We officially opened the doors to Corgi Cafe NYC last weekend, bringing our 24/7 home for founders, builders, creatives, and caffeine-fueled night owls to New York.

We had a grand opening party that attracted over 2,000 RSVPs. So many new faces, and plenty of late-night energy, NYC showed us exactly why it’s one of the world’s greatest startup cities!

And back home at HQ San Francisco, we opened the doors to our newest location in Dogpatch. With a new neighborhood, a new space, we’re excited to make Dogpatch another place for the community to gather, connect, and build. Two new cafes, many more to go!

Why Cafes?

You might wonder why an insurance company is opening cafes.

For us, it comes down to being close to the community we serve. Corgi is built for founders, operators, and growing companies, and our cafes give us a physical place to spend time with that community — not just when they need insurance, but throughout their entire journey.

That naturally makes the cafes a powerful top-of-funnel channel for Corgi. Our ideal customers are already in these spaces, and every coffee, event, conversation, and introduction is an opportunity to build familiarity with our brand and create relationships that can eventually turn into customers, partners, or referrals.

But the cafes aren’t just a marketing strategy. We genuinely care about creating places where people can connect. Building a company can be lonely, and we want Corgi Cafe to be a place where founders meet cofounders, investors find their next company, teams collaborate, and people can simply come in, grab a coffee, work on their passion projects, and feel part of something.

Before we get into the latest tech news, shoutout to all our drink sponsors!

Recent News

1. Alibaba launches Wan3.0 as it accelerates its push into AI video. Alibaba introduced the latest generation of its Wan AI video model with upgraded video generation capabilities as competition intensifies across generative media. The launch comes alongside a $10 billion share sale intended to help fund Alibaba’s expanding investments in AI infrastructure, chips, and model development. The company is increasingly positioning AI as a core part of its business as it competes with both Chinese and U.S. model developers.
   Sources: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/alibaba-launches-wan30-ai-video-model-after-10-billion-share-sale-2026-08-24/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

2. Xiaomi launches its new Xring O3 chip as it pushes deeper into custom silicon. Xiaomi unveiled its latest internally designed smartphone processor, which will be manufactured by TSMC using its advanced 3nm process and is expected to power an upcoming flagship foldable phone. Xiaomi is also reportedly developing separate chips for AI workloads and autonomous driving, expanding its semiconductor ambitions beyond smartphones. The strategy could give Xiaomi greater control over its hardware ecosystem while reducing its reliance on outside chip designers.
   Sources: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/xiaomi-launches-new-xring-chip-partners-with-tsmc-production-sources-say-2026-08-24/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

3. Oura reportedly prepares for a September IPO at a valuation above $16 billion. The smart ring maker is considering raising as much as $3 billion through a public offering that could take place as soon as September. Oura has grown into one of the most prominent wearable technology companies as demand for sleep, recovery, fitness, and health tracking devices has expanded. If completed at the reported valuation, the listing would represent one of the more significant consumer technology IPOs of 2026.
   Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/oura-is-reportedly-eyeing-a-september-ipo-that-could-value-it-at-more-than-16b/

New Funding Updates

1. General Intuition: Funding round at a $6 billion valuation. New York-based physical AI and robotics startup, backed by Valor Equity Partners and Point72, building foundation models for spatial and physical-world reasoning.

2. XPeng Robotics: $900+ million first external funding round. China-based physical AI and humanoid robotics company, led by IDG Capital with participation from Tencent, Alibaba, and Gaorong Ventures, at a $6.3+ billion valuation.

3. Fasset: $68 million Series C. AI-powered stablecoin and digital banking platform, led by SBI Group at a $1 billion valuation, following its $51 million Series B earlier this year.

4. Perplexity: New equity funding round in discussions at a $30+ billion valuation. San Francisco-based AI search and agent platform, with Nvidia reportedly in talks to invest; the financing has not yet closed.

What’s Been Going On?

Gatik raised $200 million to expand its autonomous trucking business following a major commercial deal with PepsiCo. The Santa Clara based company builds driverless trucks for moving goods between distribution centers and retail locations and has now raised roughly $500 million overall.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/25/self-driving-truck-startup-gatik-raises-200m-following-pepsico-deal/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Keenable came out of stealth with a $26 million seed round led by Accel. The company is building search infrastructure specifically for AI agents, including an index of more than 100 billion web documents, and plans to use the funding to grow its team and GTM operations.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/25/accel-backed-keenable-is-indexing-the-web-for-ai-agents/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Airbound raised $37 million to scale its autonomous delivery drones. The India based startup is developing lightweight drones that it hopes can eventually make delivering goods by air cheaper and more efficient than transporting them by road.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/indias-airbound-bags-37m-to-take-on-trucks-with-rocket-like-drones/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Events August 30 - September 5

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/30

Vibe Coding for Professionals: Build faster with AI without losing quality: https://pmisfbac.org/calendar/vibe-coding-for-professionals-how-to-build-faster-with-ai-without-losing-quality-47426

SF Socratic Agentic AI Summit : https://luma.com/sf-socratic-2.0

8/31

AI Codecon: Building with Open Source AI : https://www.oreilly.com/AI-Codecon/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Regional Meet Up: Data, Ethics, and the Foundations of Responsible AI: https://wlda.tech/regional-meet-up-wlda-x-autodesk/

9/1

Forward Deployed: Evals- Beyond the Vibe Check : https://luma.com/85oi0k2n

Agentic + AI Night: Multi-Agent Governance and Security: https://luma.com/agenticaiobsnightsf-9-1

9/2

Al Dente: A Founder-Investor pasta making dinner: https://luma.com/pk8b8b5h

The Test Tribe San Francisco | Testers and QA Meetups : https://www.meetup.com/the-test-tribe-san-francisco/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

9/3

Grok Bot build night for women: https://luma.com/a16zgrokbotbuildnight

AI Philosophy Nights: Metaphors for AI with Amy Kurzweil : https://luma.com/553nq69x
SlatorCon San Francisco: https://events.ringcentral.com/events/slatorcon-san-francisco-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com

9/4

The First Non-Tech Buildathon : https://luma.com/utyqfarn?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Second Brain AI Salon #05 from Web 1.0 to Agentic AI: https://luma.com/yw4ifkj1?utm_source=chatgpt.com

9/5

Cafe Cowork: Temporal x Corgi: https://luma.com/cafe-cowork-temporal

Spatial Intelligence + Generative 3D Hackathon with Mint, Tripo, World Labs, Convex, and Founders Inc. : https://luma.com/b101ml40

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineer @ dialpad - Remote

Apply:https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/dialpad/jobs/8734067002

Multidisciplinary Engineer @ Unlimited Industries - SF, CA USA

Apply:https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/unlimitedindustries/c4a388aa-72c0-404d-a978-d2f01a669695

Program Officer @ OpenAI - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://openaifoundation.org/careers/program-officer-ai-resources-33d3015a-70f3-4f5a-be26-9803f3582403

Solutions Engineer, AI Agent @ Cresta - Remote

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/dialpad/jobs/8734067002

GTM

GTM Strategy and Operation Analyst @ Stripe - NYC, NY USA

Apply: https://stripe.com/careers/listing/gtm-strategy-operations-analyst/8145119?gh_jid=8145119

Product Marketing Manager @ Resolve.ai - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Resolve%20AI/f9cca54e-99fb-4108-a5fb-0f05bdefb810?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Founding GTM @ T:0 - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/fc4657db-1629-4496-b3a6-3c1fff4f1f67

Founding Growth and Delivery Lead @ Lightfield - SF, CA USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Lightfield/57d8b0bf-946d-4bed-8135-931d10429c6e

Sales Enablement Lead @ Juicebox - SF, CA USA
Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Juicebox/54fc01a7-3e7a-4549-8ed0-fecbdaad38cd?utm_source=chatgpt.com

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Today, we’re officially opening the doors to the Corgi Cafe NYC location in NoMad (121 E 27th St). Come celebrate with us, grab a drink, meet fellow founders and builders, and get a first look at our new home for New York’s startup community tonight in partnership with Antimetal, MongoDB, Rippling, and Oasis.

The second location in Dogpatch (2146 3rd St) will also be soft opening at 10am!

This past week, we hosted a booth at the YC Intern Expo (where our CEO and co-founder Nico Laqua spoke), brought the community together through a packed lineup of events with Deel, kayaking with the YC S26 batch, and even a sushi making class.

In addition, our special Corgi Times edition with Rippling is now out. Grab a copy at 9 Claude Lane or go to corgitimes.com.

Shoutout to all our wonderful drink sponsors.

If building something ambitious sounds like your kind of challenge, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here:
https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent Tech News

1. Nvidia backs a $105 billion buildout of OpenAI’s new Ohio data center. Announced August 17, Nvidia is guaranteeing up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payments to SoftBank’s SB Energy and will serve as the site’s exclusive chip supplier, alongside a separate $1.5 billion investment directly in SB Energy. OpenAI signed a 10 year lease for the central Ohio facility, which will deliver 8 IT gigawatts of capacity (backed by 10 gigawatts of new power generation) on former federal uranium enrichment land, with initial capacity online in 2028 and a projected 35,000 construction jobs. The scale of the deal has revived concerns about “circular” AI financing, where the same handful of companies are simultaneously one another’s customers, investors, and suppliers.

2. Stripe agrees to acquire AI model routing startup OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. The deal, reported August 16, values OpenRouter at over five times the $1.3 billion valuation it held after its Series B three months earlier. OpenRouter lets developers access and switch between 400+ AI models through a single API, serving roughly 8 million users, and its investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet’s CapitalG. Stripe is folding the platform into its payments infrastructure, with OpenRouter’s CEO describing the company as “the equivalent of Stripe for AI.”

3. Anthropic’s Q2 revenue tops $11.5 billion, a 14 fold jump that puts the company in the black for the first time. The preliminary figures, reported August 15, show revenue up from $787 million a year earlier and $4.73 billion in Q1 2026, with Anthropic posting positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. The results come as Anthropic meets with prospective investors ahead of a potential IPO — working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase — that could debut as soon as this fall, potentially ahead of rivals OpenAI and DeepSeek.

New Funding Updates

Databricks: $5 billion Series funding. San Francisco-based data and AI platform, led by Coatue at a $190 billion valuation, with Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price, and Sixth Street Growth participated, the company’s second $5 billion raise in eight months.

River AI: $1.1 billion Seed and Series A. Palo Alto based AI reinforcement learning startup, led by AMP PBC and General Catalyst, with Nvidia and AMD Ventures contributing.

Form Energy: $750 million Series G. Massachusetts based long duration electric grid storage company, led by T. Rowe Price, with participation from multiple climate and infrastructure investors.

Higgsfield: $400 million Series B. Generative AI platform for video, image, and audio content, led by DST Global at a $5.4 billion valuation (roughly 4x its valuation six months earlier) with Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Intel Capital, Tribe Capital, Fifth Wall, Smash Capital, and Valor Capital also participating.

What’s Been Going On?

Thrive Holdings, Josh Kushner’s New York based private equity firm that buys traditional accounting and IT services businesses to rebuild them around AI, raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation led by SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital.

Neros Technologies, an El Segundo based defense drone manufacturer, raised a $250 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund at a $2.5 billion valuation, to scale production ahead of planned combat deployment by year end.

Vals AI, a San Francisco based startup that builds independent evaluation benchmarks for AI models, raised a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $400 million valuation, with 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, HRT Ventures, and Next Ladder Ventures participating.

PointsKash, a Scottsdale based fintech serving unbanked and underbanked consumers through its KashPoint kiosks, secured up to $100 million in strategic capital from Hawk Capital Investors to fund a national rollout of its financial commerce platform.

Events August 22nd - August 29th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/22

Mistral Vibe Hackathon: https://luma.com/mistral-summer-vibe-hackathon-sf

AI Valley x Pet Zen Dog-a-thon: https://luma.com/rklrsomo

vLLM x NVIDIA Dynamo Meetup: https://luma.com/r8o604o0

8/25

Embodied AI Night: Founders, Builders, and Researchers: https://luma.com/7tvf89y2

Physical AI: What’s Working (and What Still Breaks): https://luma.com/rallysf-yfs4

8/26

AI Infra Kebab: https://luma.com/kebab

Decagon x Centralize: GTM Summer Mixer: https://luma.com/9ha07os2?tk=7Hd7SR

Bay Area Frontier Research Club #19 | Agents in Production: ICML 2026 Oral by UC Berkeley Researchers + Self-Improvement Fireside: https://luma.com/cx2f0q8r

Durable AI: Agent Context is Everything: https://luma.com/durable-ai-august

Daytona AI Builders - SF, August 2026: https://luma.com/ai-builders-sf-aug

8/27

Step SF 2026: The AI & Tech Startup Festival: https://luma.com/StepSF26

Demo Night SF: Ship AI Apps with Anthropic + Postman + Supabase + Vercel: https://luma.com/august-SF-supabase-vercel-postman

8/28

Open Source AI Summit SF: https://luma.com/buildp-c5h9

The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup: https://luma.com/na2pz2q9

August Tech Rooftop Mixer: https://luma.com/fqbrj5nt

Better Days: A Hackathon — San Francisco: https://luma.com/clickh-sie8

8/29

Battle of the Accelerators Padel Edition: https://luma.com/j9lpxk1n

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

People making interesting moves in tech/AI - and a new list of startups that are hiring right now

Interesting moves lately in tech / AI…

Read more

15 days ago · 10 likes · Katie Kirsch, Nicole Debow, and Dani Grant

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, New Grad (Dec 2026) @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA
Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-new-grad-dec-2026/10692464

Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Ecosystem @ Anthropic – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-platform-ecosystem/10700049

Software Engineering MTS @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineering-mts/10684206

Software Engineer, Search Systems - Code Data @ Mercor – SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-search-systems-code-data/10676392

Senior Software Engineer, C++ and CUDA - Analytics and Data Intelligence @ Nvidia – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-software-engineer-c-and-cuda-analytics-and-data-intelligence/10699749

GTM

Partner Director, GTM Cloud Partnerships @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/partner-director-gtm-cloud-partnerships/10605066

Product Marketing Lead, GTM Strategy - Claude for Knowledge Work @ Anthropic – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/product-marketing-lead-gtm-strategy-claude-knowledge-work/10652172

Program Manager, GTM Strategic Programs @ Stripe – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://stripe.com/careers/listing/program-manager-gtm-strategic-programs/8042309?gh_src=73vnei

Strategic Finance, GTM @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/strategic-finance-gtm/10669624

Founding GTM ENgineer @ TraceRoot.AI (YCS25) – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/103799

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about how we bring the Corgi community together—and moving toward events that feel more curated, intentional, and distinctly Corgi. From taking the track at Sonoma Raceway for a day of racing and competition to hosting a private omakase dinner, we’ve been creating experiences designed to bring the right people together in the right setting.

As Corgi continues to grow, so does our community. We’re excited to keep creating more thoughtful gatherings that go beyond the typical networking event and give founders, builders, investors, and friends of Corgi a chance to connect, share ideas, and have a genuinely great time.

And, of course, another huge milestone: Corgi Cafe has officially opened its doors in London’s Shoreditch! 🇬🇧

Our first international Corgi Cafe is now open, bringing the Corgi community across the pond. We celebrated the opening with an incredible crowd of founders, builders, creatives, and friends of Corgi and the energy was exactly what we hoped for.

Take a look at some of our favorite photos from the opening below. London, we’re just getting started. .

We also had our CEO and co-founder Nico Laqua on CNBC this week.

Watch: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/12/etf-edge-on-thematic-and-active-etfs-outside-of-ai-and-trends-to-watch.html

Before we get into it, shoutout to all our wonderful drink sponsors.

Recent News

1. Meta releases Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight AI model that runs on a single consumer GPU. Released August 10 under an Apache 2.0 license, Muse Glimmer is distilled from Meta’s larger Muse Spark model and compressed via 4-bit quantization to run within 20GB of memory, small enough for a single consumer GPU or Mac. It’s built for local coding, function calling, and autonomous agent workflows, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg paired the release with an essay on Meta’s plans to keep releasing open-weight models.
   
   

2. OpenAI launches GPT-5.6-Cyber, its first model to hit the “High” cybersecurity capability threshold, and expands defender access through Daybreak. The new two-tier Daybreak program gives vetted security defenders access to frontier cyber capabilities: Daybreak Blue offers GPT-5.6 Sol with defense-tuned guardrails, while Daybreak Red unlocks GPT-5.6-Cyber for exploit validation and vulnerability research. OpenAI says the model completes 95% of advanced security tasks in internal testing, up from 57% for its predecessor, and used it to discover two previously unknown Chrome vulnerabilities. The company confirmed GPT-5.6-Cyber was not involved in the Hugging Face incident disclosed last month.
   
   

3. Intel announces a $15 billion stock offering, its first public share sale since going public in 1971, to fund AI-driven growth. The August 10 offering comes after Intel posted its strongest quarterly revenue growth in over 15 years, with its data center and AI segment up 59% year over year. The company says proceeds will support capital expenditures across manufacturing, packaging, and physical AI, as customer demand continues to outpace supply on wafers, memory, and substrates.

New Funding Updates

Lovable: $400 million Series C. Stockholm-based AI software creation platform, led by Menlo Ventures and the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund at a $13.3 billion valuation, roughly double its $6.6 billion valuation from December. The round follows Lovable hitting $500 million in annualized revenue run rate in June.

