Oct 9, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ The $2B Prediction

Plus: Leasing the Grid, The AI Cash Register

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The next wave of disruption is not about building new tools, it’s about teaching them to think, trade, and transact on their own.

FINTECH

NYSE Parent Bets $2B on Power of Belief

👀 What’s the move: Intercontinental Exchange, the 70B dollar parent of the New York Stock Exchange, is investing up to 2B dollars in Polymarket, a blockchain-based prediction market where users place USDC wagers on real-world events. Along with the investment, ICE will distribute Polymarket’s sentiment data to financial institutions and work together on tokenization projects, effectively merging speculation-as-signal with traditional trading infrastructure.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This is not a random crypto gamble but ICE transforming public speculation into a new asset class of market intelligence. By legitimizing a platform once targeted by regulators, ICE is showing that prediction markets may become the next data feed Wall Street wants to control. For Polymarket, it marks both a regulatory comeback and a flood of institutional liquidity, turning a once-banned betting platform into a 9B dollar enterprise now connected to the same systems that power global futures trading. The line between “pricing expectations” and “shaping them” just got dangerously thin

⛵ Key takeaway: When the NYSE begins trading on sentiment, the crowd effectively becomes the new Bloomberg terminal.

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ENERGY

Base Power Rents the Future of Energy, One Battery at a Time

👀 What’s the move: In less than two years, Texas startup Base Power built one of the state’s largest battery networks and raised 1 billion dollars at a 3 billion valuation to take it national. Instead of selling home batteries, it leases them for under 1,000 dollars upfront, then charges a monthly subscription while locking users into buying electricity directly from Base Power for three years. Each battery, which is twice the size of a Tesla Powerwall but costs only a fraction of its price, can power a home for up to two days.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Tesla sells hardware while Base Power sells control. Its rent-and-resell model lets it aggregate thousands of home batteries into a virtual grid that trades energy back to utilities during peak demand, turning every household into an active energy node. This approach is not just cheaper power; it represents a distributed infrastructure model that could disrupt utilities, energy brokers, and even parts of Tesla’s clean-tech advantage.

⛵ Key takeaway: Base Power did not build a battery company; it built the Spotify of electricity, where owning the grid may matters less than owning the connection.

BITCOIN

Square Turns Every Café into a Bitcoin Node

👀 What’s the move: Square, the merchant arm of Block, has launched a full-stack upgrade for five million businesses that combines AI voice ordering for restaurants, smarter AI assistants with local insights, and a built-in Bitcoin wallet that allows sellers to accept, hold, and trade cryptocurrency directly from their point-of-sale systems. Square already processes more than two hundred billion dollars annually, and this expansion quietly rewires that payment network for both AI and Bitcoin.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This is not another simple fintech feature update. It is a coordinated move to merge AI-driven commerce with decentralized finance at real-world scale. By integrating conversational AI, payments, and self-custody into one system, Block is embedding Bitcoin into the daily operations of small businesses. The result pushes crypto out of the speculative zone and into the core of everyday transactions, a structural shift that traditional payment networks and banks will find impossible to ignore.

⛵ Key takeaway: Square did more than add Bitcoin to payments. It built the first AI-native retail network where every transaction can think and every dollar can decentralize itself.

STARTUP SPOT

💻 Relace
“The ops layer for AI coders.”
Builds retrieval and patch-merge infrastructure that lets coding agents edit massive repos autonomously and safely.
→ Founded by Preston Zhou & Eitan Borgnia (YC W23); raised $23M Series A (2025) led by a16z; now powering 40+ AI codegen startups including Magic Patterns and Lovable.

⚡ Base Power
“The home battery that pays you back.”
Installs grid-connected batteries that store cheap power, sell during peaks, and cut home energy costs through AI-driven optimization.
→ Founded 2023 by Zach Dell & Justin Lopas (ex-SpaceX); raised $200M Series B (2025) from a16z, Addition & Lightspeed; 25K+ homes online in Texas with Austin factory underway.

🛡️ Realm.Security
“Taming the chaos of security data.”
AI-native pipeline that filters, normalizes, and routes cybersecurity telemetry—cutting noise and SIEM costs without losing signal.
→ Founded by Peter Martin, Jeff Kraemer & Sanket Choksey; raised $5M seed (2024) from Accomplice and Glasswing; Boston-based, now claiming 80% log reduction for early enterprise clients.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Relace raised $23 million led by A16z to build the infrastructure foundation that powers production-ready AI coding agents.
Elon Musk agreed to settle a 128 million dollar lawsuit with four former Twitter executives over unpaid severance following his 2022 takeover of the company.
AST SpaceMobile partnered with Verizon to deliver satellite-based cellular broadband across the U.S., challenging SpaceX and T-Mobile.
SoftBank is acquiring ABB’s robotics unit for $5.375 billion, betting that “physical AI” will define the next phase of the information revolution.
Realm.Security raised $15M to use AI for streamlining and cutting costs in enterprise security data pipelines.

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