Trillions, Trials, & Test Flights

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 Anthropic: Nears $1T, Stops by the Vatican

Anthropic closed a $65B Series H at a $965B valuation, almost triple its February mark of $380B and a clean step over OpenAI's $852B. Run-rate revenue hit $47B, up from $30B earlier this year and $10B all of last year. Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia led. Claude Opus 4.8 dropped the same day, and the company is reportedly getting IPO-ready behind the scenes. Separately, co-founder Chris Olah was invited to the Vatican to speak at the rollout of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI, "Magnifica humanitas." His remarks: every frontier lab operates inside incentives that can pull against doing the right thing, and the world needs informed outside critics the incentives cannot bend. Worth reading in full. CNBC | Anthropic

🚀 SpaceX: Starship V3 Flies, Starlink Lands at American

Last Friday after we sent out our newsletter, SpaceX flew Starship V3 for the first time. 407 feet tall, 33 engines, brand-new launch pad, 20 mock Starlink satellites deployed midflight, and a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean before the planned ignition. The 12th test flight overall and the first of the new generation. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman flew in for it. This week, American Airlines announced Starlink will go on 500+ narrowbody jets starting Q1 2027. Gate-to-gate gigabit Wi-Fi on the largest airline in the world. Delta and JetBlue are watching. SpaceX filed its IPO prospectus last week at a $1.25T combined valuation. NPR | American Airlines

🤖 xAI: Grok V9-Medium Coming for Claude on Code

Elon posted Monday that xAI has finished training Grok V9-Medium. 1.5 trillion parameters, three times the size of the V8-Small that powers Grok today. Public release in two to three weeks. When asked about coding, Musk's reply was one line: "Much better at coding." xAI trained V9 on "a lot of Cursor data," the AI code editor used by engineers at OpenAI, Stripe, and Perplexity. Translation: xAI knows where Claude is strong and is aiming there. Claude leads coding right now. The coding AI war is the war. Techloy

🧬 Retro Biosciences: $1.8B for Reversing Aging

Retro Biosciences, the Sam Altman-backed longevity company building therapies to add ten years of healthy human lifespan, is now valued at $1.8 billion on its latest round. The company is targeting age-related disease at the cellular level using single-cell multi-omics and pooled perturbations, with a stated goal of becoming a generational pharma company. Frontier biotech, frontier compute, frontier capital. STAT

🦅 Perplexity: CNN Joins the Lawsuit Pile

CNN sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York, alleging the company scraped 17,000+ stories, photos, and videos to train its products without consent. First lawsuit CNN has filed against an AI company. The complaint also targets Perplexity's "Comet Plus" tier, which the network says falsely advertised access to CNN premium content after their licensing talks fell apart. Perplexity's response, in full: "You can't copyright facts." The Times, Dow Jones, and the New York Post are already in court against Perplexity. Time and Gannett took deals instead. The split is becoming the story. Variety

🏛️ Reflection AI: Open Superintelligence Lobby Lands in DC

Reflection AI, the open-frontier model lab founded by ex-DeepMind researchers including Misha Laskin, is opening a Washington presence and pitching the federal government on open-weight superintelligence as a national-security posture. The thesis: if the frontier is going to be open, the US should be the country leading it, not following it. Reflection's "Building Frontier Open Intelligence" thesis hits a town newly receptive to it. The Trump admin's quantum equity stakes this month already show DC writing checks to frontier compute. Open AI policy is the next round. Washington Post

👀 Watch List

🚁 Skydio: Dallas Goes Drone-First for 911

Dallas Police launched a Drone as First Responder program this week with eight Skydio X10s deployed from Fire-Rescue stations across the city. Two-minute arrival to any call within a two-mile radius, thermal imaging, ground loudspeaker, 360-degree obstacle avoidance. First operational use was day two: a DFR drone helped officers safely remove a man from Interstate 45. Training throughput target: three holding calls cleared per drone-hour. The drones flow through a $120.6M Axon contract, with another $10.3M added for counter-drone defense at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Dallas now runs offensive and defensive drone posture through one vendor stack. The procurement template the rest of the country will copy. As Dallas residents, we support this. DroneXL

⚛️ Quantinuum: The Quantum IPO Stress Test

Honeywell-backed Quantinuum filed to raise up to $1.05B at a $12.7B valuation on the Nasdaq under ticker QNT, the first real quantum computing IPO and not a SPAC. Public quantum stocks have ripped since late March (IonQ up 132%, D-Wave up 110%), the Trump admin just took equity stakes in D-Wave and Rigetti, and Quantinuum has its own $100M CHIPS Act check on the way. The question is whether QNT proves the trade or breaks it. Yahoo Finance

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Write the eulogy my closest friend would give at my funeral if I died this year. Then write the one they'd give if I died at 90. The gap between those two is my actual to-do list.

📚 Content

📈 SpaceX by the Numbers

Teslaconomics pulled the cleanest single-image summary of the SpaceX S-1 we've seen. $18.7B revenue, $6.6B EBITDA, Starlink at 61% of the mix, and $24.7B of cash sitting on the balance sheet to fund the next decade of build. Save the image. Read the breakdown.

🔬 Rare Footage: Inside PsiQuantum

Molly O'Shea got the only public look inside PsiQuantum's cleanroom, where the company is growing Barium Titanate on 300mm silicon wafers. They're the only ones doing it at this scale anywhere in the world. The footage is rare and the implication is bigger than quantum: the same photonics stack PsiQuantum is building for fault-tolerant quantum computing could replace copper inside AI data centers. The Commerce Department just put $100M of CHIPS Act money behind it. Watch the tour.

📊 The Best Sharpie on X

Natalie Fratto's Charts & Crafts is one of the best visual breakdowns on X right now. She takes complicated private market stories and turns them into a Sharpie, a piece of paper, and four minutes that land harder than any spreadsheet. We're all visual learners. Watch it.

🤝 Get in the Room

Private investing for (almost) everyone*

We are a curated network of exceptional angels, VCs, family offices, founders, and industry experts investing in pre-IPO companies. We back sharp operators and high-leverage deals. We move fast. We bring value. We don’t miss around the edges. Deals don’t wait. Neither do we.

*Vibes and values must be aligned. Must be an "accredited investor."