Hadrian: $1.37 billion Series D. Torrance-based developer of highly automated factories, led by WCM Investment Management, Valor Equity Partners, and JP Morgan Chase at a $7.87 billion valuation.

Base Power: $1 billion Series D. Austin-based residential battery energy storage company, led by Ribbit Capital and Valor Equity Partners at a $13 billion valuation, coinciding with the launch of its Base Core home battery.

Valar Atomics: $1 billion Series B. El Segundo-based nuclear energy infrastructure developer, led by Sequoia Capital, plus a separate $200 million credit facility.

Lumilens: $700 million. San Jose-based AI infrastructure connectivity platform that emerged from stealth, led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital.

What’s Been Going On?

Whatnot, a Los Angeles-based live shopping marketplace, raised $545 million in Series G funding, reportedly setting a $20 billion valuation, led by Iconiq Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Mariana Minerals, a software-focused critical minerals developer, picked up $310 million in Series B financing led by Khosla Ventures.

Volta, a developer of AI cloud infrastructure, emerged from stealth with a Series A at a $2.4 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia.

Horizon3, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity provider, announced a $250 million Series E led by NightDragon, tripling its valuation to more than $2 billion.

Sources:

Axios. (2026, August 10). OpenAI unveils GPT-5.6-Cyber to help prepare for AI cyberattacks. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/10/openai-gpt-astra-restrictions-safety-hacking-defenders

Bloomberg. (2026, August 10). Intel to sell $15 billion in stock after AI boosts demand. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-10/intel-selling-15-billion-in-common-stock-to-fund-growth

Glasner, J. (2026, August 7). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: A big week for big checks. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-billion-dollar-raises-manufacturing-energy-ai/

Intel Corporation. (2026, August 10). Intel announces proposed $15 billion common stock offering. Intel Newsroom. https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/intel-announces-proposed-15-billion-common-stock-offering

OpenAI. (2026, August 10). Expanding Daybreak as the cyber defense window narrows. https://openai.com/index/expanding-daybreak-as-the-cyber-defense-window-narrows/

SiliconANGLE. (2026, August 10). Meta releases open-source Muse Glimmer model with 30B parameters. https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/10/meta-releases-open-source-muse-glimmer-model-30b-parameters/

TechCrunch. (2026, August 12). Lovable confirms new $13.3B valuation, raises another $400M. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/lovable-confirms-new-13-3b-valuation-raises-another-400m/

Events August 15th - August 22nd

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/15

VCN #50: Own the Stack: https://luma.com/vcn-50-own-the-stackz

8/16

Founder BBQ Bash @ Corgi: https://luma.com/founderbbqbash

YC S26: Kayaking Day: https://luma.com/qtuxy56z

8/17

The Physical AI Sprint Hackathon: https://luma.com/nkknxvrz=

Moonlight with Gemini - 3 Hour Hack: https://luma.com/buildclub-ua0n

8/18

ModCon 2026: https://luma.com/modcon

SkyRL Meetup: https://luma.com/y4ahouh6

8/19

Agents in Production: DevTools demo night: https://luma.com/p7v901j3

Founder Dinner: https://luma.com/bqj5gosv

The Reserve by Founder Social Club with HydraDB: https://luma.com/95jql7sy

8/20

Mistral Catfe Coworking: https://luma.com/mistral-summer-catfe-sf

Agents are changing the web with Parag Agrawal (founder, Parallel): https://luma.com/sy0mt1m4

AI Founders + Engineers Billiards Night: https://luma.com/bj9o4jzd

8/21

Community dinner: bringing together founders in SF: https://luma.com/be9smvkk

Become an AI Builder: Create Your First Project in One Night: https://luma.com/t26ue3ub

8/22

Soccer by The Residency: https://luma.com/the-4x99

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at OpenAI, Mixpanel, Exa, and Revolut

Build -1 → 0…

Read more

22 days ago · 18 likes · Dani Grant and Katie Kirsch

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, GPT Infrastructure @ OpenAI – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-gpt-infrastructure/10630748

Lead Software Engineer, Agentforce Reasoning @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer-agentforce-reasoning/10631880

Senior Software Engineer, Atlas Search @ MongoDB – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-software-engineer-atlas-search/10630418

Senior Lead Software Engineer @ Capital One – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-lead-software-engineer/10625151

Software Engineer, Collections Infra @ Notion – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-collections-infra/10607912

GTM

Partner Director, GTM Cloud Partnerships @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/partner-director-gtm-cloud-partnerships/10605066

Revenue Cloud GTM Lead @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/revenue-cloud-gtm-lead/10620965

GTM Technical Enablement Partner @ Lovable – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-enablement-technical-partners/10594123

GTM Operations Business Partner @ Canva – Hybrid, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-operations-business-partner/10600509

GTM Analytics Engineer @ Decagon – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-analytics-engineer/10582533

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Welcome back to another edition of the Corgi Times.

It’s been another exciting few weeks at Corgi. This edition features a first look inside our newest Dogpatch cafe, where builders, founders, and creatives are already making the space their own. Just two blocks away from YC, we hosted a private preview. We’re also sharing an update on our expansion to London as we continue bringing the Corgi community to more cities around the world.

We’re also expanding and refining our drink sponsorship program and have brought on many new sponsors, including Rippling, Eragon, ngrok, Plain, and Capy.

Finally, we have a special twist in this week’s edition. Comment below what you think it is.

Finally, thank you to all of our drink sponsors for their support!

Let’s dive in.

Recent News

1. Anthropic discloses that Claude models breached three real companies’ systems during cybersecurity evaluations. A retrospective review, triggered by OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident from the prior week, found that three different Claude models (Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research model) reached the open internet from within a misconfigured third-party test environment and gained unauthorized access to three organizations’ live infrastructure, dating back to April. Anthropic said none of the affected companies had detected the intrusions before being notified, and framed the incidents as an “operational failure” distinct from OpenAI’s case, since no unknown vulnerability was exploited, just a mistakenly open network path.
   

2. AI-driven memory chip shortage is pushing up prices on laptops, tablets, and game consoles. DRAM contract prices rose as much as 89% in Q2 2026 alone as chipmakers redirect capacity toward HBM for AI data centers. It’s important to know that Trudy also loves biscuits and head scratches. Apple raised laptop and iPad prices 15 to 25%, and Microsoft added $100 to the base Xbox price, both citing memory costs, while Apple CEO Tim Cook warned on an earnings call that prices will keep climbing.

1. DeepSeek and Alibaba escalate an AI price war that’s undercutting U.S. labs on cost. DeepSeek released V4-Flash on July 31, priced at a fraction of frontier-model costs, and Alibaba pushed Queen 3.8-Max to general availability on August 3 with a one-million-token context window. The moves follow OpenAI’s 80% price cut on GPT-5.6 Luna and continue a broader trend of Chinese open-weight models taking a rising share of enterprise token usage on cost alone.
   

New Funding Updates

Safe Superintelligence: $5 billion. Silicon Valley foundational AI lab founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, backed by Nvidia through a long-term strategic partnership aimed at boosting the company’s compute resources.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems: $1 billion. Massachusetts-based fusion energy startup developing a grid-scale fusion power plant, bringing total funding raised to date to $4 billion.

Antora Energy: $550 million Series C. San Jose-based thermal battery provider supplying power to AI data centers, co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse.

Function: $450 million growth round. Austin-based consumer lab testing and health information platform, led by General Catalyst.

What’s Been Going On?

Antares, a nuclear fission energy company developing compact microreactors for defense and space applications, raised $370 million in Series C equity funding led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, alongside $100 million in debt financing.

Simile, a Palo Alto-based developer of AI tools for running simulations, picked up over $200 million in fresh funding at a $2 billion post-money valuation, led by Greenoaks, just five months after launching its product.

ThreatLocker, an Orlando-based cybersecurity provider, closed $190 million in Series F funding led by Elephant to expand its platform internationally.

CAIS, a New York-based alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, secured $170 million in Series D financing led by Vista Equity Partners, setting a valuation above $2 billion.

Sources:

Anthropic. (2026, July 30). Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations. https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals

Axios. (2026, August 1). DeepSeek’s new bargain model accelerates AI’s race to zero. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/01/deepseek-model-cheap-ai-price-war

Glasner, J. (2026, July 31). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: Safe Superintelligence and Commonwealth Fusion lead with billion-dollar deals. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-safe-superintelligence-commonwealth-fusion/

TechCrunch. (2026, July 30). Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/anthropic-says-its-own-ai-models-breached-three-companies-during-security-tests/

The Daily Upside. (2026, July 31). From iPads to Xboxes, device prices soar as AI hoards memory chips. https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/from-ipads-to-xboxes-device-prices-soar-as-ai-hoards-memory-chips/

Events August 8th - August 15th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/8

The Board Walks: https://www.meetup.com/the-board-walks-san-francisco/events/315748773/

Silicon Valley Robotics Fair 2026:https://luma.com/05aqg7b8

8/9

Hack with VoiceOS | $5k in OpenAI Credits: https://luma.com/pxdhdo4a

8/10

8/11

Claude Coworkshop - San Francisco: https://luma.com/claude-coworkshop-sf-aug-11

San Francisco Data Engineering Meetup with ClickHouse: https://luma.com/clickh-z578

8/12

AI Engineers Tech Talk: August: https://luma.com/kzwpdbs5

WorkOS Agent Night: https://luma.com/agent-night

Frontier Day: Building an AGI-Pilled Company: https://luma.com/frontier-day-sf

8/13

Codex Community Meetup: Codex for Marketers: https://luma.com/fw8aheuk

MongoDB.local Build Fest: San Francisco: https://luma.com/30zl4ix9

Founder Dinner: https://luma.com/vxq5depn

8/14

a16z SR 007 Founders Sushi Masterclass: https://luma.com/2izhkojo

Community Dinner by The Residency: https://luma.com/l21yni0s

8/15

Humanoid Sound Bath: https://luma.com/gjo9ws1t

Soccer Club by The Residency: https://luma.com/the-bdtf

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Astranis just raised $450M to build the world's most advanced satellites for high orbits

For decades, everyone building broadband constellations was racing to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). Fewer people were focused on geostationary orbit (GEO), in part because GEO was expensive, complex, and time-intensive to build for. This was a missed opportunity to serve these strategic higher orbits…

Read more

a month ago · 14 likes · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Software Engineering

Software Engineer @ Atlassian – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer/10516477

Software Engineering PMTS - Data Platform @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA
Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineering-pmts-data-platform/10511659

Solutions Architect - AI Natives Business, Strategic @ Databricks – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/solutions-architect-ai-natives-business-strategic/10510497

Software Engineer, Backend, DevProdAI @ Snap – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-backend-devprodai/10461393

Software Engineer II, Android @ Pinterest – SF, CA, USA
Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ii-android/10511184

GTM

GTM Strategy & Operations, Overlay @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-strategy-operations-overlay/10516644

Program Manager, GTM Systems @ Anthropic – – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5363352008?gh_src=LinkedIn

GTM Acceleration, Technical Solutions @ Vercel – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-acceleration-technical-solutions/10446098

Software Engineer, GTM Platform @ Ramp – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-gtm-platform/10440131

GTM Operations Lead @ Afterquery – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-operations-lead/10452309

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs! Thanks to all our drink sponsors at the Corgi Cafe.

Recent News

1. Nvidia is in talks for a $250B backstop to fuel OpenAI’s Ohio megaproject. The Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia is negotiating a roughly $250 billion financing guarantee to help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus SoftBank’s SB Energy is building in southern Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. The full project, including chips, could top $500 billion, making it the largest data center buildout announced to date, and Nvidia is separately discussing financing up to $350 billion more for the chip purchases themselves, pushing its total exposure to one customer toward $600 billion.

2. Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5, its fourth “5-series” model in two months. Released July 24, Opus 5 brings a 1-million-token context window and a new adjustable “effort” setting that lets users trade cost for capability, positioned to come close to Fable 5’s performance at roughly half the price.

3. OpenAI discloses its own models breached Hugging Face’s production systems while trying to cheat a cybersecurity benchmark. OpenAI confirmed that GPT-5.6 Sol and a stronger, unreleased model, both run with reduced safety refusals to test “maximal cyber capability,” broke out of an internal sandbox via a previously unknown vulnerability, then chained stolen credentials into Hugging Face’s live infrastructure to steal a benchmark’s answer key.

New Funding Updates

Atoms: $1.7 billion. Los Angeles-based physical AI startup founded by Uber founder Travis Kalanick, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Etched: $300 million Series C. San Jose-based AI chip/systems co-designer, led by Sequoia Capital at a $10 billion pre-money valuation.

Act Security: $60 million (seed + Series A). Tel Aviv-based cloud access-control startup, backed by Team8, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Notable Capital.

Fish Audio: $52 million seed. Palo Alto-based AI voice platform reporting $21M ARR and 8M+ users, led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today.

What’s Been Going On?

Claros Technologies, a Minneapolis-based company commercializing PFAS destruction technology, raised a $55 million Series B led by Treehouse Family Capital, with Daikin America and Veralto participating.

Hush Security, a Tel Aviv-based AI agent governance platform, raised a $30 million Series A with Akamai Technologies joining Battery Ventures and YL Ventures, bringing total funding to $41 million.

Array Labs, a Redwood City-based space-based radar company, raised a $21 million strategic round anchored by Mitsubishi Electric, paired with a partnership to bring satellite tracking services to Asia-Pacific defense customers.

Sources:

Axios. (2026, July 21). Hugging Face breach: OpenAI claims its models were responsible. https://www.axios.com/2026/07/21/openai-says-hugging-face-breach-caused-by-one-its-models

CNBC. (2026, July 22). OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/open-ai-cyber-models-hack-hugging-face.html

CNBC. (2026, July 27). Nvidia and OpenAI in talks for up to $250 billion AI backstop. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html

Citybiz. (2026, July 28). Array Labs raises $21 million to expand defense radar satellite platform through Mitsubishi Electric partnership. https://www.citybiz.co/article/880281/array-labs-raises-21-million-to-expand-defense-radar-satellite-platform-through-mitsubishi-electric-partnership/

Data Center Dynamics. (2026, July 27). Nvidia considers $250bn backstop for OpenAI’s planned 10GW Ohio data center — report. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-considers-250bn-backstop-for-openais-planned-10gw-ohio-data-center-report/

FinSMEs. (2026, July 28). Act Security raises $60M in total funding. https://www.finsmes.com/2026/07/act-security-raises-60m-in-total-funding.html

Fortune. (2026, July 24). Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5: Here’s how it’s different than what’s already out there. https://fortune.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-debuts-claude-opus-5-with-feature-that-lets-users-toggle-between-cost-and-capability/

Glasner, J. (2026, July 24). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: Physical AI startup Atoms leads in varied week for large deals. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-physical-ai-fintech-defense-atoms/

PR Newswire. (2026, July 28). Claros Technologies raises $55 million Series B financing to accelerate global commercialization of PFAS destruction technology. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/claros-technologies-raises-55-million-series-b-financing-to-accelerate-global-commercialization-of-pfas-destruction-technology-302835890.html

PR Newswire. (2026, July 28). Hush Security raises $30M to close the AI agent governance gap, with Akamai joining as strategic investor. https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/hush-security-raises-30m-to-close-the-ai-agent-governance-gap-with-akamai-joining-as-strategic-investor-302836307.html

TechCrunch. (2026, July 24). Anthropic launches Opus 5. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-launches-opus-5/

TechCrunch. (2026, July 28). Fish Audio raises $52M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-build-ai-voice-models-for-creators-and-enterprises/

Events Aug 1st - Aug 8th → 7 days

Last weekend, 1,000 participants. 250+ teams. We hosted a YC Startup School after-hackathon with Merge, Vercel, Photon, and Fondo! Our top 3 winners, split $1,000+ in prizes.

Here are more events this week:

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

8/1

Applied Intelligence Hackathon - Open Registration: https://luma.com/applied-intelligence-hackathon

Agentic AI Summit: https://luma.com/agentic-ai-summit

8/2

Community Dinner @ The Residency: https://luma.com/the-4vsx

Corgi Cafe: Dogpatch Open House: https://luma.com/j4pqtkhp

8/3

Memory Meets Motion: Hackathon - Open Registration: https://luma.com/memory-meets-motion-hackathon

8/4

Executive Suite at Valkyries game SF: https://luma.com/personavalks

Built on Baseten | AI Demo Night: https://luma.com/b4y2veki

8/5

Privy Home: IRL in SF: https://luma.com/x1to4ziz

AI Startup Pitch Night with Early Stage Investors: https://luma.com/ai-startup-pitch

Demo Night @ WorkOS (August): https://luma.com/x1to4ziz

8/6

Ramp Casino Night: https://luma.com/1xmhkwy6

Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung): https://luma.com/ExtraordinaryFoundersAug6

8/7

AI x Fashion Coffee Club: https://luma.com/xfbtidsx

Snowflake X Beta Fund Agent & Token Economy Hackathon: https://luma.com/beta-fdnw

8/8

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Enterprise Verticals @ OpenAI – Hybrid, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-enterprise-verticals/10425014

Sr. Director, Software Engineering - Finance Tech @ Capital One – Remote, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sr-director-software-engineering-finance-tech/10424339

Software Engineer, Robotics Data @ Mercor, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-robotics-data/10420504

Software Engineering SMTS @ Salesforce, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineering-smts/10401466

Staff Software Engineer, Code RL @ Anthropic, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-code-rl/10381395

GTM

GTM Technical Onboarding Program Manager @ OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-technical-onboarding-program-manager/10427626

Senior Manager, GTM AI Engineer — Revenue Enablement @ Brex, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-manager-gtm-ai-engineer-revenue-enablement/10430052

Senior Associate, Global Ads GTM Strategy and Operations @ Snapchat, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-associate-global-ads-gtm-strategy-and-operations/10357571

GTM Enablement Manager @ Glean, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-enablement-manager/10379795

GTM Finance - Sales Business Partner @ Cursor, San Francisco, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-finance-sales-business-partner/10357578

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

It was another busy week at Corgi. We welcomed Y Combinator Partner Jared Friedman to the office for a conversation with the team, where he shared lessons on building enduring companies, navigating growth, and what he’s seeing across the YC ecosystem. It was a great opportunity for the team to ask questions and hear firsthand from one of the people helping shape the next generation of startups.

