Aug 4, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ OpenAI Raises $8.3B

More Stories: Apple’s New Bot, Mistral Fuels AI Wars

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

When payment rails censor art, chatbots get recycled, and AI valuations float higher than reality, you start to wonder who's really programming whom.

FUND

OpenAI Raised 83 Billion to Build an Empire

👀 What’s the move: OpenAI just raised $8.3B at a $300B valuation—well ahead of schedule. The round was led by Dragoneer with a $2.8B check, joined by Blackstone, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. Originally planning to raise this tranche by year-end, OpenAI accelerated the timeline as investor FOMO hit a fever pitch.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just a cash grab—it’s a reshuffling of power. By sidelining early backers in favor of new giants like Blackstone and Dragoneer, OpenAI is building a war chest and a political moat. This cap table now reads like a future Fortune 10 AI oligarchy. Between federal contracts and Microsoft synergies, they’re not just playing to scale—they’re playing to govern.

⛵ Key takeaway: OpenAI isn’t raising money—it’s drafting a board of kings for the AI empire.

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Apple Builds a Bot It Said Nobody Wanted

👀 What’s the move: After years of shrugging off chatbots, Apple has finally spun up an internal “AKI” team to build its own ChatGPT-style search interface. The goal? Retrofit Siri and Safari with real-time, web-crawling answer capabilities—something Google and OpenAI have been doing for over a year.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Apple once dismissed chatbots as gimmicky. Now it’s quietly hiring the same Siri engineers it sidelined to build... a chatbot. The pivot reveals more than a late product roadmap—it’s an admission that Apple Intelligence can’t fake it without a true LLM-native layer. And if Cupertino’s betting on its own answer engine, it may also be preparing to ditch OpenAI under the hood.

⛵ Key takeaway: Apple skipped the chatbot hype cycle—and may have missed the data flywheel too.

FUND

Mistral Targets $1B at $10B Valuation Amid AI Arms Race

👀 What’s the move: French AI startup Mistral is raising another $1B, doubling its valuation to $10B just months after launching Le Chat and Europe’s first “reasoning” model. MGX from Abu Dhabi is reportedly circling the round, joining U.S. backers like a16z and Nvidia.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just Euro pride—it’s trench warfare. Mistral is Europe’s best shot at staying in the AI game without becoming a satellite of Silicon Valley or Beijing. The money isn’t just fuel—it’s armor in a zero-sum contest for model supremacy, compute access, and regulatory influence.

⛵ Key takeaway: The AI war is global, and Mistral just loaded another clip—next stop, sovereignty or surrender.

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🧠 SmartRecruiters
“Agentic AI replaces ATSes.”
AI-native hiring platform with AI matching, candidate engagement, auto outreach, predictive analytics, dynamic scheduling. Operates global scale via Winston + SmartOS engine, GDPR/compliant AI control.
→ Founded 2010 by Jérôme Ternynck in San Francisco; 4,000+ enterprise customers (Amazon, Visa, McDonald’s); $71M revenue in 2024 (+51% YoY) with ~700 employees. Acquired by SAP announced Aug 1 2025, closing Q4 ’25; embeds into SuccessFactors HCM suite while remaining available standalone; last valued ~$1.5B based on $225M funding.

🌐 VAST Data
“AI OS for Exabyte‑scale thinking.”
Unified platform combining storage, database, compute, namespaces & agent runtime—built for real‑time, agentic AI workloads using its DASE architecture.→ Delivers TB/s access across global spine; InsightEngine/AgentEngine support pipelines and workflow agents.
→ Founded 2016 by Renen Hallak & ex‑XtremIO/Dell EMC leaders; $380M raised, valued at $9.1B in Dec 2023—new funding talks with Nvidia & CapitalG could raise valuation toward $30B in 2025; ARR $200M as of early ’25, projecting $600M next year; cash‑flow positive with gross margin ~90%.

💻 Mistral AI
“Europe’s open-source LLM pioneer.”
Multi-size, Apache‑licensed large language models (Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, Mistral Small 3.1, Magistral, Devstral) built for efficient reasoning, code & multilingual tasks → rival GPT‑4 performance on benchmarks, available via API & open weights.
→ Founded Apr 2023 in Paris by DeepMind/Meta veterans Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample & Timothée Lacroix; backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Nvidia, Eric Schmidt, BNP Paribas, Salesforce; raised €105M seed.

BAY AREA MEMOS

New details show how Google's $2.4 billion deal with Windsurf benefited its founders and VCs at the expense of most employees.
Vast Data is in talks with CapitalG and Nvidia for a new funding round that could more than triple its valuation to $30 billion.
SAP is set to acquire the AI-powered talent acquisition platform SmartRecruiters to enhance its human capital management suite.
AI chip startup SiMa.ai raises $85 million in a Series C round led by Maverick Capital to scale its edge computing technology.
AI's economic contribution is undervalued by $97 billion when accounting for the surplus value provided to users, a new analysis suggests.

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