons, plans to begin trading on the Nasdaq in early September through a merger.
OpenAI is expanding into South Korea with a Seoul office, strategically positioning itself ahead of new AI regulations.
Volkswagen extends AWS deal to use AI in factories, aiming for major cost savings.

TOGETHER WITH US

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