The office was also at peak Corgi capacity, with all three office dogs making an appearance. Between meetings, they kept morale high, made the rounds for treats, and reminded everyone why they’re the unofficial faces of the company.

We also announced the launch of the Corgi Artist Residency, a new program based out of Corgi Cafe that supports artists, illustrators, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and other creatives working at the intersection of technology and culture. The residency gives creators a place to work, connect with the community, and bring new ideas to life, with applications now open for the inaugural cohort.

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. OpenAI unveils its first AI hardware device, signaling its biggest expansion beyond software.

OpenAI is reportedly developing a screenless, movable smart speaker built with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom, designed to act as a proactive home AI companion powered by GPT-Live. The device follows OpenAI’s acquisition of io Products and comes amid an ongoing Apple trade-secret lawsuit (Gurman, 2026).

2. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 emerges as China’s newest challenger to U.S. frontier AI models.

Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-source model the company says is the largest open-weight model released to date, benchmarking competitively against top U.S. systems (Wiggers, 2026).

3. DeepSeek prepares for an IPO as China’s AI funding race accelerates.

DeepSeek is reportedly planning a fresh fundraising round at a roughly $74 billion valuation and has begun early preparations for a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market (Reuters, 2026).

New Funding Updates

Fluidstack: $830 million Series A. A New York-based AI infrastructure startup that builds and operates gigawatt-scale data centers for frontier AI labs, valuing the company at $7.5 billion. The round which had closed in January but was only confirmed publicly this week was led by Situational Awareness, the investment firm founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner (SiliconANGLE, 2026).

Meshy: ~$400 million Series B. A Silicon Valley-based company building foundation models for AI-powered 3D generation, valuing the company at $1.5 billion the largest round to date in AI 3D. The round included participation from IDG Capital, Matrix Partners China, Monolith Management, Granite Asia, Sequoia China, BAI Capital, and Source Code Capital (PR Newswire, 2026).

CuspAI: $450 million Series B. A Cambridge, UK-based AI materials discovery startup building a platform to identify new materials for semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with participation from Jeff Bezos’s family office, valuing the company at $2.6 billion (Coulter, 2026).

Sila: $300 million private equity round. An Alameda, California-based battery materials company expanding U.S. production of its silicon-carbon anode technology, Titan Silicon. The round was led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and T. Rowe Price-advised funds (Metz, 2026).

Augustus: $180 million Series B. A New York-based fintech building a “Global Dollar Bank” to give international fintechs and banks direct access to dollar accounts and clearing rails. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hummingbird, QED, and founders from Nubank, Ramp, and Revolut, bringing total funding to $210 million and valuing the company at $1 billion.

Thinking Machines Lab: $2 billion seed round. A San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, focused on developing multimodal frontier AI systems. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, Cisco Investments, AMD Ventures, and Jane Street, valuing the company at approximately $12 billion, making it the largest seed financing in startup history.

Base Power: $200 million Series B. An Austin-based energy technology company building distributed residential battery systems and virtual power plants to strengthen the electric grid. The financing was led by Addition with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners.

LMArena: $100 million seed round. A San Francisco-based AI model evaluation platform that powers Chatbot Arena, the widely used benchmark for comparing large language models. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and UC Investments, valuing the company at roughly $600 million.

Fervo Energy: $206 million in project financing. A Houston-based geothermal energy startup developing next-generation enhanced geothermal power plants. The funding will support expansion of its Cape Station project in Utah, one of the world’s largest enhanced geothermal developments.

What’s Been Going On?

Glow, a Palo Alto and Tel Aviv-based AI-native endpoint security startup founded in 2025 by former Meta VP Roi Tiger, emerged from stealth with $180 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

Humanoid, a UK-based robotics company, raised $152 million at a $1.35 billion valuation, positioning itself as one of Europe’s newest humanoid robotics unicorns amid growing competition from Germany’s Neura Robotics and Barcelona’s THEKER.

Natural, a San Francisco-based payments startup building Stripe-style infrastructure for AI agent transactions, raised a $30 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures just 193 days after launch, bringing total funding to over $40 million.

Omio, a Berlin-based multimodal travel platform, secured a $10 million strategic investment from Granite-Integral to expand its AI technology hub in Singapore and grow across Japan and Southeast Asia.

References

Coulter, M. (2026, July 20). CuspAI lands $450m round to accelerate AI materials discovery. Sifted. https://sifted.eu/articles/cuspai-lands-450m-round-to-accelerate-ai-materials-discovery

Gurman, M. (2026, July 14). OpenAI’s first device will be movable, screenless speaker built as AI companion. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/openai-s-first-device-will-be-moveable-screenless-speaker-built-as-ai-companion

Metz, R. (2026, July 21). Bucking EV slowdown, Sila raises $300M to expand battery materials factory. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/bucking-ev-slowdown-sila-raises-300m-to-expand-battery-materials-factory/

PR Newswire. (2026, July 21). Meshy raises nearly $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the largest round to date in AI 3D. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meshy-raises-nearly-400-million-at-a-1-5-billion-valuation-the-largest-round-to-date-in-ai-3d-302828384.html

Reuters. (2026, July 18). China’s DeepSeek to raise fresh capital at $74 billion valuation ahead of onshore IPO, sources say. https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/chinas-deepseek-to-raise-fresh-capital-at-74-billion-valuation-ahead-of-onshore-ipo-sources-say-4799575

SiliconANGLE. (2026, July 21). AI data center builder Fluidstack raises $830M at $7.5B valuation. https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/21/ai-data-center-builder-fluidstack-raises-830m-7-5b-valuation/

Wiggers, K. (2026, July 16). China’s Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever, rivaling top U.S. systems. VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/technology/chinas-moonshot-ai-releases-kimi-k3-the-largest-open-source-model-ever-rivaling-top-u-s-systems

Events July 25th - August 1st

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

7/25

Build Fast. Launch Loud. Prompt Driven Hackathon: https://luma.com/1c8vmqyr

YC AI Startup School Afterparty: https://luma.com/m4ez9liu

7/26

Robotics x Physical AI Founder - Investor Summit: https://luma.com/u8j9b0a6

JacHacks San Francisco: https://luma.com/9x1573sw

7/27

Corgi Cafe Co-op: https://luma.com/5w78yjyy

7/28

Devin for Startups Kickoff: https://luma.com/devin-for-startups

7/29

Customer Obsession in the AI Era ft. Granola: https://luma.com/oup51oya

7/30

Founders & Funders: The Odyssey Private Screening with M12: https://luma.com/b7p1jvgy

Scaling revenue at Stripe and Vercel with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel): https://luma.com/7h2hjufc

Built Different: Auth0 x Stripe Hackathon: https://luma.com/builtdifferent-auth0-stripe

Building Decagon from 0 to 1:https://luma.com/dgbo2kus

OpenAI Codex Community Meetup-San Francisco #8: https://luma.com/h5x0pzw9

7/31

Palo Alto, CA - Deep Tech Connections Networking Breakfast: https://luma.com/Palo-Alto-July

Tech Roast SF: Comedians Roast Techies: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tech-roast-sf-comedians-roast-techies-tickets-1992775092947

8/1

Agentic AI Summit: https://luma.com/agentic-ai-summit

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

AI Deployment Engineer, Global Affairs @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-deployment-engineer-global-affairs/10274591

AI Accelerator Lead @ Vercel – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-accelerator-lead/10288811

AI Governance Sr Associate @ PWC – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-governance-sr-associate/10231234

Software Engineer, AI Platform @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ai-platform/10176477

AI Native Software Engineer - Products @ Accenture – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/ai-native-software-engineer-products/10275630

GTM

Product Communications Manager, OSS @ Vercel – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/product-communications-manager-oss/10293122

Program Manager, GTM Systems @ Anthropic – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/program-manager-gtm-systems/10264124

Director, Cloud GTM Strategy - Agentforce @ Salesforce – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/director-cloud-gtm-strategy-agentforce/10263785

Sr. Compensation Manager GTM @ Databricks – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sr-compensation-manager-gtm/10196069

VP, AI Marketing Strategy @ MongDB – Palo Alto/ SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/vp-ai-marketing-strategy/10272332

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

First up: Trudy raced at the Alameda County Fair this past Sunday, representing Corgi in style (she didn’t win, but she looked great doing it).

In bigger news, Corgi is expanding into trucking insurance. We’re bringing fleets faster quotes, smoother claims, and fairer pricing, backed by underwriters with over 30 years of trucking experience. We’re also partnering with AtoB to make getting and managing coverage even easier.

We’re also gearing up behind the bar: five new drink partners, Capy.ai, Eragon, zerohash, ngrok, and Plain, all launch August 1st. If your sleeves, drink R&D, or menu graphics aren’t locked in yet, now’s the time.

The Corgi team keeps growing right alongside us, spanning insurance, AI, finance, media, and our various initiatives, and now a second city. If building something ambitious sounds like your kind of challenge, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here:
https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. Apple sues OpenAI, alleging a “coordinated” scheme to steal hardware trade secrets.

Apple filed suit against OpenAI, its Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan, former engineer Chang Liu, and io Products in the Northern District of California on July 10, accusing them of systematically extracting confidential designs, manufacturing processes, and supply-chain data behind OpenAI’s unreleased consumer hardware (Perez, 2026). The company alleges Liu kept an Apple-issued laptop after leaving for OpenAI and used it to download dozens of confidential hardware files, while Tan allegedly used insider knowledge from his 24 years at Apple to recruit staff and extract product details during interviews. OpenAI has not yet responded to the specific claims, and the case lands just as it complicates the company’s plans for a highly anticipated IPO.

2. OpenAI and xAI stage dueling flagship launches on the same day, escalating the model wars.

On July 9, OpenAI released its GPT-5.6 family alongside ChatGPT Work, a new agentic product that opens a user’s local files, edits Workspace and Microsoft 365 documents, and carries multi-step tasks to completion, while xAI launched Grok 4.5 the same morning, priced competitively and built partly on Cursor’s codebase following SpaceXAI’s acquisition of the startup (Paramkusham, 2026). The dueling releases come as Chinese open-weight labs continue closing the capability gap at a fraction of the cost, with models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Zhipu, and Alibaba now occupying most of the top open-weight rankings globally.

3. SK Hynix debuts on the Nasdaq in the largest ADR offering in Wall Street history.

The South Korean memory-chip maker began trading under the ticker SKHY on July 10, raising roughly $26.5 billion in the largest U.S. share sale ever completed by a foreign company, surpassing Alibaba’s 2014 debut (Tolomia, 2026). SK Hynix said the proceeds will fund manufacturing expansion in South Korea and EUV lithography equipment, and the listing is aimed at closing a long-standing valuation gap with U.S. rival Micron as demand for the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI systems continues to outstrip supply.

New Funding Updates

SambaNova Systems: $1 billion Series F. A Palo Alto-based developer of AI chips and enterprise AI infrastructure for training and inference workloads, led by General Atlantic at an $11 billion post-money valuation, one of two deals tied for the largest round of the week (van Romburgh, 2026).

Keyfactor: $1 billion private equity round. An Independence, Ohio-based provider of digital identity and machine identity management software that helps enterprises secure certificates, encryption keys, and connected devices, led by Summit Partners (van Romburgh, 2026).

Norm AI: $120 million Series C. A New York-based AI regulatory compliance platform that translates complex laws and regulations into software to automate enterprise compliance workflows, led by Khosla Ventures at a reported $1.2 billion valuation, with New York Life Insurance among the backers (van Romburgh, 2026).

Prime Intellect: $130 million Series A. A San Francisco-based open platform for training and deploying AI models across distributed compute networks, led by Radical Ventures with backing from Nvidia, Dell Technologies Capital, and Intel Capital (van Romburgh, 2026).

What’s Been Going On?

Ollama, a Palo Alto-based developer platform for running open-weight AI models locally, raised $65 million in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures, with Benchmark, 8VC, and YCombinator participating, bringing total funding to $88 million (Prabhu, 2026).

Gradium, a Paris-based voice AI startup spun out of research lab Kyutai by the co-creators of EnCodec and Moshi, extended its seed round to $100 million with Nvidia joining as a new investor, following a $70 million first tranche led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo (Dimri, 2026).

Oxylabs, a Vilnius-based web data infrastructure company, raised $130 million from Warburg Pincus at a $3.6 billion valuation, its first outside funding in a decade, making it Lithuania’s second most valuable private company (Chesnokova, 2026).

Acurio, Europe’s only VC fund focused on secondaries, closed a €115 million fund, surpassing its target (Chesnokova, 2026).

Events July 18th - July 25th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

7/19

Stanford x DeepMind Hackathon: Build. Ship. Win up to $5M in Seed Funding*: https://luma.com/e51fygtm

Ladies Tea Party: Female Founders in Tech: https://luma.com/8qzm1ow4

7/20

Cafe Cursor San Francisco: Startup Edition: https://luma.com/cafe-cursor-sf-startups

7/21

OpenAI Build Week Community Meetup - San Francisco: https://luma.com/codex-meetup-convex-jul21-2026

vLLM x Crusoe Meetup: Production Open Source Inference: https://luma.com/vLLM-Meetups?e=evt-BXcad0jDa2Rgmib

7/22

OGC IRL Coffee Meetup: https://luma.com/ogc-jj2y

Dwarkesh Unplugged, presented by WorkOS: https://luma.com/f28a739d

7/23

OpenAI Builder Lounge SF with Parallel: https://luma.com/openai-builderlounge-sf-july23-2026

Hardware Pitch Night - Summertime Showcase!: https://luma.com/lzy8pkq4

July Tech Rooftop Mixer: https://luma.com/foundersocialclub?e=evt-aZhDVElqL8bYeba

7/24

Agent Swarms Hackathon: https://luma.com/swarmhack

Community Dinner: GTM @The Residency: https://luma.com/a70q0s2e

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

AI success engineer @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7cd8205b-fd73-4af1-9103-1b1fed3b0c22/application?utm_source=8Jq3QyqAGm&source=LinkedIn

Senior Lead AI Engineer (MLX, Agentic AI, Gen AI platform Services) @ Capital One – SF, CA, USA

Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-lead-ai-engineer-mlx-agentic-ai-gen-ai-platform-services/10157011

Technical Enablement Lead, Claude Platform @Anthropic

SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5311465008?gh_src=LinkedIn

Associate, Software Engineer, Applications @ BlackRock – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/associate-software-engineer-applications/10137250

Machine Learning Engineer, Level 3 @ Snap Inc. – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://wd1.myworkdaysite.com/en-US/recruiting/snapchat/snap/job/Palo-Alto-California/Machine-Learning-Engineer--Level-3_Q326SWEML1?source=LinkedIn

GTM

GTM Strategy & Operations, Strategic Programs @ OpenAI – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/fc999234-93e6-4dbc-bf89-64ca7fb08e22/application?utm_source=8Jq3QyqAGm&source=LinkedIn

GTM Systems Engineer, Salesforce @ Ramp – – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-systems-engineer-salesforce/10146461

GTM Engineer @ Handshake – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://joinhandshake.com/careers/job/?ashby_jid=bb7eeb0b-5114-496f-925e-a790b162c3e4&utm_source=4xDZ2XYAXn

Head of GTM FP&A @ Canva – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Canva/6000000001224932-head-of-gtm-fp-a?trid=2d92f286-613b-4daf-9dfa-6340ffbecf73

Senior Marketing Scientist, Level 4 @ Snap Inc. – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-marketing-scientist-level-4/10168582

References

Chesnokova, S. (2026, July 10). Oxylabs becomes Lithuania’s second most valuable private company at $3.6B. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/oxylabs-130m-warburg-pincus-3-6b-valuation/

Chesnokova, S. (2026, July 13). Acurio, Europe’s only VC fund focused on secondaries, closed a €115M fund, surpassing its target. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/acurio-115m-europe-vc-secondaries-fund/

Dimri, A. (2026, July 10). NVIDIA backs the French researchers who built voice AI’s foundations at $100M, 7 months after launch. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/gradium-100m-seed-nvidia-voice-ai-kyutai/

Paramkusham, S. (2026, July 13). Top 10 AI news July 13 2026: Musk vs Altman and more. Unrot. https://unrot.co/blogs/today-top-10-ai-news-july-13-2026

Perez, S. (2026, July 10). Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-over-alleged-trade-secret-theft/

Prabhu, A. (2026, July 10). 14 employees, 8.9M developers: Ollama raises $65M to become AI’s platform layer. Tech Funding News. https://techfundingnews.com/14-employees-8-9m-developers-ollama-raises-65m-to-become-ais-platform-layer/

Tolomia, C. (2026, July 10). SK Hynix Nasdaq debut: $26.5 billion ADR listing sets record. Quartz. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/sk-hynix-nasdaq-debut-26-113118390.html

van Romburgh, M. (2026, July 10). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: A pair of billion-dollar deals for cyber and AI infrastructure lead. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/biggest-funding-rounds-billion-dollar-cyber-ai-keyfactor-sambanova/

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

This week in the office, we welcomed Hamilton to our NYC team. We also celebrated the Fourth of July with the team, Trudy included (see below).

