Oct 3, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Grid Dreams Go Public

Plus: Amazon’s $5 Pantry Invasion, BCI Goes Crypto

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Today feels like a fever chart of ambition: power grids are turning into stock tickers, Amazon is stuffing pantries with five-dollar bets, and brain-machine startups are wandering straight into the crypto casino.

DREAM

Fermi IPOs at $12B With Nothing but Hype and Rick Perry

👀 What’s the move: Fermi, a Texas-based data center REIT co-founded in January by former U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, just pulled off a $682M Nasdaq IPO at a $12.5B valuation. The company has no revenue, a $6.4M loss, and no operations live until 2026; but it’s pitching a future 11GW energy-fed AI campus powered by nuclear, gas, and solar.

💡 Why it’s not boring: The IPO wasn’t about fundamentals. It was a cocktail of AI data center mania and political credibility, sold into a market that now treats “compute infrastructure” as the new oil. Investors are betting that Perry’s name and the promise of sovereign-scale power supply can override the absence of cash flow.

⛵ Key takeaway: Fermi proves you don’t need revenue to IPO in the AI era — just the right mix of hype, grid talk, and a Washington Rolodex.

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RETAIL

Amazon’s $5 Pantry Invasion

👀 What’s the move: Amazon just rolled out “Amazon Grocery,” a 1,000-item private-label food line priced mostly under $5, uniting its Fresh and Happy Belly brands. Think milk, ground beef, bagels, and brownies — available both online and in Amazon Fresh stores. The model mirrors Costco’s Kirkland playbook, but wired into Prime, logistics, and Whole Foods shelf space.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Private label isn’t about cinnamon rolls, it’s about traffic and data. By embedding its own SKUs across digital and physical stores, Amazon can undercut incumbents, steer Prime loyalty deeper into daily spend, and weaponize retail data for everything from logistics to ads. The bigger story: when a tech giant invades low-margin groceries, it isn’t chasing markup, it’s chasing dominance of consumer habit.

⛵ Key takeaway: This isn’t bread and butter, it’s Amazon turning pantries into platform lock-in.

BCI

VisionSys Turns From Brainwaves to Blockchain Bets

👀 What’s the move: VisionSys AI, originally a neurotech company focused on brain–computer interfaces and AI-driven medical systems, just announced a $2B Solana treasury initiative with Marinade Finance. The plan is to stake $500M in SOL within six months, with the eventual goal of scaling to $2B. The market wasn’t convinced, shares fell nearly 40% on the news, despite being up more than 200% year-to-date.

💡 Why it’s not boring: VisionSys’s core model has been high-risk, long-cycle medical AI, with products that take years to commercialize and generate limited near-term cash. By suddenly pivoting into Solana staking, it is effectively trading research bets for financial engineering, hoping blockchain yields can cover a weak balance sheet. For the broader market, this highlights how public companies under pressure may rebrand speculative treasury plays as “strategic AI-Web3 integration,” blurring the line between technology roadmaps and balance-sheet arbitrage.

⛵ Key takeaway: A neurotech firm turning into a Solana treasury shop shows how quickly “AI strategy” can morph into “yield strategy” when capital runs thin.

STARTUP SPOT

🧠 Oneleet
“Security-first compliance stack.”
Automates SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA with integrated pentesting + vCISO services.
→ YC S22; hit $6M ARR in 19 months; backed by YC; growing as end-to-end cybersecurity + compliance platform.

📊 Axiom
“LLMs trained on math.”
Models focused on formal proofs to power reasoning for finance, quant, and risk use cases.
→ Founded by Stanford math PhDs; raising ~$50M (2025) at ~$300M valuation; pre-product, targeting hedge fund adoption.

🔎 Feedzai
“AI RiskOps for finance crime.”
Fraud, AML, KYC detection across banking and payments with real-time AI.
→ Founded 2011 in Portugal; protects 1B users and ~$8T annually; acquired Demyst, powers ECB digital euro fraud monitoring; backed by Mastercard + global banks.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Oneleet raised $33 million to replace traditional “compliance theater” with an integrated security compliance platform, taking on rivals like Vanta.
Intel is in talks to make AMD’s older chips, a deal that could validate Intel’s foundry push but remains uncertain given their fierce rivalry.
Caterpillar surged to record highs as its power turbines became an unexpected winner from AI’s soaring data center energy demand.
Universal and Warner near AI licensing deals that would apply a streaming-style payment model for using songs in training and generating music.
The European Central Bank picked Portuguese AI risk management firm Feedzai to handle fraud detection for the digital euro.

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