🕶️ Mira Murati's $40B second act

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Good Friday, folks.

Accel is leading a $1B round into Thinking Machines at a $40B valuation. The AI lab Mira Murati launched barely a year ago does just over $100M in ARR. That's a 400x revenue multiple , and two co-founders, including Lilian Weng and Luke Metz, have already left for OpenAI.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Vague PIPs that burn runway
OpenAI walks from $1B Cursor revenue
Perplexity triples to $750M run rate
Flock's AI guardrail has an off switch

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The founder’s dashboard / Your quick roadmap

Rushin' Roulette
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FOUNDER BOARD

💳 $140B shift to pay-per-sale ads retools budgets and KPIs across funnels. tie spend to revenue.
🧩 3 moves turn forecasts into action by cost-sharing and piloting together and naming a tie-breaker, break group paralysis fast
🚐 Founder-built RV hits $20M, turn founder pain into product and win design-led buyers with a modern build.
🤖 68% of employees now ask AI before managers on routine work questions, turn managers into coaches to keep signal and trust.
🛠️ Vague PIPs burn 90 days of runway and team morale, replace talk with task lists before you start one this quarter.

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RUSHIN' ROULETTE

Five bullets of updates

🛡️ Meta is overhauling its social apps for teens after a $17 billion child-safety settlement, adding stricter age checks, tighter notification controls, and usage time limits. The move shows how a massive regulatory settlement can dictate product design, potentially lowering teen engagement while setting a new baseline for youth protections across consumer platforms.
🚚 Autonomous trucking software maker PlusAI is going public via an $800 million SPAC merger. The deal will give the company access to public capital markets to fund development and commercialization of its self-driving truck technology, and will test whether investors still support using an $800 million SPAC merger to finance capital-intensive autonomy bets.
🚀 AI answer-engine startup Perplexity triples revenue to $750 million and chases a $30 billion valuation ahead of a planned 2028 IPO. The deal talks with Nvidia and other investors show that capital is still flowing to AI platforms that can prove rapid revenue growth, even amid uncertain long-term user demand.
⚠️ AI chatbot providers OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok suffered a simultaneous outage that left many users unable to access tools. For startups building on these models, the incident exposes infrastructure single-point-of-failure risk and underscores the need for vendor redundancy, graceful degradation plans, and communication when critical AI services blink off without warning.
💡 Texas Republican lawmakers are moving to restrict large-scale data centers statewide, putting big technology companies’ Texas expansion plans at risk. If a historically pro-business state begins limiting the power-hungry infrastructure behind cloud computing and AI, other red states may follow, forcing operators to rethink where they place server farms and how they secure regulatory stability.

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STARTUP NEWS

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines: $40B, $100M, vibes

Photo by Oleg Illarionov on Unsplash

So how does $100M become $40B?

In case you've been living under a rock, Thinking Machines is the AI lab that ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati spun up, and it's about to pull off the flex of the year. Accel is reportedly leading a $1B round that stamps the company at $40B. Revenue? A run rate "over" $100M. That's a 400x multiple. In any other sector, that's Series A traction cosplaying as a decacorn.

Here's the wild part. This is the second act. The seed was $2B at $12B, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction all piling in. Late last year they wanted $50B. So $40B is technically a haircut. Let that sink in.

Meanwhile, on the talent layer… the founding bench is thinning. Co-founders Lilian Weng and Luke Metz already bounced back to OpenAI. The AI talent loop keeps looping.

Why should you care?

Because you're building on top of these models. Inkling and its Tinker platform charge usage-based compute fees, and those costs land straight in your unit economics. My advice? Stay model-agnostic, build for provider switching, and turn proprietary-data fine-tuning into a product, not a cost center. The premium compute party won't last forever.

Read Full Story

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STARTUP TV

Why unprofitable startups are popular again

💡 Investors want startups to lose money again.
After 2023 punished unprofitable companies, the script has flipped. In this episode, Caya breaks down why profitability suddenly matters less — and how AI has reshaped fundraising so that more money is flowing to fewer startups.

We explain the current funding cycle, why milestones matter more than burn right now, how seed and pre-seed rounds quietly ballooned into old-school Series A sizes, and what founders actually need to optimize for if they plan to raise again.

If you’re fundraising this year, this video is about knowing which currency investors care about — and when that inevitably changes.

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BIG TECH NEWS

OpenAI walks from $1B Cursor deal, chases Musk instead

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

The AI Cold War just got a body count, and it is measured in billions.

Who walks away from a billion dollars?

OpenAI does. In a plot twist ripped straight from a divorce thriller, OpenAI just torched its partnership with Cursor, the AI coding darling pumping over $1 billion in annualized revenue into its coffers. Why? Because SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion, and Elon Musk's name on the cap table is apparently kryptonite.

So this was overnight. Early 2026, Cursor sat comfortably as a top-five OpenAI customer. Then the acquisition closed, and OpenAI walked away from the deal, citing Musk's courtroom admission that xAI trained on OpenAI models. Trust, once burned, does not renew.

Why didn't Anthropic flinch?

Because Anthropic reportedly owes SpaceX $45 billion in data-center capacity. Claude keeps flowing to Cursor. Funny how leverage rewrites loyalty.

Here's the takeaway for you. If your primary AI vendor is Musk-adjacent, or your acquirer might be, your valuation just caught a haircut nobody priced in. Architect every API endpoint like it could vanish tomorrow, because now it can.

The lesson, ahead of OpenAI's 2026 IPO: strategic non-entanglement now outranks revenue. In this war, a billion dollars is just the tip you leave on the table when you storm out.