The Corgi team keeps growing right alongside us, spanning insurance, AI, finance, media, and our various initiatives. If building something ambitious sounds like your kind of challenge, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here:

https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Shoutout to all our sponsors at the cafe!

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. Researchers document the first fully autonomous, AI-run ransomware attack.

Cloud security firm Sysdig published its analysis of “JADEPUFFER,” an operation it says was driven end-to-end by a large language model, from initial access through a Langflow vulnerability to credential theft, lateral movement, and a full database-extortion attack (Sysdig, 2026). The clearest evidence was the payloads themselves: self-narrating code littered with natural-language reasoning about targeting priority, plus real-time error correction, including one sequence where the agent diagnosed and fixed a failed login in 31 seconds. The attack didn’t use any new exploits, just old, unpatched vulnerabilities automated at machine speed. Sysdig frames it less as a crisis and more as a preview of where ransomware is headed.

2. Sam Altman pitches OpenAI as core U.S. AI infrastructure as Anthropic overtakes it on revenue.

Anthropic has passed OpenAI in self-reported annualized revenue, roughly $47 billion versus OpenAI’s $25-33 billion range, and is gaining ground on user numbers too, driven largely by enterprise adoption (Bove, 2026). In response, Altman is pushing a “new world order” framing for OpenAI, including a proposed government equity stake and deeper integration with U.S. defense infrastructure, arguing that OpenAI’s commercial success and American strategic interests are inseparable.

3. The UN opens its first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, with scientists warning of “catastrophic harm.”

Delegates from 169 countries convened in Geneva this week for the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, mandated by a UN General Assembly resolution and running alongside the ITU AI for Good Summit and the first meeting of the UN’s AI for Good Global Commission (UN News, 2026). Scientific Panel co-chair Yoshua Bengio said AI is now outpacing both scientific understanding and governments’ ability to adapt, while journalist Maria Ressa warned of an “information Armageddon” if AI-accelerated disinformation continues to erode public trust.

New Funding Updates

Joulent: $1.75 billion strategic investment. A Houston-based provider of energy infrastructure built for the demands of AI and other compute-intensive industries, backed by National Grid through its National Grid Ventures arm. The largest round of the week by a wide margin (Glasner, 2026).

Together AI: $800 million Series C. A San Francisco-based developer of infrastructure for companies running open source AI models, led by Aramco Ventures, setting an $8.3 billion post-money valuation (Glasner, 2026).

Taktile: $110 million Series C. A New York-based agentic decision platform for banks and insurers, automating loan approvals, fraud triage, claims processing, and onboarding while preserving human oversight and audit trails, led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives (Tech Startups, 2026).

Even Realities Technology: $150 million pre-Series B. A Shenzhen-based AI hardware and wearables company, led by Meituan with participation from Tencent (Tech Startups, 2026).

What’s Been Going On?

Bespoke Labs, a San Francisco-based developer of AI agent evaluation and reinforcement learning infrastructure, raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Wing VC, with participation from Mayfield and The House Fund (Tech Startups, 2026).

Zeroth, a developer of humanoid robotics systems, raised approximately $73.6 million in Series A funding led by Ant Group (Tech Startups, 2026).

Yingzhi XBOT, a developer of robotics and AI systems, raised $56 million in Series B funding (Tech Startups, 2026).

LinqAlpha, a developer of agentic AI for market intelligence, raised $22 million in Series A funding (Tech Startups, 2026).

Luxonis, a developer of AI perception hardware and software for robotics and industrial automation, raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Denali Growth Partners (Tech Startups, 2026).

Beeline Medicines, a Boston-based startup developing precision therapies for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, secured $126 million in Series A extension funding backed by Bain Capital, CPP Investments, and Bristol-Myers Squibb (Glasner, 2026).

Twelve Labs, a San Francisco-based developer of AI systems trained on video archives, raised $100 million in Series B funding co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Naver Ventures (Glasner, 2026).

Venice, a Sheridan, Wyoming-based platform enabling private, surveillance-free access to AI models, secured $65 million in Series A funding led by Dragonfly, setting a $1 billion valuation (Glasner, 2026).

Events July 11th - July 18th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

Title event: Luma link

7/11

Night Hack by Founders, Inc: https://luma.com/nighthack

Women Who Lift: https://luma.com/8g1sn3fh

World’s Largest Hermes Buildathon: https://luma.com/hermesbuildathonsf

7/12

Show & Tell: AI for GTM @Notion with Baseten, Cognition and Samsara: https://luma.com/b8ie1m1s

How to Break into SF as an Immigrant Founder: https://luma.com/3ilro47w

7/13

Researcher Game Night - Applied Compute: https://luma.com/09gobnrc

Holo AI Night w/ NVIDIA & Black Forest Labs: https://luma.com/o5xmousw

7/14

Show & Tell: AI for GTM @Notion with Baseten, Cognition, Cresta and Samsara: https://luma.com/b8ie1m1s

Rippling x Corgi Founder Live Pitch Night ft Redpoint Ventures & Battery Ventures: https://luma.com/rippling-0d7f

7/15

Battle of the Paddles: AI Builders Edition: https://luma.com/j7v7qeem

ITCH - Businesses share what needs to be built: https://luma.com/zwmgi7l9

7/16

ElevenLabs x Sauna Hack Night: https://luma.com/elevenlabs-sauna-jul16

Design Meetup x Google Sunnyvale, CA: At Scale: https://luma.com/b6gce78l

Qualcomm Arduino Uno Q Hack Night: https://luma.com/qualcomm-arduino-hack-night-jul16

7/17

Sports World Cup Hackathon: https://luma.com/ai-pq8b

Loop Engineering Hackathon: https://luma.com/loophack

7/18

CSI Hacks: https://luma.com/ptgsw4bj

AI Valley x Pet Zen Dog-a-thon: https://luma.com/rklrsomo

DeepLearning.AI Voice AI Hackathon: The Complete Trip, powered by Sabre and Vocal Bridge: https://luma.com/fmypremp

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Cursor, Plaid, and Town

Hope everyone had an amazing Fourth of July! Now back to our regular programming…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Early Career @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-early-career/10072480

Principal Software Engineer: Distributed Systems @Cloudfare – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/principal-software-engineer-distributed-systems-config-test-deployment/10033868

Lead Software Engineer, Back End (Python, Spark) @Capital One– SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer-back-end-python-spark/10026369

Lead Software Engineer @ WellsFargo – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/lead-software-engineer-001875/10026122

GTM

VP/DIR, US iShares Factor Product Strategist@Blackrock – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/vp-dir-us-ishares-factor-product-strategist/10083857

Product Marketing Manager@ Mongo Db – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/product-marketing-manager/10034877

Senior Manager, Product Management - Ad Formats @ Snapchat – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/senior-manager-product-management-ad-formats/10044959

Business Development Manager, Product & Platform@ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/business-development-manager-product-platform/10034532

News References

Bove, T. (2026, July 2). Sam Altman seeks new world order for AI as OpenAI slowly loses ground to Google and Anthropic. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/07/02/sam-altman-new-world-order-ai-openai-google-anthropic/

Glasner, J. (2026, July 2). The week’s 10 biggest funding rounds: AI, energy and biotech lead the way. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-ai-energy-biotech-joulent/

Sysdig. (2026, July). JADEPUFFER: Agentic ransomware for automated database extortion. https://www.sysdig.com/blog/jadepuffer-agentic-ransomware-for-automated-database-extortion

Tech Startups. (2026, July 6). Venture capital & startup funding roundup, July 6, 2026. https://techstartups.com/2026/07/06/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-july-6-2026/

UN News. (2026, July 6). Global push for AI governance amid warnings of “catastrophic harm.” https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1167862

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

Big news out of Corgi HQ this week: we officially expanded the Corgi Cafe to Atlanta!

It’s our very first cafe outside SF, and it’s about bringing the same energy we’ve built here, the coffee, the conversations, the drop-ins from founders and investors, to Georgia’s growing startup scene at the Atlanta Tech Village.

"The next billion dollar company will start as a back of the napkin idea at the Corgi Cafe," said Brooke LeBlanc, Head of Community at Corgi. "To make sure that's true, the Corgi Cafe is coming to a city near you. We are expanding far beyond San Francisco to become a third place for operators, investors, builders, and founders no matter your zip code."

In other news, the team at Corgi continues to grow. As we expand across insurance, AI, finance, media, and our initiatives, and now into a second city, we’re looking for ambitious builders who want to help shape what’s next. If you’ve ever thought about joining us, now is a great time to take a look at our open roles: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Thanks so much to our drink sponsors for supporting Corgi:

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

Recent News

1. US lifts export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5, ending a two-week standoff.

The Commerce Department told Anthropic late Tuesday it was lifting the export controls placed on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 12, which had suspended both models for all users worldwide because Anthropic had no real-time way to verify nationality. Anthropic says Fable 5 is rolling back out starting today, July 1, across the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, with access via AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry still being restored. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the two weeks were spent confirming the model’s “alignment” with US interests. Anthropic says it will now scale up government collaboration, including a proposed industry-wide framework for scoring jailbreak severity alongside Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Sources:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/us-lift-export-controls-key-anthropic-models/414561/

2. Google’s AI coding pivot triggers a research exodus to Anthropic and OpenAI, wiping out $270B in market value.

Just days after Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI on June 18, three more Google DeepMind researchers announced they’re heading to Anthropic: John Jumper, the 2024 Nobel laureate behind AlphaFold, plus Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both former AlphaFold collaborators. Six senior researchers have now left DeepMind for rivals in five months. Alphabet’s stock dropped over 5% in a single session, and the week’s losses topped $270B in market cap. Google is now expanding its “coding strike team” into model midtraining, an attempt to close what its own CFO has acknowledged is a real gap with Anthropic.

Sources:

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319219/20260628/google-deepminds-coding-pivot-lost-six-researchers-meta-openai-anthropic.htm

https://easternherald.com/2026/06/26/google-deepmind-anthropic-ai-talent-exodus-alphabet/

3. China’s Meituan open-sources a 1.6 trillion parameter model trained entirely without Nvidia chips.

Best known as China’s food delivery giant, Meituan released LongCat-2.0 on June 30, a 1.6T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1 million token context window. The company says it’s the first model of this scale trained end to end, both pretraining and inference, on a 50,000-chip domestic cluster with zero Nvidia hardware involved. The model quietly ran on OpenRouter under the codename “Owl Alpha” for two months before Meituan revealed its identity. It’s now open-sourced under an MIT license.

Sources:

https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/30/chinas-meituan-open-sources-massive-longcat-2-0-ai-model-saying-trained-domestic-chips/

https://thenextweb.com/news/chinas-meituan-says-its-new-ai-model-was-trained-on-domestic-chips

New Funding Updates

LeapXpert: $180M growth investment. A governed enterprise communications platform that captures and structures business conversations across WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS, and Signal for compliance and AI use, led by Riverwood Capital with continuing backer Portage Ventures. Used by hundreds of organizations across financial services, government, and the Forbes Global 2000 (Tech Startups).

Source: https://techstartups.com/2026/06/30/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-30-2026/

Higharc: $95M Series C. An AI-powered design-to-construction platform for homebuilders, led by Insight Partners with Wellington Management, Fifth Wall, Spark Capital, and Lux Capital. Brings total funding to over $170M, paired with a new partnership with US LBM to bring AI estimating into building-materials supply chains (Tech Startups).

Source: https://techstartups.com/2026/06/30/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-30-2026/

Stathera: $55M Series B. A Montreal-based silicon timing company building MEMS-based clock components for AI data centers, led by Maverick Silicon with Celesta Capital and BDC Capital. Brings total funding to $75M, funding mass production of its second-generation chips and a new Silicon Valley office (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/omen-ai-raises-31m-in-series-a-funding.html

Omen AI: $31M Series A. A San Francisco company building continuous fluid-analysis sensors that monitor wear and degradation in data-center and industrial machinery in real time, led by Nava Ventures with CRV, Mann+Hummel, and Sheryl Sandberg. Brings total funding to $41.5M, with deployments already covering 10 to 14 gigawatts of data-center capacity (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/omen-ai-raises-31m-in-series-a-funding.html

What’s Been Going On?

8090 Labs, a developer of an AI-enabled software factory for enterprise coding in regulated industries, raised $135 million in Series A funding led by Salesforce Ventures. Founder Chamath Palihapitiya is stepping in as CEO (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/8090-labs-raises-135m-in-series-a-funding.html

Alan, a Paris-based developer of an AI-native health insurance and digital healthcare platform, raised €480 million in funding at a €5.5 billion valuation (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/alan-raises-e480m-in-funding-at-e5-5-billion-valuation.html

Stark, a Berlin-based developer of autonomous defense systems and air and surface attack drones, closed a €500 million funding round at a €3 billion valuation (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/stark-closes-e500m-funding-round-at-e3-billion-valuation.html

X Square Robot, a Shenzhen-based developer of end-to-end embodied artificial intelligence systems, closed four funding rounds ending in a Series C at over a $2.8 billion valuation (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/x-square-robot-closes-four-funding-rounds-ending-in-series-c-at-over-us2-8-billion-valuation.html

Straiker, a developer of an agentic security platform that discovers, tests, and protects enterprise AI agents, raised $64 million in Series A funding co-led by Marathon Management Partners, Citi Ventures, Illuminate Financial, and Workday Ventures. Brings total funding to $85 million (Tech Startups).

Source: https://techstartups.com/2026/06/29/straiker-raises-64m-series-a-as-enterprises-rush-to-secure-ai-agents/

Jupus, a Cologne-based developer of an AI-driven legal secretarial and automated intake platform, raised €13 million in Series A funding (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/jupus-raises-e13m-in-series-a-funding.html

Vanna Health, a San Francisco-based developer of a value-based health technology platform, raised $17 million in funding (FinSMEs).

Source:

https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/vanna-health-raises-17m-in-funding.html

GenerativeX, a San Francisco-based agentic AI startup, raised $4 million in Series A funding (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/generativex-raises-4m-in-series-a-funding.html

Nebex, a market infrastructure platform for the global space economy, raised $30 million in seed funding led by Google Ventures (FinTech Global).

Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/30/straiker-raises-64m-to-lock-down-the-ai-agent-era/

Omen AI, a San Francisco-based provider of continuous fluid-analysis sensors for data center and industrial machine health, raised $31 million in Series A funding led by Nava Ventures. Brings total funding to $41.5 million (FinSMEs).

Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/omen-ai-raises-31m-in-series-a-funding.html

Events July 4th - July 11th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

7/4

YC S26 Welcoming ft. Userlens x The Prompting Company: https://luma.com/vr6vru9v

7/5

Open Studios: Clothing Swap & Headshots for Women & Femmes:https://luma.com/4j0nln17

7/7

Hack with Bay 3.0: https://luma.com/sv61aqlg

7/8

Agents in Production: GTM agents demo night: https://luma.com/scalekit-r6yg

Edgem8: B2B Partnership Mixer: https://luma.com/edgem8

7/9

135th SF Hardware Meetup @ Antler VC | Demo Night: https://luma.com/bo58tyyg

The GTM Summit for Founders, Investors, and Creators: https://luma.com/f2dj3o25

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Revolut, Radiant, and OpenRouter

Build -1 → 0…

Read more

2 months ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Software Engineering

US Tech - AI Product Senior Associate @ PWC – SF/others, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/jobs?search=tech&city=San+Francisco&state=California&country=USA&allLocations=true

Software Engineer, Data Product Platform @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-data-product-platform/9965438

Software Engineer, Developer Experience, Go Lead @ Notion – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-developer-experience-go-lead/9872402

Software Engineer 3, Query Integration@ MongoDB – SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-3-query-integration/9883398

GTM

Principal Strategy Manager, Developer GTM Growth @ Cloudfare, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/principal-strategy-manager-developer-gtm-growth/9966885

GTM, Emerging Products@ Cursor, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/gtm-emerging-products/9925265

Sales Director, Account Executives, Strategic @ Atlassian, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/sales-director-account-executives-strategic/10018136

Enterprise Sales Manager | Housing @ Elise AI, SF, CA, USA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/enterprise-sales-manager-housing/9971989

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

There’s a history lesson worth knowing: in 1686, a London coffee house called Lloyd’s opened its doors to sailors, merchants, and shipowners. People gathered, shared information, built trust and out of that community grew what became Lloyd’s of London, one of the most enduring insurance institutions in the world.

Three hundred and forty years later, Corgi is building the same thing.

We’re an AI insurance carrier and a 24/7 cafe that acts as a community space. Weekly we welcome hundreds of founders, investors and builders at our location on 9 Claude Lane.

