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Top Signals: All Eyes on Friday’s CPI & Diesel Just Broke Its Record

Big Movers: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra, Apple CEO handoff, Anthropic Fable 5.1, Figure-Nscale humanoid cloud, & Uber layoffs

Open Deals: Thinking Machines $1B at $40B, Polymarket $1B at $21B, & XDOF $1.2B Series B

Mega Rounds: Nvidia-MediaTek $3.5B, Crusoe $3B at $30B, Wonderful $550M at $5B, Gimlet $300M, & Upwind $300M

Exit Watching: Nvidia-Hugging Face $12.93B, Delivery Hero-Uber $15B, PlusAI SPAC, Console-Palo Alto, & GoPro-Starman

The Funding Buzz: HUMAIN $10B+ AI fund, Swish Ventures $250M, crypto VC late-stage crowding, & Thrive’s FIFA fallout

— Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business

Granola’s revenue motion runs on Attio. Here’s what that adds up to:

The hottest Signals & News To Watch This Week

Markets go into this holiday-shortened week split 50/50 on whether the Fed raises rates in September, a rare hike-not-cut setup. A hot 162K August jobs print (versus 55K expected) barely moved the odds, so Friday’s CPI and Thursday’s PPI become the deciders. New chair Kevin Warsh has made inflation his single focus, and prices have run above the 2% target for five years.

Why It Matters: A hike would lift the cost of the debt fueling the whole AI buildout, right as hyperscalers borrow heavily to fund data centers. For VCs and founders, higher-for-longer rates mean tighter late-stage capital and stingier valuations. For real estate, another leg up in borrowing costs squeezes deals that were already penciled on cuts arriving, not hikes.

US retail diesel hit an all-time high of $5.85 a gallon Friday, topping the $5.816 record from June 2022. The US conflict in Iran has choked refined-product flows from the Persian Gulf, while Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have shut supply. Those two regions made up roughly a third of global diesel exports in 2025, and US distillate stockpiles sit at record lows for this time of year heading into winter.

Why It Matters: Diesel moves nearly every physical good, so a record price funnels straight into the cost of everything consumers buy. That feeds the exact inflation reading the Fed is watching this week, tightening the hike case. For anyone modeling 2026 costs, from logistics-heavy startups to real estate operators, this is a direct hit to margins and a fresh inflation risk few had priced.

Big tech moves, movers and trends to watch this week

OpenAI’s AGI Moment — OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its first AGI-level model, scoring 98.6% on ARC-AGI-3 and running computer and browser tasks autonomously at $10/$50 per million tokens.

Apple CEO debut — Apple’s new CEO John Ternus hyped a Sept. 9 iPhone launch and pipeline beyond. Outgoing Tim Cook warned of a memory-chip pricing “hundred-year flood” driven by AI data centers in his final earnings call; Musk agreed.

Fable 5.1 — Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, cutting costs up to 45% on agentic tasks; early testers call it the top coding model, after an 18-day export-control outage.

Cloud muscle for humanoids — California humanoid robotics firm Figure secured at least $3.5B in AI cloud compute from Nscale, scalable past $6B.

Strive’s bitcoin play — Investment firm Strive could become the second-largest public Bitcoin holder by end-2026 as shares hit $26.84, nearing warrant exercise price.

Robinhood Chain’s breakout — Robinhood Chain apps hit a record $2.7M in 24-hour revenue, lifting Arbitrum‘s ARB ~30%; licensing now tops 35% of Arbitrum’s July income.

Reorg at Scale — San Francisco ride-hailing giant Uber is cutting 3,300 jobs (10% of staff), trimming managers 20%, and ending most remote work.

Open Funding Rounds or VC Fund Raises to watch this week

Forty-Billion Ask — Thinking Machines, Mira Murati‘s AI lab, is in talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation led by Accel, with revenue over $100M.

Prediction Market Windfall — Crypto prediction market Polymarket is raising $1B at a $21B valuation led by 1789 Capital (linked to Donald Trump Jr.), near Kalshi‘s $22B.

XDOF — Robot training-data startup XDOF, founded by UC Berkeley researchers, is raising a Series B at $1.2B just 3 months after its $70M Series A; 8VC leads.

Six Billion for Robot Brains — General Intuition is raising at a $6B pre-money valuation led by Valor and Point72, just weeks after a $320M round valued it at $2.3B.

Companies that raised money in the past week and why they matter

Nvidia backs MediaTek — Nvidia invested $3.5B in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek as part of a $3.9B bond offering to expand beyond GPUs.

Data Center Windfall — Data center developer Crusoe raised $3B at a $30B valuation led by Atreides and Valor Equity, after a $13B contract with Jane Street.

Cognition’s $47B Jump — AI coding startup Cognition is closing a $1B round at a $47B valuation after drawing $10B in investor interest.

Wonderful doubles to $5B — Israeli-Dutch AI agent platform Wonderful raised a $550M Series C led by Insight Partners, with Salesforce joining, at a $5B valuation.

Multi-chip unicorn — Multi-chip AI infrastructure startup Gimlet Labs raised $300M at a $3B valuation led by a16z, with Arm and Microsoft‘s M12 joining.

Upwind’s $3.8B bet — San Francisco AI cloud security startup Upwind raised $300M at a $3.8B valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Imaging Overhaul — US medical imaging platform Scan.com raised $220M ($90M equity led by Noteus Partners, $130M debt) to expand nationally.

Security Surge — AI security startup HiddenLayer raised $100M with ARR up 10x to tens of millions, as enterprise AI-security spend jumps 83% to $2.83B this year.

