Filings, Fabs, & Frontal Lobes

👋🏽 Quick Welcome to New Readers 

The Markup is LFG Ventures' weekly read on the private markets. We cover the companies building the future across AI, defense, space, and frontier tech. Here's what each section is doing:

📈 Portfolio Pulse: the week's news across the companies we (and some of you) are invested in.

👀 Watch List: news on a short list of names we're tracking for future investments.

💬 Prompt: a practical new way to put AI to work.

📚 Content: what we're reading, watching, or learning this week.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🚀 SpaceX: The IPO Filing Is Here

SpaceX filed its S-1 IPO prospectus this week, kicking off what will be the most-watched IPO in a generation. The filing leans into AI, Starship, and the long arc of making humans multiplanetary. Right on cue, the company announced a 12th Starship test flight is on deck as it pushes toward operational cadence. The math is staggering: Starlink revenue, Starship contracts, and a defense business that keeps winning. Public markets are about to get their first real shot at the company that's been quietly running away with space, comms, and a growing slice of national security. TechCrunch | CNBC

🧠 Anthropic: Stainless, KPMG, & Karpathy

Three moves, one direction. Anthropic acquired Stainless, the API tooling company that powers SDKs for OpenAI, Meta, Cloudflare, and others. It also inked a partnership with KPMG to deploy Claude across the firm's 275,000 employees and embed it in audit, tax, and advisory workflows. Then it hired Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI cofounder and former Tesla AI lead, to run a new frontier research group. Distribution, enterprise, and talent. The order is the strategy. Anthropic | Anthropic | CNBC

🤖 OpenAI: Court Win, Compute Lock, & Money Moves

A busy week in San Francisco. The jury sided with OpenAI in the Musk trial, closing one of the most-watched chapters in the company's history. On the product side, OpenAI launched Guaranteed Capacity, a new offering that lets enterprise customers reserve dedicated compute on demand. And ChatGPT is getting deeper into personal finance, with new tools to help users budget, plan, and make sense of their money. The legal overhang is gone. The platform is widening. The wallet is next. CNBC | OpenAI | OpenAI

🧬 Neuralink: Any Region, Any Time

Neuralink unveiled a next-gen surgical robot that can reach any region of the brain, including deep structures previously off-limits. That opens the door to clinical work in Parkinson's, epilepsy, and depression, well beyond the motor cortex work the company is known for. The expansion of indications matters more than the hardware. Every new region unlocks a new patient population, a new payer dynamic, and a new shot at proving BCIs are not a science project. Paradromics is in the same race. Tech Times

🎒 Anduril: Voyager Goes to the Edge

Anduril introduced Voyager Gateway 1, a rugged edge compute platform built for the dismounted operator. Translation: a data center small enough to carry, hardened enough to fight. It runs Lattice and other defense AI workloads in the field, with no reliance on rear-area cloud. The trend is clear. Modern warfare is compute-bound, and the team that puts the most capable silicon closest to the trigger wins. Anduril keeps showing up where the next contract gets written. Anduril

⚡ Lambda: Powering Hudson River Trading

Lambda announced a partnership with Hudson River Trading, one of the most respected quant firms in the world, to power its research and development infrastructure. HRT trades against the smartest money on earth. They do not pick vendors casually. Lambda's GPU cloud is now sitting underneath some of the most demanding compute workloads in finance, alongside its existing footprint in AI labs. The customer roster keeps getting harder to argue with. Lambda

📊 Kalshi: Minnesota Picks a Fight

Minnesota moved to ban prediction markets, putting Kalshi squarely in the crosshairs of state regulators again. The state argues the contracts function as sports betting and run afoul of local gambling law. Kalshi's position has not changed: it is a CFTC-regulated federal exchange, and federal preemption applies. This is the next round of a fight that is going to play out state by state until the courts settle it. Every skirmish raises the profile. NPR

👀 Watch List

🛰️ Varda Space: W-6 Sticks the Landing

Varda's W-6 capsule reentered Earth's atmosphere and validated both autonomous navigation and its next-generation thermal protection system. That's a meaningful step for a company building the orbital pharmaceutical manufacturing thesis. Reentry is the hardest part of the loop, and Varda is now doing it on cadence. The dream of factories in orbit needs reliable downmass to be a business. They're building it, one capsule at a time. PR Newswire

🤖 Figure AI: 200 Hours, Zero Failures

Figure ran a 200-hour continuous livestream in a real warehouse, rotating several different humanoids through the shift to sort 249,560 packages with zero failures. The whole run was powered by Helix, Figure's in-house AI stack for perception and control. At the end of the shift, the robot ('Rose') stepped away from the line on her own. Pretty cool walk off. This feels like the ChatGPT moment for humanoids. Long-duration autonomy is the unlock that turns demos into a labor business. And the wildest part: this is the worst the technology will ever be. Figure

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

I want to build an audience around [topic or niche]. I have [X hours per week] to dedicate to it. What is the minimum viable content strategy that could make me a recognized voice in this space within 12 months? No vanity metrics. Just what actually builds real influence.

📚 Content

🕵️ Open-Source Palantir Just Showed Up

Someone built an open-source clone of Palantir and posted the whole thing on GitHub. Mass data ingestion, entity resolution, link analysis, the works. The good news: the surveillance stack is no longer locked behind a $200K seat license. The bad news: the surveillance stack is no longer locked behind a $200K seat license. Hard to decide whether to be impressed or unsettled. Probably both.

🦅 Palmer Luckey at the Reagan Library

Palmer Luckey laid out the full Anduril worldview in a wide-ranging talk at the Reagan Library. The "world gun store" frame stuck with us: stop trying to be the world's police, arm the allies who are willing to fight for themselves, and rebuild the American industrial base before it's too late. He's blunt on China, blunt on cost-plus contracting, and blunt on Big Tech's "Davos man" problem. Worth the full watch.

🎲 It Is OK to Be Wrong

A page from The Book of Elon worth keeping close: it is ok to be wrong, just don't be confident and wrong. Being wrong is part of the deal. Being loud about it before you check your work is the problem. Calibrate first. Conviction second.

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