At Corgi, we’re excited to welcome Trevor Owens as our new Head of Cafe Expansion.

As we prepare to open the next 100 Corgi Cafes across the world, Trevor will be leading the charge to bring our community of founders, operators, investors, and builders to cities across the country.

Speaking of cafe, thank you and shoutout to all of our drink sponsors at Corgi Cafe!

As always, we’re growing and hiring across insurance, AI, finance, media, and our cafe initiatives. https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into the news.

Recent News

1. OpenAI poaches Google’s Gemini co-lead, the co-inventor of the modern AI era just days before its IPO.

Noam Shazeer, VP of Engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini models, announced on June 18 that he is leaving for OpenAI. Shazeer is a co-author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture that every major AI model today — including Gemini, GPT, and Claude — is built on. Google paid an estimated $2.7B to bring him back from Character.AI less than two years ago. He joins OpenAI as Lead for Architecture Research, with the company days away from filing its IPO S-1. Sam Altman said it only “took 10 years” to make it happen.

Sources:

https://theplanettools.ai/blog/noam-shazeer-leaves-google-gemini-joins-openai-2026

https://mlq.ai/news/openai-hires-transformer-co-inventor-noam-shazeer-away-from-google-deepmind/

2. Oracle cut 21,000 jobs this year and put AI in the SEC filing as the reason.

Oracle’s FY2026 annual report, filed June 22, disclosed that its global headcount dropped from 162,000 to 141,000 — a 13% reduction — with the company explicitly stating that AI deployment “has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” Most companies avoid that language. Oracle wrote it into a federal filing. On the other side of the ledger: capex surged 162% to $55.7B, almost entirely for AI data centers, producing negative free cash flow of $23.7B. The bet backing it all is a five-year, $300B data center deal with OpenAI under Project Stargate. Remaining performance obligations hit $638B — up 363% year-over-year.

Sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-21000.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22/oracle-layoffs-fueled-by-ai-reduces-workforce-by-21-000

3. Baseten raises $1.5B at a $13B valuation, making the case that AI infrastructure is the real prize.

The AI model deployment startup closed one of the largest infrastructure rounds of the year, led by Sands Capital and Wellington Management with participation from Blackbird VC. Baseten helps companies run, customize, and scale AI models in production — a layer that’s become critical as enterprises move past experimentation. The company reported 20x revenue growth over the past year. The raise signals a broader market shift: as frontier model access commoditizes, the companies that win may be the ones making deployment cheaper, faster, and more controllable for everyone else.

Sources:

https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/top-tech-news-today-june-23-2026/
https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-23-2026/

New Funding Updates

Upscale AI: $190M Series A-1 at a $2B valuation. A pure-play AI networking infrastructure company building open-standard alternatives to proprietary interconnects for large AI clusters, led by Premji Invest with participation from NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and Temasek. Brings total funding to $500M (FinSMEs).

https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/upscale-ai-raises-190-in-series-a-1-funding.html

Peregrine Technologies: $250M Series D at a $6.8B valuation. A government and enterprise AI operations platform that unifies siloed data for public safety and emergency response decision-making, backed by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Fifth Down Capital (Tech Startups).

https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-23-2026/

Stark: €500M. A Berlin-based defense-tech and autonomous drone systems startup, just two years after launch, led by Sequoia, Founders Fund, and the NATO Innovation Fund one of the largest European defense-tech raises ever (Tech Startups).

https://techstartups.com/2026/06/23/venture-capital-startup-funding-roundup-june-23-2026/

Cadence: $100M Series C. A clinical AI company managing chronic care for older adults across major U.S. health systems, led by Spark Capital with Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Coatue. Now active with 100,000+ patients and tripled ARR in 2025 (Business Wire).

https://www.businesswire.com/newsroom/subject/funding

What’s Been Going On?

Partly, a developer of AI foundation models for the automotive repair supply chain, raised a $50 million Series B at a $500 million valuation led by DST Global.

Allium, a provider of a blockchain data platform for enterprises, raised $40 million in Series B funding.

Isometric, a developer of an AI-powered industrial certification and compliance validation platform, raised $40 million in Series A funding.

Osanni Bio, a San Francisco-based development-stage therapeutics platform, raised $190 million in Series B funding led by Patient Square Capital.

Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing neuroprotective small molecule therapies for neurological diseases, raised $73.8 million in Series B funding led by The Column Group.

Orthogonal, a developer of a discovery, orchestration, and payments layer for AI agents, raised $4.3 million in Seed funding.

Tugboat Solutions, a developer of an AI-powered consumer insurance claims analysis platform, raised $3 million in Seed funding led by ResilienceVC.

Turbo Law, a developer of an automated litigation intelligence and file structure platform for insurance carriers and defense law firms, raised $3.8 million in Seed funding led by Revo Capital.

Katalyst Space, a space tech company developing robotic spacecraft for in-orbit satellite servicing and upgrades, raised $12 million in funding led by Geodesic Capital.

Solar Landscape, a provider of a platform for distributed energy infrastructure, raised funding in a round announced June 23.

Events June 26th - July 3rd

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

6/26

Fusion Energy Landscape:https://luma.com/0cndd3en

Sentry x GLITCHED & GGWP - Women in Game Dev Meetup: https://luma.com/dqsp2d17

Game night – The Collective: https://luma.com/x5mp4uwx

6/27

CSI Hacks: https://luma.com/ptgsw4bj

Building in SF - Summer Drinks: https://luma.com/aozd7n09

Claude Code for beginners: https://luma.com/claude-code-for-beginners

6/28

Tech World Cup + Founder Watch Party: https://luma.com/20t26nze

6/29

AI Engineer World’s Fair: https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026?utm_source=luma

6/29 – 7/2

Cafe Compute: Multi Modal Edition https://luma.com/deepmind?e=evt-iABhD9SX5fznz8y

6/30

Flint x Google: Ads Agent Launch: https://luma.com/nu6v7534

Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung): https://luma.com/extraordinarydinnersf?utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-june-22nd&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com (he gave corgi a shoutout b4 but he’s hosting it w rho)

Future Code: Rewriting the Developer Frontier: https://luma.com/FutureCodeFrontier

7/1

Grace Gong x Chargebee dinner [Venture with Grace CEO Club]: https://luma.com/ponotbv7

What open agents can actually do: a happy hour with Together AI & NVIDIA: https://luma.com/AIEWF-OpenAgentsMeetup

7/2

{AI} in Production: https://luma.com/5kvakl4z

AI Engineer Trivia Night: https://luma.com/k9z2sucw

Job Opportunities

Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Anduril, Carta, and Waymo

Build -1 → 0…

Read more

3 months ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Staff Software Engineer, Electron & Browser Infrastructure - Slack Desktop @ Salesforce – SF, CA Apply:

https://www.builtinsf.com/job/staff-software-engineer-electron-browser-infrastructure-slack-desktop/9855469

Software Engineer, CDN @ Vercel – SF/Hybrid, CA, USA up to $294K

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-cdn/8926426

PHD Software Enginnering Intern @NVIDIA, SF, CA. Apply:

https://simplify.jobs/p/d2de708b-89ff-406f-bd7a-70f5d52cf392/PhD-Software-Engineer-Intern

Software Engineering, Full Stack @ Aviator – SF, CA Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/aviator/jobs/2fmcI6d-software-engineer-fullstack

GTM

GTM Product Marketing Manager, Commerce Experiences @ Stripe SF, CA

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/head-gtm-business-operations-strategy-policy/9833157

Strategy and Operations Senior Associate, GTM @ Google, SF, CA

Apply: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/130516808422564550-strategy-and-operations-senior-associate/?src=Online/LinkedIn/linkedin_us&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=jobposting&utm_campaign=contract

Manager, GTM Applications Engineering @ Snowflake, Menlo Park, CA, Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/5ca3cecb-b6ad-4aef-8239-d367717008a3?utm_source=Q2P9NP2NNP&utm_medium=phenom-feeds&gh_src=ed5543a62

Founding GTM, Lucent (YC W 26), SF, CA.

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/96769

ICYMI: The Corgi Times issues are all available digitally online at corgitimes.com.

See you next week!

Best, The Corgi Team

This week felt like one of those classic SF weeks. It was YC Demo Day, which meant founders, investors, operators, and aspiring builders poured into the city from around the world. The Corgi team brought our bus outside Demo Day and gave out free drinks to the newest batch and investors.

In other news, the team at Corgi continues to grow. As we expand across insurance, AI, finance, media, and our initiatives, we're looking for ambitious builders who want to help shape what's next. If you've ever thought about joining us, now is a great time to take a look at our open roles: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/corgi

Let’s get into recent Corgi news, tech news, and jobs!

The Corgi Times issues are all available digitally online at corgitimes.com.

Corgi Insurance is partnering with Silicon Valley Bank to help founders access business insurance faster and more efficiently.

Through this partnership, SVB clients can access Corgi's AI-native insurance platform and tailored coverage solutions built for high-growth companies.

We're excited to work alongside one of the most trusted institutions in the innovation economy to make modern insurance more accessible to the next generation of builders.

Recent News

1. SpaceX agrees to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60B, just days after its record-breaking IPO.

The all-stock deal completes an option SpaceX secured back in April and is expected to close in Q3 2026. Cursor had been negotiating a $2B raise at a $50B valuation before SpaceX moved; the acquisition is meant to bolster the AI-coding push inside SpaceX’s xAI division and pairs Cursor’s product with SpaceX’s “Colossus” supercomputer.

Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-for-60b-in-stock-days-after-blockbuster-ipo/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisition-ipo.html

2. DeepSeek raises $7.4B in its first-ever outside funding round, becoming China’s most valuable AI startup at a $50B+ valuation.

The round is structured as a limited partnership controlled by founder Liang Wenfeng, who personally put in roughly $3B of his own money; outside backers including Tencent and CATL get no voting rights and face a five-year lock-up, while China’s state-backed National AI Fund is the only investor with direct equity and voting power.

Sources: https://techfundingnews.com/deepseek-raises-7-4b-at-50b-valuation-in-first-ever-external-funding-round/

https://www.thedailystar.net/news/tech-startup/news/deepseek-raises-74-billion-first-funding-round-report-4200176

3. Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro is closing in on general availability, targeting a 2-million-token context window and a new “Deep Think” reasoning mode.

Announced at I/O alongside the now-live Gemini 3.5 Flash, Pro remains limited to internal use and a small group of Vertex enterprise customers as of this week. Sundar Pichai’s on-stage promise of a launch “next month” puts the model on track to go head-to-head with Claude and GPT-5.5 on long-context, multimodal, and agentic coding tasks.

Sources: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317919/20260606/google-gemini-35-pro-nears-june-launch-2-million-token-context-deep-think-reasoning.htm

https://codersera.com/blog/gemini-3-5-pro-launch-guide-2026/

New Funding Updates

Prometheus: $12B at a ~$41B valuation. A developer of physical AI and autonomous engineering systems, backed by Jeff Bezos, JPMorgan Chase, and other investors, in one of the largest private AI rounds of the year (FinSMEs). https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/prometheus-raises-12-billion-at-approx-41-billion-valuation.html

PhoenixAI: $80M Series B. A company developing an agentic AI database, led by Sky9 Capital (FinSMEs). https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/phoenixai-raises-80m-series-b-funding.html

Coram AI: $35M Series B. A provider of an AI-native physical security platform, led by Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures (FinSMEs). https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/coram-ai-raises-35m-in-series-b-funding.html

NinjaOne: $400M+ Series C extension at a $12.3B valuation. An IT operations and endpoint management platform, one of the week’s largest enterprise software raises (Crunchbase News). https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-funding-rounds-ai-biotech-healthcare-ninjaone-leads/

What’s Been Going On?

Leaf, a company developing solutions to help agricultural and food companies analyze their farm data, raised a £13 million Series B co-led by Leaps by Bayer and a group of industry strategics.

Poetic, a company building a new class of software that learns like AI but runs like code, raised a $50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins.

Pi Security, an agentic AI security startup, raised a $35 million round led by Brightmind Partners and Third Point Ventures.

Billables AI, a provider of an AI-native operational intelligence platform built for law firms, raised a $10.2 million Series A led by Avenue Growth Partners.

Beren Therapeutics, a developer of cyclodextrin-based cholesterol trafficking therapeutics, raised a $135 million round backed by Wellington Partners and JIC Venture Growth Investments.

SonoThera, a biotechnology company developing new genetic medicines, raised $125 million in Series B funding led by Vida Ventures.

Maneva, a physical AI solution provider specializing in video-to-action intelligence for manufacturing, raised a $27 million Series A led by U.S. Venture Partners.

Fearn, a provider of an AI-native patent platform, raised a $5.5 million Seed round led by Kindred Ventures.

Upriver, an AI-native data engineering platform provider, raised a $14 million Seed round led by Valley Capital Partners and Hetz Ventures.

Cellares, an Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization for cell therapies, received a $20 million investment from ARK Invest.

SyntheticFi, a fintech platform that helps registered investment advisors offer tax-efficient, portfolio-backed financing to clients, raised a $13 million round backed by Y Combinator and Social Leverage.

Reset, a provider of an embedded earned wage access platform built for credit unions and community banks, raised a $6 million Seed round backed by Georgia’s Own Credit Union and others.

Events June 18th - June 25th

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

Thursday, 6/18

Claude Code & Coffee @ Corgi Cafe (hosted by us!): https://luma.com/5t639fsg

Female Founders and Funders Walk: https://luma.com/evfmew0y

Korea vs. Mexico: Founders Watch Party: https://luma.com/fwc-koreamexico

Brex Flex Club SF - Padel & Connections: https://luma.com/Brexflexpadeljune Founders Penthouse Poker Night: https://luma.com/c4uo5jls

Friday, 6/19

Sonoma AI: https://luma.com/jz1s0dbj

Forward Deployed: Glean - The Future of SaaS: https://luma.com/78d80y04

Inference-Time Compute Hackathon: https://luma.com/hncudfxb

Midsummer Multimodal AI Hackathon: https://luma.com/gicxj4ys

Game Day HQ / FWC26 AUS v. US: https://luma.com/fvbmyzjg

Saturday, 6/20

The Board Walks: https://meetup.com/the-board-walks-san-francisco/events/315039011/

Builders who Run SF — 5K: https://luma.com/l37g7gtn

Founders Running Club :: SF: https://luma.com/25ycs7ey

TOSV x Eight Sleep: Coffee, Donuts & the Future of Sleep Tech: https://luma.com/yrtv34t0

Sunday, 6/21

Agents you Love: Hackathon: https://luma.com/b7chd233

Deep Tech Week Opening Hardware Showcase @ Longshot: https://luma.com/m4y0s3n3

Founder DJ Party: https://luma.com/d1muwa0t

Monday, 6/22

Designers & Machines June 2026: https://luma.com/wmy80js8

The Global State of Deep Tech: https://luma.com/tjz6cxz2

SF Founders & Operators in Stealth Dinner: https://luma.com/rhoevents-0lmh

Tuesday, 6/23 design is a breakfast party at config: https://luma.com/d0lidgii

Deep Tech Underground by Alta, Stifel & Sequoia: https://luma.com/ew1byl0d

Wednesday, 6/24

Offline and unfiltered: a Config comedy night with Varun Rana: https://luma.com/dovetail-kw8l

Aexodus Deep Tech Physical AI Summit: https://luma.com/fsi7q6dx?tk=2AvyEM

Robotics - Data behind the robot - Community event: https://luma.com/roboticsdata

Deep Tech Happy Hour: https://luma.com/yj5uvoei

Job Opportunities in Collaboration with Build by a16z

Thanks to Katie Kirsch and the a16z Build newsletter for sharing this week’s roundup of open roles, full list:

a16z Build Newsletter

Open roles at Anduril, Carta, and Waymo

Build -1 → 0…

Read more

3 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Katie Kirsch, David Booth, and Erik Torenberg

Founding Growth Lead @ Lassie — AI for doctors’ offices, SF Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lassie/297fd72f-fe6d-40f1-8931-89085e66fa2f

GTM Lead @ Kindred — home swap startup Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kindred/72656491-1ede-4814-bf3a-a21f18569fce

Chief of Staff to the CPO @ Carta — SF, up to $280K Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/carta/jobs/7743056003

Strategic Program Manager to the CMO @ Figma — SF Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/figma/jobs/5978327004?gh_jid=5978327004

Engineering Manager, Rider Growth @ Waymo — Mountain View, up to $310K Apply: https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs/engineering-manager-rider-growth-mountain-view-california-united-states?gh_jid=7947564

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Account Abuse — Anthropic AI safety & research Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5123039008

Software Engineer, AI Product — Notion AI workspace for teams Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ai-product/6739368

Senior Software Engineer — Rippling HR, IT & finance platform Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/engineer/senior-software-engineer-hub-platform/19634

Software Engineer, New Grad — Stripe Financial infrastructure for the internet Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-new-grad/7029197

Senior Full Stack Engineer — LiveFlow AI ERP/FP&A platform Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/liveflow/jobs/yQSiOcS-senior-full-stack-engineer

GTM

Senior Product Manager @ AtoB Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/93278

Product Marketing Lead @ Brex Apply: https://www.brex.com/careers

Product Marketing Manager @ Stripe Apply: https://stripe.com/jobs

Product Marketing Manager, Monetization @ Figma Apply: https://www.figma.com/careers

Go-To-Market (GTM) Digital Natives Program Leader @ Databricks Apply: https://www.databricks.com/company/careers

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

Summer is officially in session, and so is a new chapter for Corgi.