Cap Table Shuffle — AI assistant startup Town closed a $90M Series B at a $1B valuation led by Forerunner and Menlo; Index withdrew after rival Instinct objected.

Ring Computer — Bengaluru smart-ring maker Ultrahuman raised $70M at a $365M valuation from Qualcomm Ventures and Labcorp, targeting $200M revenue by Jan 2027.

Superluminal’s Obesity Play — Boston AI biotech Superluminal closed an oversubscribed $60M Series B led by BVF Partners for rare genetic obesity drugs.

Virtual Physicists — Cambridge AI physics lab Physical Superintelligence raised a $58M seed led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures to optimize data centers and discover physical laws.

Typewriter’s Gene-Editing Bet — Cambridge/Tokyo biotech Typewriter raised a $56M Series A led by AN Venture Partners and RA Capital for RNA-based in-vivo CAR-T.

Support Stack — St. Louis AI customer support platform Capacity raised a $54M Series E led by Kathy Ireland, after crossing $100M ARR.

Battle-tested bots — Israeli combat drone developer AITAN raised $41M to export tech proven across 500,000 operational flight hours to allies.

Guardio hits unicorn — Israeli consumer cybersecurity startup Guardio raised $40M at a $1.1B valuation, with Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport joining.

Decacorn in Six Months — San Francisco AI model-training startup AfterQuery hit a $3.2B valuation just 5 months after its $30M Series A, YC‘s fastest unicorn ever.

Hallucination hunter — Washougal, WA startup Resect AI emerged from stealth with $25M to catch LLM fabrications in real time.

Traffic cop for clouds — Sequoia-incubated Empirik spun out with $21M seed to predict infrastructure outages before they happen.

Undercover Bots — DC-based Aslan raised $20.8M to deploy AI agents with fake personas into encrypted criminal networks for US intelligence; 100 agents active.

Treasury Play — Publicly traded Solana treasury firm DeFi Development Corp eyes a $20M raise to buy more SOL, bringing holdings to 2.33M SOL.

Diameter Pay — San Francisco stablecoin payments startup Diameter Pay raised a $10M Series A co-led by CMT Digital and Lightspeed Faction to expand global dollar rails.

Hydrogen cargo boost — SF Bay Area startup Newlight raised $9M seed after cutting fuel 24% on an 8,500-mile test retrofitting diesel ships with hydrogen injection.

Back Doubles Down — French bitcoin treasury firm Capital B raised $8.8M from Adam Back to buy 376 BTC, lifting holdings to 3,521 BTC.

DeFi Insurance Gets Safer — Firelight, helping fintechs recover from DeFi hacks, raised $8M and expanded beyond XRP to bitcoin and XLM.

Mergers & Acquisitions and IPOs

The GitHub of AI — Nvidia will acquire New York open-source AI repository Hugging Face for $12.93B, nearly tripling its $4.5B 2023 valuation.

Delivery Hero’s $15B Exit — Berlin food-delivery platform Delivery Hero‘s board backed Uber‘s $15B takeover, doubling Uber’s global footprint outside China.

PlusAI SPAC — Santa Clara autonomous-trucking developer PlusAI will go public via a Texas Ventures Acquisition III SPAC in an $800M deal, raising $300M.

Console cash-out — AI IT help-desk startup Console sold to Palo Alto Networks for $500M after raising $29M from Thrive and DST.

Camera pivot — Action-camera maker GoPro will merge with Starman Optical for $285M ($1.14/share), wiping $92M debt while pivoting to defense and aerospace.

Rilo acquired — Indian marketing-intelligence startup Rilo acquired by Adobe in a licensing and talent deal; the $1M-funded firm had 10K users.

Open or upcoming IPOs to watch:

Nscale’s $103B runway — Nvidia-backed UK AI cloud provider Nscale claims $103B in contracted revenue ahead of a potential September IPO.

Wall Street Taps — Anthropic is close to naming Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as lead underwriters for its $2T IPO, with a filing expected next week.

Ring Theory — Finnish smart-ring maker Oura filed for an IPO seeking a $16B valuation after revenue hit $1.2B in nine months, with 5M paid subscribers.

Moonshot’s Hong Kong Play — Beijing AI startup Moonshot, maker of the Kimi model, filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO seeking $3B at a $50B valuation.

Kraken delays IPO again — San Francisco crypto exchange Kraken (parent Payward) pushed its US IPO to Q2 2027 at earliest amid tough market conditions.

VC & PE Activity To Watch

Saudi AI Accelerator — Saudi sovereign-backed HUMAIN will launch a global VC fund this year targeting $10B+, with offices in the US, UK, France, and Saudi Arabia.

Lightspeed — Seeking $600B funds in a secondary process dubbed Project Mercury to extend ownership of OpenAI and add a new commitment to Anthropic.

Khosla Ventures — Menlo Park VC is raising $5.5B across new funds in largest yet effort with $1B early-stage, $2B venture, $2.5B mature startup allocations.

Capital boost — Hyperliquid Strategies, a digital-asset investment firm, expanded its equity facility from $1B to $2.5B; has sold $647M in shares as of June 30 per filings.

Swish Shoots Again — Swish Ventures, ex-NBA player Omri Casspi‘s fund, closed a $250M third fund, lifting AUM to $800M after backing nine unicorns.

Consensus Trade — Truth Ventures‘ Varun Datta says crypto VCs crowding late-stage deals (57% of Q2 capital) miss the real alpha at founding stage.

Thrive’s FIFA fumble — Thrive Capital, led by Josh Kushner, defended its $4.2B bid for 20% of a proposed FIFA commercial entity that collapsed amid backlash.

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