Stripe confirmed on Wednesday that it was buying OpenRouter. While the company didn’t disclose the deal price, sources told the New York Times that it paid $7.5 billion. That’s a huge step up from OpenRouter’s $1.3 billion valuation in May. To put that price in context, the founders alone will reportedly receive $1.5 billion from the
In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some unexpected things to say about his venture capital rivals on the West Coast. “It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,” Kushner wrote about AI in the letter, leaked to Bloomberg. “It would also be a grave error in our minds to
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises. The CEO, who famously studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, implied in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these were the kinds of capitalists who gave rise to Marxist socialism. “There are Marxist overtones and
The Malaysian government has ordered the shutdown of a startup-centric community called the Network School, according to The Wall Street Journal. Billing itself as “a frontier community for techno-optimists,” the Network School reportedly grew out of entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan’s conviction that the United States is in irreversible decline; Srinivasan has said his goal
Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines, announced this week that she was stepping down from her role, citing health concerns. “I don’t feel like I can continue at the pace a startup requires,” he wrote in an internal Slack message, which he also shared on X. “After thinking about it for several months, I finally
When Microsoft reported excellent earnings in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026 year (which ended June 30), it included an interesting little tidbit about how its investments in the two largest and competing AI labs are faring. For the quarter, it recorded its investment in Anthropic as a gain of $3.2 billion, increasing diluted