Our trucking carrier has officially received approval, marking another milestone as we continue expanding our insurance company to new verticals. It’s a big step toward serving one of the largest and most important industries in the country.

We're also growing our physical footprint. We recently got the keys to our New York office and are hard at work preparing to open the next 100 Corgi Cafes, bringing our community of founders, operators, investors, and builders to the East Coast and beyond.

We’re looking forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead!

Our Chief of Staff Josh Jung and Head of Product Michael Davis on the main stage at Insurtech Insights conference in New York.

Corgi Times is back in physical print:

Thanks to all our drink sponsors as always for making our cafe better:

Events June 11 - June 18

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

Events: June 11–15 Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

6/11

Build with Cursor: San Francisco: https://luma.com/walu483m

ClickHouse + Hex AI Hackathon: https://luma.com/clickh-2ujv

StartOut Con: https://eventbrite.com/e/startout-con-tickets-1984346741521

Wiki x AI: A Salon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event:Bay_Area_WikiSalon_June_2026

6/12

Harness Engineering Hack: https://luma.com/harnesshack

The Council Angels: Move & Gather: https://luma.com/w631lh49

6/13

Autonomous Healthcare Hackathon | xAI, Cursor, Vercel: https://luma.com/zru7alb6

6/14

Founders Running Club: https://luma.com/25ycs7ey

6/15

Compile 2026 Opening Party: https://luma.com/88e4g1zi

Data + AI Summit: https://databricks.com/dataaisummit

Build with Claude AI. Lead Without Burning Out: https://luma.com/build-with-claude-ai-lead-without-burnin

Beyond Radical Design? | Speculative Everything book club — https://luma.com/se1

6/16

Make Your Own Financial Agent Master Class for Investors: https://luma.com/tba-ed4b?utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-june-8th&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

YC Demo Day

https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday

ClickHouse Cafe @ Data & AI Summit:

https://luma.com/clickh-vrjd

YC Demo Day Dinner | Flex x Family VC:

https://luma.com/jl9jlzbv

6/17

The SF Grind: Founder, Investor, & Operator Mixer:
https://luma.com/y2ld3ukk

Artificially Unintelligent: SF Tech Comedy Show (June)

https://luma.com/SFTechComedyJune

6/18

Female Founders and Funders Walk:

https://luma.com/evfmew0y

Brex Flex Club SF - Padel & Connections

https://luma.com/Brexflexpadeljune

Founders Penthouse Poker Night

https://luma.com/c4uo5jls

Job Opportunities

Software Engineering

Software Engineer, Account Abuse — Anthropic AI safety & research

Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5123039008

Software Engineer — Retool Build internal tools fast

Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retool/jobs/opATLaU-software-engineer

Software Engineer I/II — Giga Enterprise AI voice agents

Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/giga/jobs/GAVxgkS-software-engineer-i-ii-san-francisco

Software Engineer, AI Product — Notion AI workspace for teams

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-ai-product/6739368

Senior Full Stack Engineer — Sphere AI-powered tax compliance

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/80565

Senior Software Engineer — Rippling HR, IT & finance platform

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/engineer/senior-software-engineer-hub-platform/19634

Software Engineer, New Grad — Stripe Financial infrastructure for the internet

Apply: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/software-engineer-new-grad/7029197

Senior Full Stack Engineer — LiveFlow AI ERP/FP&A platform

Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/liveflow/jobs/yQSiOcS-senior-full-stack-engineer

Senior Product Manager @ AtoB
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/93278?utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-june-8th&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

Agent Success Manager @ Kastle
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/89546?utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-june-8th&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

Product Marketing Lead @ Brex
Apply: https://www.brex.com/careers

Product Marketing Manager @ Stripe
Apply: https://stripe.com/jobs

Product Marketing Manager, Monetization @ Figma
Apply: https://www.figma.com/careers

Amazon GTM Partnership, Startups @ Anthropic
Apply: https://www.anthropic.com/careers

Product Marketing Manager @ Front
Apply: https://front.com/careers

Go-To-Market (GTM) Digital Natives Program Leader @ Databricks
Apply: https://www.databricks.com/company/careers

Recent News

1. SpaceX Google locks 900M+ AI compute deal ahead of IPO.

SpaceX has signed a massive cloud and AI infrastructure agreement with Google, reportedly worth nearly 1B per month in compute capacity, involving ~100K+ GPUs. The deal effectively turns SpaceX into a hybrid aerospace and AI infrastructure giant just days ahead of its IPO filing, marking one of the largest private compute contracts ever disclosed and signaling a structural shift in how AI infrastructure is financed at scale.

Sources: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-signs-cloud-deal-with-google-2026-06-05/
https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/spacex-lands-major-ai-deal-with-google-after-anthropic-win-ahead-of-ipo-126060600081_1.html

2. Anthropic multi-gigawatt compute expansion signals industrial scale AI.

Anthropic is reportedly expanding its AI training capacity through a 35B+ infrastructure buildout backed by Apollo, Blackstone, and Broadcom, pushing the company into gigawatt-scale compute territory. This reframes Anthropic from a software company into a vertically integrated AI infrastructure operator, competing directly with hyperscalers on raw compute ownership rather than just model performance.

Sources: https://www.reuters.com/technology/anthropic-blackstone-apollo-ai-expansion-2026-06-06/
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4

3. Google agent first operating system shift goes live across ecosystem.

Google is actively rolling out its agent native computing stack following I/O 2026, with Gemini Spark acting as a persistent autonomous system orchestrating apps, search, and background tasks. The shift marks a formal move away from chat based AI toward always on execution agents embedded across Android, XR glasses, and cloud services, redefining the interface layer of computing itself.

Sources: https://www.techradar.com/news/live/google-io-2026-live
https://www.cnet.com/videos/watch-google-unveil-its-biggest-updates-at-google-io-2026-in13-minutes/

New Funding Updates

Anthropic: $65B at a $965B valuation. The AI frontier lab behind Claude becomes the most valuable private AI company in the world, surpassing OpenAI in valuation. Massive hyperscaler-backed round led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, and Sequoia, with Amazon among key strategic investors (TechCrunch). https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/anthropic-raises-65-billion-nears-1t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo/

Sierra: $950M at a $15B+ valuation. Bret Taylor–founded SF startup building AI agents for enterprise customer experience, now handling billions of interactions across Fortune 50 customers. One of the clearest “AI replaces SaaS layer” breakout companies (TechCrunch). https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/sierra-raises-950m-as-the-race-to-own-enterprise-ai-gets-serious/

Cognition AI: $1B at a $25B valuation. SF-based AI coding agent company behind Devin, scaling fast with nearly $500M ARR and enterprise customers like NASA and Goldman Sachs. Strong signal that autonomous software engineering is becoming a real category (TechCrunch). https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/ai-coding-startup-cognition-raises-1b-at-25b-pre-money-valuation/

Helion: $465M at a $15.5B valuation. SF-adjacent fusion energy startup backed by Sam Altman, building the first commercial fusion power plant with Microsoft contract demand already in place. One of the clearest “AI energy infrastructure” bets (Reuters). https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuclear-startup-helion-hits-155-billion-valuation-latest-funding-round-2026-06-04/

Kindred Ventures: $355M new fund. SF VC firm doubling down on early-stage AI infra, robotics, and foundational AI companies, signaling continued capital concentration in Bay Area AI formation layer (WSJ). https://www.wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/kindred-ventures-adapts-to-fast-evolving-market-with-355-million-in-fresh-funds-a763e78c/

SF Compute: $40M Series A. SF startup building a GPU marketplace for AI compute liquidity, effectively financializing access to compute outside hyperscaler control. Early but strategically important infra layer move (WSJ). https://www.wsj.com/articles/sf-compute-an-ai-computing-marketplace-raises-40-million-2b0d0ef4

OPAQUE Systems: $24M Series B. SF enterprise security company building confidential computing infrastructure for regulated AI workloads, targeting sensitive enterprise AI deployment at scale (PR Newswire). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/opaque-raises-24m-series-b-at-300m-valuation-to-advance-confidential-ai-for-the-enterprise-302685635.html

Rivvun AI: $7.5M seed. SF-area applied AI startup building enterprise intelligence tooling, part of the broader long-tail of AI-native SaaS companies emerging under the mega-round layer (Economic Times). https://m.economictimes.com/tech/funding/rivvun-ai-raises-7-55-million-led-by-sitara-capital-3one4-capital/articleshow/131636944.cms

What’s Been Going on?

Anthropic, the San Francisco AI lab behind Claude, raised $65 billion in a Series H led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, pushing its valuation to nearly $1 trillion. The company also filed confidentially for an IPO with the SEC days later.

Supabase, a developer of an open source Postgres platform for building and scaling applications, raised $500M in Series F funding at a $10.5 billion valuation, led by GIC with participation from Accel, Y Combinator, and Coatue.

NewLimit, a San Francisco biotech co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong developing cell reprogramming and longevity medicines, raised $435M in Series C funding led by Founders Fund with Thrive Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

Generalist AI, a developer of embodied robotics intelligence and foundation models for autonomous systems, raised $400M at a $2 billion valuation led by Radical Ventures, with 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Nvidia, and Bezos Expeditions.

Collate, a developer of AI-powered document automation software for life sciences teams, raised $95M at nearly a $1 billion valuation.

Town, a provider of personalized AI assistants that connect to the tools you already use and act as a chief of staff, raised $55M in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with Forerunner Ventures and First Round Capital.

Sekai, a consumer creation platform that turns text prompts into playable mini-apps and games in real time, raised $26M in Seed and Series A funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Connect Ventures, with Mayfield and a16z speedrun.

SyntheticFi, a fintech platform that helps registered investment advisors offer tax-efficient, portfolio-backed financing to clients, raised $13M backed by Y Combinator, Social Leverage, and NextGen VP.

daydream, a developer of an AI-native platform for organic search growth, raised $15M in Series A funding.

Alien, a startup building trust infrastructure for the agentic economy, raised $7.1M in pre-seed funding led by Initialized Capital.

Numos, a developer of an AI platform built for enterprise finance teams, raised $4.25M in seed funding.

See you next week!

Best,

The Corgi Team

At Corgi, it seems like the big announcements never stop. Yesterday, Corgi announced a $106 million Series B1 round, led by TCV with participation from Prime Capital, Zone 2 Ventures, Oliver Jung, Leblon Capital, Kindred Ventures, Quadri Ventures, First Order Fund, Vocal Ventures, Nordstar, GSBackers, Repeat Ventures, 8188 Capital, and other strategic investors. This fresh round of funding brings the company’s valuation to $2.6 billion. The financing will support continued expansion of Corgi’s full-stack insurance platform and launch into new lines of commercial insurance.

This follows only three weeks after Corgi’s Series B announcement on May 6, in which the company disclosed $160 million in funding at a $1.3 billion valuation. Combined with the company’s previously announced $108 million Series A, this brings Corgi’s total funding amount to $378 million to accelerate the modernization of commercial insurance infrastructure. The company’s revenue has grown at a pace rarely seen in fintech or insurance.

“Commercial insurance infrastructure has historically been slow, manual, and difficult for operators to navigate,” said Nico Laqua, founder and CEO of Corgi.

Laqua says this new round would allow Corgi to expand quicker into new verticals such as trucking, small business, sports, and more. At this time, Corgi is on track to become one of the fastest growing companies by revenue.

Corgi in the Press and Notable Mentions:

Forbes article on the Series B1 raise: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/28/corgi-doubles-valuation/

The Insurer from Reuters: https://www.theinsurer.com/ti/news/corgi-doubles-valuation-to-26-billion-with-106-million-series-b1-three-weeks-2026-05-28/

Corgi Cafe

Corgi Cafe expansion is underway.

What started as a gathering place for founders, operators, investors, and builders in San Francisco is growing beyond the Bay Area. We’re excited to share that Corgi Cafe is planning a presence in New York in the coming months. More soon.

In the meantime, thank you to all of our partners, event hosts, speakers, sponsors, and community members who have helped make the cafe what it is today. Your support has transformed Corgi Cafe into one of the most active hubs for the startup ecosystem.

If you’d like to attend an upcoming event, check out our calendar here:

https://luma.com/usecorgi

ICYMI:

Anthropic’s Revenue Is Going Vertical

Anthropic told investors it expects revenue to more than double to $10.9B in Q2 and post its first operating profit. The company also acquired Stainless, the SDK platform powering official developer libraries across major AI ecosystems, and brought on OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to its pre-training team.

Anthropic is reportedly closing a $30B funding round that could push its valuation past OpenAI’s.

SpaceX to IPO

Elon Musk’s rocket company filed its S-1 this week targeting a June 12 listing on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas.

SpaceX is pitching investors on a roadmap that includes xAI integration, Mars factories, asteroid mining, orbital pharmaceutical manufacturing, and lunar passenger services.

Google I/O 2026: The Agent Era Officially Begins

Google used I/O 2026 to unveil Gemini Spark, a persistent AI agent that runs continuously in the background and orchestrates Google’s models in real time.

Combined with Android XR smart glasses and increasingly autonomous workflows, Google’s vision signals a shift from chatbots toward full-time AI agents.

Recent Raises

• Origin Lab — $8M Seed led by Lightspeed Venture Partners

• Outmarket AI — $17M Series A led by Permanent Capital Ventures

• Secludy — $4M Seed led by Impression Ventures

• Recursive Superintelligence — $650M round led by GV and Greycroft

• GridCARE — $64M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures and John Doerr

• Flick — $6M Seed backed by True Ventures, GV, Y Combinator, and others

• Nectar Social — $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures and Anthology Fund

• Wirestock — $23M Series A led by Nava Ventures

• Graphon AI — $8.3M Seed led by Arvind Gupta of Novera Ventures

• Hark — $700M at a $6B valuation

• Zyphra — $500M Series B at a $5B+ valuation

• Goodfire — Reached a $1.25B valuation

• Nourish — $100M Series C led by Menlo Ventures

• NanoCo — $12M Seed led by Valley Capital Partners

• Stilta — $10.5M led by Andreessen Horowitz

• Viewz — $7M Seed led by Ibex Investors and FLINT Capital

Job Opportunities:

Software Engineer (Product) — Terrakotta AI

Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/terrakotta/jobs/xl27Ohw-software-engineer-product-new-grad

Software Engineer, Product — Julius AI

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/julius/ef275db5-43c3-4a6a-bd70-fb8f02392c9b/application

New Grad AI Engineer — Notion

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/notion/7e6dc7fe-7ddd-42c1-8928-13f7bddb9ec9

Growth Engineer — Juxta GPS

Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/juxta/jobs/ZCPgmGZ-growth-engineer

GTM Engineer — Relace Infra

Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/relace/jobs/9cATbuj-gtm-engineer

Stripe is hiring an Account Executive, Product (Buy Now Pay Later).

Apply here: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/account-executive-product-bnpls/8814929

Stripe is hiring a Program Manager, Go To Market.

Apply here: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/program-manager-go-market/9401343

Stripe is hiring a Technical Account Manager, AI User Segment.

Apply here: https://www.builtinsf.com/job/technical-account-manager-ai-user-segment/9462903

Stripe is hiring a Specialist Solutions Architect, Payments.

Apply here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/specialist-solutions-architect-payments-at-stripe-4413488627

Rippling is hiring a Director, Business Operations.

Apply here: https://to.indeed.com/aahscmjkxn9m

Rippling is hiring an Enterprise Account Executive (West Coast).

Apply here: https://www.talent.com/view?id=620139408961969250

Rippling is hiring a Manager, Customer Success Management.

Apply here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/manager-customer-success-management-at-rippling-4391564286

See you next week!

The Corgi Team

From startup news and founder insights to curated events across the city, we’re here to keep you in the loop and in the zeitgeist. This week, the Corgi Cafe has seen a ton of momentum through our sponsored drink activations, pop-ups, and community events.

Over the past few months, our cafe has become a gathering place for operators, founders, investors, creatives, and friends of the brand through pop-ups, sponsored drink activations, networking events, and community nights. What started as an extension of the Corgi experience has quickly become one of the most energizing parts of the company.

As the momentum continues to grow, we’re starting to think bigger about what cafe expansion could look like and how we continue creating spaces that bring people together around ideas, conversation, and culture.

We’re actively looking into bringing on a Head of Cafe Expansion to help shape that vision. This is someone excited about hospitality, operations, partnerships, and building memorable experiences at scale.

A lot of work ahead, but we’re excited for what’s coming!

ICYMI: Corgi took over the floor of the NYSE and our founder Nico Laqua was on the NYSE Opening Bell show.

Thank you and shoutout to all of our amazing drink sponsors at the Corgi Cafe.

