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Omen AI adds liquid know-how in $16 million Aquatic Labs acquisition; plus, Northwood Space raises $375M Series C at a $2B valuation Nov 02, 2026

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Two startups tackling the data center water problem are joining forces in a $16 million deal.

Also, space infrastructure company Northwood Space on Monday said it had raised $375 million in a Series C round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth, valuing the company at $2 billion.

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Ex-Palantir execs launch Dream to build AI world models for construction; plus, Upwind raises $400M; and Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy Oct 30, 2026

Show notes

-Trained on 100 million square feet of building permits, dream wants to disrupt Autodesk with AI.

-The cloud security startup raised a Series C at a $3.8B valuation, instead of selling itself for the same price.

-Mintive was founded by two engineers who have been working on AI for decades through Google Brain, Coursera. It's platform promises to help IT easily control enterprise agents

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Fusion startups are giving the government shares in exchange for awards. Is it worth it? Oct 28, 2026

Show notes

Helion now has another $225 million to help speed development of its first fusion power plant, due to provide Microsoft with electricity in 2028.

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Matiks raises $10M to expand its math and puzzle gaming platform; AI delivers ‘zero financial payoff’ to most companies, plus, Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs Oct 27, 2026

Show notes

Matiks has introduced a new platform for users to create games using AI.

Also, "despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."

And Warhound, the brain child of Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerges from stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement.

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Helion could double output of its power plants; plus, startups don’t need to go viral to win customers; and Agent cloud startup Daytona hits $1B valuation Oct 26, 2026

Show notes

Helion now has another $225 million to help speed development of its first fusion power plant, due to provide Microsoft with electricity in 2028.

Also, at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, two founders and a VC discussed how to not just gain an early following but keep one.

And Daytona is building a cloud for agents that's like giving every agent its own computer. It has attracted founders of Stripe, Perplextity, Datadog, Mercor and others as angels, it says.

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The secret to fast startup growth isn’t early sales say top names in tech; plus, Rivian bought a world model startup to accelerate self-driving ambitions Oct 23, 2026

Show notes

At this year’s Disrupt, Lovable GTM lead Luke Arno, Polska’s Ben Broca, and Theory Ventures’ Tomasz Tunguz gave founders some tips on how to achieve true sales success in the first 90 days.

Also, EV maker Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a U.K. startup founded by veterans of the gaming and autonomous vehicle industries that uses AI to turn images and videos into lifelike 3D worlds.

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AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation; plus, Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI Oct 22, 2026

Show notes

Just 9 months after raising an $180 million seed round, Flapping Airplanes has landed $1 billion Series A for its mission to build AI models "without ingesting half the internet."

Also, startup Recursive has released Flint, a free, laptop-sized coding model built largely by its own AI research system, as an early test of AI that improves itself.

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Plants can speak using electricity, so this startup built an AI model to decipher their language Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

Electric Plant has built an AI-powered translator to help humans listen to what plants are saying with the subtle electricity coursing through their stems.

Also, OpenAI says it's adding Orchestra's team and technology to work on Rosalind, its AI model for life sciences research, and to its related Rosalind Workbench tool, a harness that aims to help researchers plan experiments and analyze results.

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Amazon is taking its biggest shot at Nvidia yet; plus, Town nabbed unicorn valuation, and Tolan snags $30M for its AI companion Oct 20, 2026

Show notes

Amazon wants to break Nvidia’s hold on PyTorch, the free toolkit used to build most AI apps, so that more developers run their apps on alternative chips like its own.

Also, AI assistant startup Town nabbed a unicorn valuation on Monday, announcing a $108 million Series B round co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

And AI companion app Tolan has raised another $30 million after attracting more than 250,000 active users.

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Veritas expands its anti-counterfeit chip to jewelry, trophies, and fragrance bottles; plus, Elorian’s first AI model wants to reason with images Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

Counterfeiters are getting better at replicating brands' marks and passing off dupes, known as "superfakes," as genuine items. A startup called Veritas wants to tackle the problem with its own chip that verifies goods.

Also, according to Elorian's evaluations, Glimpse outperforms even GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short-form video captioning, with competitive results on other visual reasoning tasks.

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