Sep 16, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Brand AI Protection

Plus: OpenAI’s $350B Compute Bill, Nvidia Dumps Dreams

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The frontier is shifting. AI is no longer just a tool; it’s a cost center, a shield, and a battlefield all at once.

STARTUP

Harvard Law Dropout Make Brand Protection an AI Business

👀 What’s the move: MarqVision was founded by Mark Lee, who left the path of a conventional legal career at Harvard Law after realizing that counterfeiting — a $3T global black market — was still being fought with manual, case-by-case legal work. MarqVision’s core innovation is turning what used to be a manual, legal-heavy process into an automated, revenue-linked service. Its platform uses computer vision to scan e-commerce and social channels for counterfeit goods, then automatically files takedowns across marketplaces. Layered with LLMs, it generates reports, tracks infringers, and now ties removal activity to real sales uplift for brands.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Lee reframed brand protection from a back-office legal cost into a top-line growth service. That’s why MarqVision went from $1M to $20M ARR in four years and is chasing $100M by 2027. This isn’t software as a tool — it’s AI executing the work, with economics that threaten law firms, investigators, and even marketplace policing teams. The funding signals investor confidence that “AI-led services” can scale like SaaS but disrupt entire professional categories.

⛵ Key takeaway: A Harvard law student walked away from courtrooms, raised $48M, and turned brand policing into a growth engine.

TOGETHER WITH QODER

🚀 Qoder Officially Launches Pro Plans

Qoder is an agentic coding platform for real software. Built on top programming models, Qoder can search up to 100,000 code files and power autonomous, end-to-end R&D with its AI programming agent. Since its preview on Aug 21, Qoder has earned global acclaim for contextual engineering and features like Repo Wiki and Quest Mode. Now, the official Pro and Pro+ subscriptions are live.

✨ What’s New

Repo Wiki Upgrade: Auto-generate a Wiki directory, push it to repos, and share docs with your team.
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Context Compression: Summarize conversations to cut costs and increase credit durability by up to 50%.

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$350B Compute Bill: OpenAI’s Real AGI Test

👀 What’s the move: The Information says OpenAI is projecting $350B in compute spend by 2030, a figure that sharpened after locking in a $300B cloud contract with Oracle — and cash burn is already running billions above plan this year. The tab comes from training and serving GPTs on Oracle, Google, and CoreWeave racks, while Sam Altman scrambles to hedge with Broadcom chips, “Stargate” mega–data centers, and any lever that turns compute from a rental expense into a strategic asset.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just an AI arms race — it’s an economic one. Every dollar of inefficiency compounds into billions, and whoever controls the servers holds the choke point. OpenAI is caught in a squeeze: depend on hyperscalers and risk margin death, or build its own stack and risk capital suicide.

⛵ Key takeaway: When compute is your landlord, you either buy the building or pray the rent doesn’t kill you.

CLOUD

Nvidia Dumps Cloud Dreams, Becomes the Tollbooth

👀 What’s the move: Nvidia has quietly killed DGX Cloud as a customer-facing product, retreating from head-on competition with AWS and Azure. Instead, it’s doubling down on Lepton, a GPU rental marketplace that routes workloads across hyperscalers and niche providers, turning Nvidia into the switchboard operator of global AI compute.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t a retreat, it’s a re-wiring of the business model. DGX Cloud was Nvidia trying to be a cloud. Lepton makes Nvidia the arbiter of clouds — less CAPEX, no channel conflict, and total control of demand flow. Hyperscalers may set the prices, but Nvidia still gets paid on every GPU cycle.

⛵ Key takeaway: Nvidia figured out the obvious — it doesn’t need to win the cloud war if it already owns the battlefield.

STARTUP SPOT

🛡️ MarqVision
“AI-powered brand protection.”
Uses vision + NLP to detect and remove counterfeits, piracy, impersonations across marketplaces and social.
→ Founded 2020 by Harvard Law grad Mark Lee (YC S21); $48M Series B, ~$90M total; 350+ customers; ARR scaled past $20M.

🛠️ Divergent
“AI + 3D print meets factory.”
Digital manufacturing platform using AI design, metal 3D printing, robotic assembly for auto/defense/aero.
→ Founded 2014 by Kevin Czinger; $290M raise Sept 2025 ($2.3B val); customers include Lockheed, RTX, General Dynamics; scaling new LA + OK plants.

🧠 Luminary Cloud
“Physics AI for design.”
Cloud-native simulation + physics-informed AI to test and optimize engineering designs in seconds.
→ Founded 2019 by Jason Lango & Stanford’s Juan Alonso; $72M Series B (N47, Sutter Hill); ~100 staff; customers in aerospace, auto, industrial R&D.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Divergent raised $290M at a $2.3B valuation, using its 3D printing and AI platform to scale auto and defense manufacturing.
Luminary Cloud raised $72M to advance Physics AI, bringing cloud simulations that cut product design from days to seconds across industries like automotive and aerospace.
Dyna Robotics secures $120 million in a Series A round with backing from Nvidia and Amazon to scale its general-purpose AI robots.
Alphabet dodged a DOJ breakup and surged past $3T market cap, fueled by search dominance and booming AI cloud growth.
UK MoD signed a £400M deal with Google for UK datacenters to support AI, cybersecurity, and secure UK-US defense links.

TOGETHER WITH US

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