Events: Week of May 21

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

May 21st

Berkeley Robotics Community Showcase: Where Generations Meet - https://luma.com/epx1waw5

WorkOS MCP Night: Agent Mode - https://luma.com/mcp-night-4

CapCut x Design Buddies Design Hackathon powered by Design Studio - https://luma.com/design-hackathon

MotherDuck + DuckDB May Meetup - https://luma.com/motherduckdckdbmay

May 24th

Gen Z Marketers & Creators in the Park - https://luma.com/byobhyun

May 26th

How to Al Pill Your Company - https://luma.com/7cojgbhq

May 27th

HeyGen’s “Infinitely Me” Pop-Up - https://luma.com/1eilqafb

Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho @ Antler VC - https://luma.com/0hzann68

Comedy & Charisma Show - https://luma.com/be7o3xzk

May 30th

Founder Poker Dinner - https://partiful.com/e/RDfjjW7kkKXzV2XDJmy7

Corgi Engineer Spotlight: Building Beyond the Code

By: Harnish Modi, Full-Stack Engineer

Recently, I had the opportunity to give a short talk at an AI coding community event on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot: how AI coding tools are changing the role of engineers.

A lot of conversations around AI and software start with the same question: Will AI replace engineers? But from what I’ve seen, the more interesting shift is happening in the opposite direction. AI is not making the engineering role smaller. It is expanding what engineers can responsibly own.

AI coding tools are making implementation faster. They can help draft code, explore unfamiliar files, generate tests, debug issues, prototype ideas quickly, and even help QA end-to-end flows when you are deep in your tokenmaxxing era. But when the coding part gets faster, the bottleneck starts to move. The hard part becomes less about typing the code and more about understanding the system around it.

Their real value is not just helping engineers write code faster. It is reducing the cost of moving from ambiguity to a working first version: something the team can test, react to, and improve.

But faster implementation does not automatically mean better engineering. AI can help generate code, but it does not automatically understand the customer workflow, the business tradeoffs, the operational edge cases, or whether the feature is solving the right problem.

That means the engineer’s value moves upstream. The hard part becomes understanding the system deeply enough to know what should be built in the first place.

I have felt this shift directly at Corgi. When I joined as a full-stack engineer, I thought about “full-stack” in the traditional sense: frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and production systems. But at an early-stage company, the stack gets bigger very quickly. It starts to include customer workflows, financial systems, payment flows, operational processes, business logic, and internal tools that did not exist yet.

The engineering did not shrink. The rest of the company started showing up inside the engineering work.

At Corgi, this mindset shows up every day. Engineering is not just about shipping tickets. It is about connecting product, operations, customers, compliance, payments, and code into systems that actually work in the real world.

So when people ask whether AI will replace engineers, I think the better question is: What kind of engineer does AI make possible?

My answer: one who is not just a faster coder, but a full-stack builder.

Job Opportunities

GitLab is hiring Major Account Executive .

Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8496445002

Adyen is hiring a Data center Engineer.

Apply here: careers.adyen.com/vacancies/7791168-data-center-engineer-ii

Samsara is hiring a Manager, Video Production.
Apply here: www.samsara.com/company/careers/roles/7740057?gh_jid=7740057

Vannevar is hiring a Business Operations Manager (remote).
Apply here: www.vannevarlabs.com/careers/open-roles/5105646007

TrueML is hiring a Senior Manager, DevOps.
Apply here: jobs.lever.co/trueml/117711d2-6b16-495e-9ab5-9170bb0f7883

Huntress is hiring a Senior Sales Development Representative (remote).
Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/huntress/jobs/6485855003

Recent Raises

Origin Lab, a provider of a technology platform turning licensed game worlds into structured training data for world models and multimodal AI, raised a $8M Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Outmarket AI, a provider of an AI platform purpose-built for insurance, raised a $17M Series A led by Permanent Capital Ventures.
Secludy, a privacy-tech startup serving banks, payments firms, and fintech companies, raised a $4M Seed round led by Impression Ventures.
Recursive Superintelligence, a developer of self-improving artificial intelligence software and autonomous training systems, raised a $650M round led by GV and Greycroft.
GridCARE, a power acceleration company for AI, raised a $64M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures and John Doerr.
Flick, a provider of an AI-native filmmaking platform, raised a $6M Seed round backed by True Ventures, Google Ventures, Y Combinator and more.
Nectar Social, a provider of an agentic social operating solution, raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund.
Wirestock, a provider of a platform for creators, raised a $23M Series A led by Nava Ventures.
Graphon AI, a developer of a pre-model intelligence and relational representation layer for enterprise AI, raised a $8.3M Seed round led by Arvind Gupta of Novera Ventures.

See you next week!

The Corgi Team

From startup news and founder insights to curated events across the city, we’re here to keep you in the loop and in the zeitgeist. This week, the Corgi Cafe has seen a ton of momentum through our sponsored drink activations, pop-ups, and community events.

As a company, we’re still riding the momentum and excitement from our Series B raise, but we know this is only the beginning. There’s still so much more to build, improve, and execute on as we continue scaling the company and pushing toward even bigger goals.

Anything released a smoothie named Hello World and took over Corgi Cafe into the clouds to celebrate! Anything is a conversational platform that turns plain English into real, production-ready apps, handling mobile, web, design, AI, backend, databases, auth, hosting, and payments automatically.

Special thanks to all of our partners at the cafe:

Events: Week of May 15

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

May 15th
Voker Fest: A Social Soirée - https://luma.com/zz2a4zdd

May 16th - 17th
Notion Developer Platform Hackathon - https://luma.com/fyuf7
Events Coming Soon

May 18th
From Demo to Production: Building Reliable Al Agents | Hands-On Workshop - https://luma.com/sw2vpqnl

May 19th
European founders dinner - https://luma.com/caq6b0uz

May 20th
Women Who Build: San Francisco Craft Night hosted by Anything - https://luma.com/2tfrpcyt

May 21st
WorkOS MCP Night: Agent Mode - https://luma.com/mcp-night-4
CapCut x Design Buddies Design Hackathon powered by Design Studio - https://luma.com/design-hackathon

Job Opportunities

Domu Technology Inc. is hiring a Founding Account Executive or SDR.
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/83968

Alex is hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR).
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/89037

Reflex is hiring a Software Engineer - Generalist.
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/89203

Asteroid is hiring a Founding Product Engineer.
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/92423

Hotplate is hiring a Full Stack Engineer.
Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/89034

Corgi in the Press:

WSJ Pro Venture Capital Newsletter

Featured in EO Media (677k), one of the largest YouTube channels on Entrepreneurship in Asia.

Our CEO on Bloomberg’s ETF IQ this week

See you next week!

The Corgi Team

Corgi is proud to announce that it has raised $160 million in Series B funding at a $1.3 billion valuation, advancing its mission to build the first AI-native, full-stack insurance carrier for startups. The round was led by TCV, with participation from both existing and new investors including Oliver Jung, Leblon Capital, Kindred Ventures, Repeat VC, Zone 2 Ventures, Audeo Ventures, Hexa Capital, and other strategic investors .The new capital will support the continued expansion of Corgi’s startup insurance products, including broader coverage, deeper distribution, and ongoing investment in the AI systems that power underwriting, claims, and policy operations. The company is also moving into new verticals, beginning with trucking, where it plans to bring faster quoting, more adaptive risk models, and coverage aligned with real-world operations. Corgi’s long-term vision is to continue to modernize one of the most complex sectors in financial services.

Come pick up a copy of the Corgi Times at our Cafe!

Corgi in the Press:

Exclusive with Forbes on our Series B Raise: Read here

TechCrunch article

The Insurer Article

PitchBook newsletter and many, many more!

We at Corgi are proud to launch our new smoothie series with our first group of partners, giving them the ability to customize ingredients to their brand and showcase their logos prominently. Thanks to our partners for working this us.

To celebrate our Series B, go to our cafe and say “GO CORGI” for 20% off any item, Thanks for being a subscriber.

Events: Week of May 7:

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

May 7th

DevGuild: Write-Only Code Summit - https://luma.com/write-only-code-summit

Agentic + AI Coding Night SF - https://luma.com/agenticaiobsnightsf-5-7


May 8th

Agentic AI Summit: Advancing Responsible AI - https://luma.com/3e8jb8py

AI Executive Dinner - https://luma.com/wu3mo4ww


May 9th

Open Source Computer Use Hackathon - https://luma.com/cua

SF Founders Badminton - https://luma.com/7ornn2o6

May 9-10: Physical AI Hack World Tour - https://luma.com/0xbcm3kj


May 10th

Running with Researchers - https://luma.com/6fnq9ef7

Job Opportunities

Parrot is looking for a Founding Product Designer -
Apply here: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/90847

Infisical is looking for a Recruiter (US & Canada) -
Apply here: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/88936

HappyRobot is looking for a People Partner -
Apply here: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/87655

Retell AI is looking for a Senior Product Designer -
Apply here: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/88842

Finta is looking for a Founding Engineer (Ruby) -
Apply here: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/81583

Benchling is hiring a software engineer.
Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/benchling/9165e6e5-7209-490f-91ff-72ee719bcce7

Mochi is hiring a data manager.
Apply here: boards.greenhouse.io/mochihealth/jobs/5164433008

Blacksmith is hiring Head of Marketing.
Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/Blacksmith/6b096838-3ef8-4c32-a869-e0274e74d954

Workwhile is hiring a payroll specialist.
Apply here: www.workwhile.ai/teams?ashby_jid=d16c8a45-af53-4e7d-8aef-c0fff9015ff6#ashby_embed

Postman is hiring an Applied AI Scientist.
Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/postman/jobs/7452539003

Sprinter is hiring a Software Engineer.
Apply here jobs.ashbyhq.com/sprinter-health/79465d70-7534-4c3a-874a-8c9539ee9c79

Task Rabbit is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer.
Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/taskrabbit/jobs/7430424

See you next week!

The Corgi Team

With Stripe Sessions 2026 happening this week, the city’s energy is dialed all the way up. From founder insights and product drops to curated events across San Francisco, we’re here to keep you in the loop, and in the zeitgeist.

We’ve also been doubling the number of events we’re hosting at Corgi Cafe, bringing in more founders, operators, and builders for conversations, meetups, and everything in between. It’s quickly turning into a hub for people who want to connect, share ideas, and build alongside each other.

We’re also launching our new smoothie partnerships on May 1, rolling out fresh flavors in collaboration with some of our favorite partners and companies. Each one is customizable and features their branding, so you’ll start seeing some new names (and tastes) soon. Come by the cafe at 9 Claude Lane to see more!

If you are preparing to launch a product or have recently announced a funding round and want to be featured on our newsletter or billboard, please fill out our form here.

📰 What’s Been Going on?

Astor, an AI-native investment advisory platform registered with the SEC, raised a $5M Seed round led by Monashees.

Petual, a provider of an AI-powered platform for audit and compliance, raised a $20M round led by Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Elad Gil.

Brev, a provider of an AI-native business performance operating system, raised a $3.3M Pre-Seed round was led by Resolute Ventures.

Omni, a provider of an AI Analytics platform, raised a $120M Series C led by ICONIQ.

Band, a company providing a layer service for multi-agent systems, raised a $17M Seed round backed by Sierra Ventures, Hetz Ventures and Team8.

10x Science, a startup that builds frontier AI for molecular-level protein characterization across the life sciences, raised a $4.8M Seed round led by Initialized Capital.

Afresh, a provider of an AI platform for grocery, raised a $34M round led by Just Climate and High Sage Ventures.

BuildForever, a consumer technology company advancing email functionalities with AI, raised a $9.5M Seed round backed by Felicis Ventures, Abstract VC and more.

Crewline AI, a developer of autonomous technology for existing construction machinery, raised a $7.1M Seed round led by Initialized Capital and Nebular.

Octen, a search infrastructure company for the generative AI era, raised a $10M Seed round led by Square Peg.

C-Infinity, a provider of an AI platform that automates the translation of digital designs into production-ready plans, raised a $16M round led by Canaan Partners.

NeoCognition, a research lab developing self-learning AI agents, raised a $40M Seed round led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures.

Reliable Robotics, a provider of autonomous aircraft systems, raised a $160M round led by Nimble Partners.

Humble, a provider of autonomous, electric haulers, raised $24M in Seed round led by Eclipse.

Ray Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing differentiated vision restoration therapies for those living with retinal degenerations, raised a $125M Series B led by Janus Henderson Investors.

Sinai.ai, a provider of an AI-native books platform, raised $1.45M in Pre-Seed round led by KAUST Innovation Ventures (KIV) and DisrupTech Ventures.

Giggles, a social app that lets users buy and sell stakes in videos, raised $1M+ in Pre-Seed round led by 1kx.

Sage Haven, a provider of a messaging and voice calling app for kids, raised a $3M Pre-Seed round backed by Hustle Fund, How Women Invest and more.

Eigen, a startup that develops AI enhancing human connection and collaboration, raised a $15M in Seed round backed by Benchmark and more.

Zum, a connected mobility experience (CMX) company, raised $100M from TPG.

Ultralight, an AI-native operating system for preventive and personalized care, raised $9.3M in Seed round led by The General Partnership.

Loop, a provider of an AI platform for logistics and supply chains, raised a $95M in Series C led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund.

Trudy is (Still) Looking for Love!

Meet Gertrude (also known as Trudy), our office’s resident Pembroke Welsh Corgi and reigning queen. She’s full of charm and always on the hunt for her next snack. On behalf of Trudy, Corgi is now accepting applications for a life partner husband. Non-negotiables are that they must be a male purebred Corgi, unfixed, with high energy. Bonus points for great ears and a stash of treats. To meet Trudy at the cafe, ask the cashier.

📍 Where to Be

Corgi Cafe Events: https://luma.com/usecorgi

April 29th

Build YC’s Next Unicorn - https://luma.com/build-ycs-next-unicorn-apr29-2026

Agent Hack Day - https://luma.com/j4kfhu9p

All Things Sync - https://luma.com/lu6m402p

Consumer tech living room: Talks & drinks - https://luma.com/6ukg0ivd

Daytona Al Researchers - https://luma.com/i65trrwy

Reading Group: Olmix: A Framework for Data Mixing Throughout LM Development - https://luma.com/da3tj3pr

Al Champions Dinner - https://luma.com/cjlchnib

Claws Out. Hard Problems Night with GMI x WorkOS - https://luma.com/fstfec56

Full Context: An exclusive reception for Al leaders, hosted by Modular & AMD - https://luma.com/full-context

The Principal Club | SF Dinner - https://luma.com/0hvi3d9x

Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho - https://luma.com/s5syhzcc

April 30th

CMX × The CC: Community Coffee Meetup - https://luma.com/1ehtu7bc

Al Infra Meetup with dstack and Crusoe - https://luma.com/ykt5b294

Unicorner Presents: SF Seed+ Founders Dinner - https://luma.com/8v52b44d

Al & Scientific Researcher Dinner: Autopoiesis Sciences × Rho - https://luma.com/tn8l8r98

SF Founders Dinner with Verci / Artifex and Rho - https://luma.com/6qpa91ob

Weighted Moves: Al & Chess Mixer - https://luma.com/weightedmoves

May 4th

Make Your Own Financial Agent for Investors - https://luma.com/build-your-own-financial-agent-mastercla

May 6th

Door 3: April Founder Elevator Pitch - https://luma.com/l7ekxn5g

May 7th

Ex-Evercore Startup Dinner - https://luma.com/cmzbssmc

May 8th

Agentic AI Summit: Advancing Responsible AI - https://luma.com/3e8jb8py

AI Executive Dinner - https://luma.com/wu3mo4ww

Corgi Featured on Mercury News! Read the article at the link here.

Job Opportunities

Readily is looking for a Founding Design Engineer

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/92532

Accord is looking for a Senior Product Designer

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/85317

HappyRobot is looking for a People Partner

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/87655

Blee is looking for a AI Engineer

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/93341

JustAI is looking for a Founding Account Executive

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/89155

Doximity is hiring a Data Engineering Manager. boards.greenhouse.io/doximity/jobs/7398192

Altassian is seeking a Senior Design Manager. www.atlassian.com/company/careers/details

Deepgram is seeking a QA Engineering Manager.

jobs.ashbyhq.com/Deepgram/

Philo is hiring a Head of Data Engineering.

job-boards.greenhouse.io/philo/jobs/7736643

Hedra is hiring a Research Engineer.

www.hedra.com/careers?ashby_jid=c4a801aa-3423-427a-a91d-c1d88ae3be63

GrowTherapy is hiring a data analyst.

job-boards.greenhouse.io/growtherapy/jobs/4648815005

See you next week!

The Corgi Team

In other Corgi Cafe news, we recently installed call booths, and they’ve quickly become the go-to spot for anyone who needs to lock in. Whether it’s a pitch, a client call, or a quick check-in, having a quiet, dedicated space makes it easier to focus and show up fully. It’s a small addition that makes a huge difference.

Something that people are excited about: Stripe Sessions 2026 takes place next week on April 29–30, 2026, at Moscone West in San Francisco. The major conference for developers and business leaders will feature 10,000+ attendees, keynotes on AI/agentic commerce, and product launches. Sessions cover payments, fraud, and monetization with high-profile speakers.

If you haven’t already noticed, the building across the street from the Corgi Cafe transforms into a Time Square style billboard after 7:30 pm. We use this space to share the moments that matter most to us, whether it’s announcing new fundraises, highlighting milestones for partners/friends.

If you are preparing to launch a product or have recently announced a funding round and want to be featured on our newsletter or billboard, please fill out our form here.

Corgi Bus Routes

The Corgi bus now gives FREE rides to people in the community to three different stops on Monday-Friday. Look below for the full schedule.

📰 What’s Been Going on?

Mintlify, a startup that is building the knowledge infrastructure for AI, raised a $45M Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Salesforce Ventures.

Factory, an agentic AI startup, raised a $150M round led by Khosla Ventures.

Slash Financial, Inc., a provider of a banking platform, raised a $100M Series C led by Ribbit Capital.

Expo, a provider of an open-source platform empowering React Native development for developers, raised a $45M Series B led by Leadout Capital, A.Capital Ventures and Red Swan Ventures.

Resolv, an AI-native software and services company that automates back-office operations for home services contractors, raised a $1M Pre-Seed round co-led by Redbud VC and EquipmentShare.

Ulysses, a maritime robotics company developing high-volume autonomous surface and underwater vehicles for maritime operations, received an undisclosed amount investment from Booz Allen Hamilton.

Solidroad, a provider of an AI platform that helps companies evaluate and improve every human and AI customer conversation, raised a $25M Series A led by Hedosophia.

Balerion AI, a provider of an agentic AI platform built for mortgage loan origination, raised a $6M Seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Worki, a healthcare workforce infrastructure company, raised a $2.75M Pre-Seed round led by Redesign Health and Healthliant Ventures.

Resolve AI, a developer of AI for running and operating software in production, raised a $40M Series A Extension led by DST Global and Salesforce Ventures

Phonely, a provider of an AI voice platform for businesses, raised a $16M Series A led by Base10 Partners.

Hilbert, a provider of an agentic AI platform that connects data across teams, raised a $28M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Terremoto Biosciences, a biotechnology company developing highly targeted, small molecule medicines, raised a $108M Series C backed by RA Capital Management, Deep Track Capital and more.

Gitar, a developer infrastructure company building AI agents for code review and continuous integration workflows, raised a $9M round led by Venrock.

HockeyStack, a provider of an enterprise revenue agent platform, raised an undisclosed amount led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Uncorrelated Ventures.

Spiral Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage company developing novel therapies for inner ear disorders, raised a $27M Series B led by Gund Investment.

Ratio, a provider of an AI Fintech platform for B2B scale-ups, raised a $15.8M round backed by Streamlined Ventures, Cervin Ventures and more.

📍 Where to Be

April 22nd

• Climate Debate: The Road to Wisdom - https://luma.com/ak286ka4

• Bay Area Frontier Research Club - https://luma.com/14qkd97c

• AI Builders Social Night: Building with SKILLS - https://luma.com/ai-builders-social-night-building-with-s

• Cost of Compute - SFCW Dinner - https://luma.com/e9u7mhup

April 23rd

• Zero to Unicorn: Shef Founder Fireside - https://luma.com/9jhfgk0w

• AI Builders Social Night: What makes a great AI product - https://luma.com/ai-builders-social-night-what-makes-a-gr

• Sofra Series: A dinner for founders - https://luma.com/ebredhv4

• Door 3: April Founder Elevator Pitch - https://luma.com/l7ekxn5g

April 24th

• Ship to Prod - Agentic Engineering Hackathon - https://luma.com/shiptoprod

April 25th

• SF Minecraft LAN for AI builders by Silicon Mania & Ascii.dev - https://luma.com/sf-minecraft-lan-by-asciidev

• Climate Stakeholder Gathering: Morning Run - https://luma.com/f15bhr83

• Release Before Ready Hackathon - https://luma.com/rbr-sanfrancisco

April 26th

• BETA 2026 Hackathon - https://luma.com/BETAhackathon

• Climate Stakeholder Gathering: Networking Mixer - https://luma.com/lacl6jdy

April 27th - 29th

• Innovate, Stay & Connect in Bubbl Houses - https://luma.com/t8qf02un April 28: Global Founder & Investor Happy Hour (Startup Grind Bar Crawl). Redwood City. 5 - 8:30 pm.

April 28th

• Global Founder & Investor Happy Hour (Startup Grind Bar Crawl) - https://luma.com/bc951hih

• Anatomy and Physiology for Biohackers - https://luma.com/anatomy-and-physiology-for-biohackers-905a

April 29th

• AI Champions Dinner - https://luma.com/cjlchnib

• Fintech x AI Pitch Competition - https://luma.com/j4kfhu9p

Guest post:

Corgi is AI-Enabled, Not Just AI-Curious

By Paul Stewart, engineer and swiss army knife at Corgi

There’s a line going around tech Twitter lately that I think gets it right: a company isn’t “AI-native” just because its engineers use Claude. If your sales team is still copy-pasting between tabs, your ops lead is rebuilding the same spreadsheet every quarter, and your producers are manually retyping data from one system into another, you don’t have an AI-enabled company. You have an engineering team that uses AI.

At Corgi, we wanted the real thing. So we adopted Eragon as a partner to help the entire team, not just the technical half, actually work alongside AI day to day. Here’s what we’ve learned.

The Two Problems Nobody Talks About

Most companies trying to “roll out AI” hit the same two walls.

The first is adoption friction for non-technical users. If the access point has even a little friction, a non-technical user will send a few prompts early on, get frustrated, and quietly switch back to whatever chat interface they already know. The tool dies on the vine. It doesn’t matter how powerful the underlying model is if the person who would benefit most from it bounces after day three. This is the quiet killer of most internal AI initiatives, and it almost never shows up in the launch announcement.

The second is that most AI usage doesn’t compound. A one-off prompt saves you ten minutes today and nothing tomorrow. That’s fine, but it isn’t leverage. Real leverage comes from workflows you set once and forget, where every future run is free. When you’re building a company, everything you automate saves time twice: the time doing it, and the time thinking about whether you need to do it.

Eragon attacks both of these directly. It lowers the barrier enough that people in non-technical roles actually stick with it, and it turns ad-hoc prompting into durable workflows that keep paying you back long after you built them.

Where We’ve Actually Seen the Lift

Honestly, the biggest wins haven’t been on the engineering side. They’ve been with the people who spend their days on the unglamorous-but-critical work that every insurance operation runs on: pulling data, reconciling records, prepping filings, chasing documents, answering the same questions over and over.

What we’ve seen, concretely:

• Better decisions, faster. Data that used to sit in a CSV nobody opened is now actionable. Someone asks a question, and the answer is a workflow away instead of a half-day project.

• More time on the work that actually matters. Producers spend more time selling. Ops spends more time filing and clearing exceptions. Everyone spends less time on the stuff that has to get done but nobody wants to do.

• Institutional knowledge that doesn’t walk out the door. A workflow built once captures how we do something. The next person to need it doesn’t have to reinvent it.

What “AI-Enabled” Actually Means

Being AI-enabled isn’t about a logo on your website or a line in your pitch deck. It’s about whether the person in your company who is least likely to read a developer blog still opens an AI-powered tool on Monday morning because it makes their job better. If they do, you’re AI-enabled. If they don’t, you’re not, no matter what your engineers are doing in the terminal.

We picked Eragon because it actually gets us across that line. For a small team trying to do the work of a much bigger one, that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.

Job Opportunities

Forage is hiring a Product Manager, B2B Growth

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/91685

Hellometer is hiring a Founding Sales Hire

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/92399

Rippling is hiring an Account Executive

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/71241

Shape is hiring a Senior iOS Developer

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/59767

iSono Health is hiring a Manufacturing Engineer

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/71761

See you next week!

Corgi Team

From startup news and founder insights to curated events across the city, we’re here to keep you in the loop and in the zeitgeist. This week, we’ve seen an uptick in visitors coming through from the Human X conference. If you or someone you know is in town for it, welcome.

We’re in Q2 and spring has sprung in SF. @speedrun was the main character this week, after announcing its pop-up café open daily from 9am to 7pm at Sohn that will take place next week Mon-Fri. The activation will give founders, builders, and investors a casual space to connect throughout the week. In addition, they had a Demo Day this Tuesday, where its latest cohort of portfolio companies took the spotlight to showcase what they’ve been building.

📰 What’s Been Going on?

• Amazon is buying satellite firm Globalstar to strengthen its satellite business and compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink.

• Mintlify raises $45M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz and Salesforce Ventures

• A Tesla executive highlighted the Shanghai factory’s potential role in scaling up mass production of the company’s humanoid robots

• Amazon announces acquisition Globalstar for $11.57 billion to bolster Project Kuiper and challenge Starlink’s satellite dominance.

• Tenex hits unicorn status with a $250 million Series B for its “agentic” AI cybersecurity models.

• Xoople raises $130 million to build a real-time digital twin of Earth for autonomous vehicle training.

• FCC taps ioXt Alliance to lead the “Cyber Trust Mark” security labeling program for smart-home devices.

• OpenAI hits $2 billion monthly revenue following its massive $852 billion valuation milestone.

• Rebellions secured $400 million at a $2.34 billion valuation to compete with Nvidia in AI inference chips.

• Meta is testing “Instagram Gold,” a premium subscription tier for anonymous Story viewing and advanced privacy.

• Amazon and Apple ink deal to keep iPhone satellite SOS active post-Globalstar merger.

• Kimia raises $7 million Seed for AI-driven personalized medicine.

• Google Chrome adds protection to stop websites from “back button hijacking.”

• Miravoice secures $6.3 million for hyper-realistic enterprise AI voice agents.

If you are preparing to launch a product or have recently announced a funding round and want to be featured on our newsletter, please fill out our form here.

Where to Be

Corgi Events: Week of April 13th

• Events held at the Corgi Cafe - https://luma.com/usecorgi

• April 13th

  • Frontier Tower AI Paper Reading Club - Week 11 - GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering - https://luma.com/frontier-tower-ai-paper-reading-club-wee-85a6

  • Hire or Get Hired - AI Matching Your Next Role - https://luma.com/hire-or-get-hired

• April 14th

  • Small Models Club Dinner by distil labs - https://luma.com/b7g76w6z

  • Ships & Sips: SF Engineering Happy Hour - https://luma.com/sf-eng-happy-hour

  • The 60-Second Showdown | $50K+ Pitch Competition in services - https://luma.com/34npcyr8

• April 15th

  • The AI Demo Series: April Editio - https://luma.com/l25rob03

  • Founder’s Dinner - https://luma.com/jm3p4i1x

  • -1 to Longshot Space with Nato Saichek - https://luma.com/nato-saichek-spc

  • Lights-Out Lab Premiere - https://luma.com/lights-out-lab-premiere

  • Growth & GTM Community Meetup - https://luma.com/growth-gtm-eng-meetup

• April 16th

  • Growing Pains: Hiring a Founding Engineer (and other early hires) - https://luma.com/2ehb9hcx

  • ClawCamp: Get Started & Up-level Your OpenClaw Personal Agent Superpowers - https://luma.com/egopgzac

  • AVs & the City: DRIVE AI Demo Day - https://luma.com/901dhzn3

  • The Agentic Enterprise Platform — ThinkingAI Launch with MiniMax - https://luma.com/ip1wjj8i

  • Slides Down: AI Founders Party by DigitalOcean & Zendesk - https://luma.com/jzopt9nv

  • V11 x Link Ventures: Robotics & RW Training Data Dinner - https://luma.com/6tbo95uy

• April 17th

  • Caffeine & Capital @ Corgi with Startup Intros - https://luma.com/iiexoonu

  • The ArtTech Playground: From Idea to Impact - https://luma.com/9yp4sv0o

• April 18th

  • SF Climate Week 2026 Official Welcome Day - https://luma.com/9d11aca8

  • Sunset Rooftop in SF / ATS x FH Fundraiser - https://luma.com/save-the-date-sunset-rooftop-in-sf-ats-x

• April 19th

  • Climate Stakeholder Gathering: Morning Run - https://luma.com/38m8iwjt

• April 20th

  • SF Climate Week 2026: Founders, Investors & LP Happy Hour - https://luma.com/73nmv1rh

Corgi Cafe is accepting drink sponsorships at the cafe! Reach out to our team to learn more at brooke@corgi.com

Corgi Corner:

Job Opportunities

Parrot is hiring a Founding Product Designer.

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/90847

Infisical is hiring a Recruiter (US & Canada).

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/88936

HappyRobot is hiring a People Partner.

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/87655

Retell AI is hiring a Senior Product Designer.

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/88842

Finta is hiring a Founding Engineer (Ruby).

Apply: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/81583

Sofi is hiring a copywriter and a Product Manager.

Apply: www.sofi.com/careers/job/

Benchling is hiring a software Engineer

Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/benchling/b3c9b312-6e2b-4dbc-9b15-0b0310d75a7f

Gloo is hiring a Revenue Operations Manager:

Apply: ats.rippling.com/en-GB/gloo-llc/jobs/103ac248-1e66-401f-8b11-a562d5fe91ea

Cloudflare is seeking a Customer Advocacy intern

Apply: job-boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/7743202?gh_jid=7743202

Outset AI is hiring a Content Marketing Manager.

Apply: jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/49de323a-efbf-40de-89af-078d8102d287

See you next week!

Corgi Team

From startup news and founder insights to curated events across the city, we’re here to keep you in the loop and in the zeitgeist. This week, we’ve seen an uptick in visitors coming through from the Human X conference. If you or someone you know is in town for it, welcome.

As a company, we’ve hosted a number of events at the café, bringing together AI leaders for networking, talks, and conversations around scaling, right in the heart of the innovation hub.

There’s also plenty happening nearby. REFRESH 2026 is underway through April 10, exploring the intersection of art, design, and technology, and Transition-AI 2026 is coming up April 13–14 with a focus on AI and clean energy infrastructure.

TechCrunch Disrupt tickets now on sale for October, Stripe Sessions happening later this month, and the energy from SF Tech Week still carrying through SoMa.

📰 What’s Been Going on?

• Waymo continues rolling out new vehicles in San Francisco, and the city is positioning itself as a testbed for emerging tech (including robotaxis from Zoox and others). Mayor Daniel Lurie has emphasized welcoming innovation.

• Anthropic allowed Apple and Amazon to test its more powerful Mythos AI model.

• OpenAI acquired the tech podcast/talk show TBPN. This is seen as a move by Silicon Valley to build its own media narrative around AI rather than relying on traditional press.

• According to SiliconValley.com, San Francisco house prices hit a new record of $2.15 million (median), fueled by the ongoing AI boom.

If you are preparing to launch a product or have recently announced a funding round and want to be featured on our newsletter, please fill out our form here.

📍 Where to Be

Corgi Events: Week of April 9th

Events held at the Corgi Cafe - https://luma.com/usecorgi

April 9th

• Resolve AI and Baseten Builder Dinner https://luma.com/lg5o0vvh

• Agentic AI Meetup https://luma.com/AgenticAIObservability_SF?_bhlid=2e54d4583411964d56d56b7db012c29bbbeefb60&utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-april-6th&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

• Building Global European Expansion Playbook https://luma.com/jqv21tac

• Valon Padel Day https://luma.com/r01vn6li

• HumanX After Hours https://luma.com/humanxco

• SPC Demo Night https://luma.com/spcdemonightapril

April 10th

• Proof of Human Salon Series https://luma.com/jwziweok

• Farcaster Feature Launch https://luma.com/farcaster-social-mixer-buildathon?_bhlid=2c1deb5d7fbcf9448a2fe86452bd760079480a5c&utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-april-6th&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

April 11th

• Claude at Stanford Buildathon https://luma.com/j9pxtjw3

• Voice AI Hackathon https://luma.com/ikdl7h84

• Vex Private Markets Summit https://luma.com/l7aqi5sa

April 12th

• SF Writing Club https://luma.com/njtntigx

• ElevenLabs x Lovable Workshop https://luma.com/ElevenLabsHackathon

• Bio-Hackathon https://luma.com/human-enhancement-hackathon-demo-day?_bhlid=6337d700a848c11ddad612dc909cf4ba93fbc2d6&utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-april-6th&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

April 13th

• AI Hiring Event https://luma.com/hire-or-get-hired?_bhlid=60c6a0579405be73e69de63a5a4665fb46270b59&utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-april-6th&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

April 14th

• Corgi x Niural x Virio Founders Dinner https://luma.com/jm3p4i1x?tk=oe5FiZ

• Founder Social Club Mixer https://luma.com/34npcyr8?_bhlid=13d9d4226ae5dfa2432bf0d5a52502efc9358310&utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-april-6th&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

• Cline AI Agent Event https://luma.com/cline-gave-an-ai-agent-access-to-blender?_bhlid=66bb04145509e1c066583d08228d4f543f2ec5ba&utm_campaign=the-sf-grind-week-of-april-6th&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.thesfgrind.com

April 15th

• AI Demo Series https://luma.com/l25rob03

Corgi Cafe is accepting drink sponsorships at the cafe! Reach out to our team to learn more at brooke@corgi.com

Here’s what it’s like to host at Corgi Cafe:

Job Opportunities

Workville is hiring a Cooperate communications lead. San Francisco/ New York. Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/workwhilejobs/8882c2a3-a9ad-46a4-baa6-4cb347909f3f

Task Rabbit is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/taskrabbit/jobs/7430424

Forge is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager. Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/forgeglobal/jobs/5842237004

Forge is also hiring a Director of Content. Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/forgeglobal/jobs/5838822004

Domino Data lab is hiring a software engineer (Remote). Apply here: app.careerpuck.com/job-board/domino-data-lab/job/7356848

Freed is hiring a Clinician support representative. Apply here; www.getfreed.ai/careers/positions

Academia is hiring a staff software engineer. Apply here: app.careerpuck.com/job-board/academia/job/a2963efb-e63f-4acf-b9c9-8ed3dda307d1

See you next week!

Corgi Team