Trump’s tariffs killed his TikTok deal & MidJourney releases v7, its first new AI image model in a year.

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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS

💰 Startup funding updates

Vallor, a Miami, FL-based provider of an AI-agent platform that puts procurement contracts on autopilot, raised $4M in Seed funding. The round was led by Dynamo Ventures and Bloomberg Beta, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, El Cap Ventures, Rock Yard Ventures, Immad Akhund (Founder, Mercury) and Sean Henry (Founder, Stord) through Sequoia’s Scout Fund.

Turbine, a NYC-based debt platform for limited partners in VC and private equity funds, raised $22M in equity funding co-led by Alpha Edison and TTV Capital, with $100M in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. The startup offers LPs liquidity loans secured by their fund stakes without giving up future upside.

Hilbi, a Bratislava, Slovakia-based provider of a patients payments platform, received a €8M investment from Ishtar Advisory.

SpinLaunch, a Long Beach, CA-based space solutions company, received a $12M investment from Kongsberg.

Deacon Health, a Nashville, TN-based specialty care management provider, raised $7M in Seed funding. The round was led by Herb Fritch, Larry Cash, and David Vandewater, among others.

Sedna Communications, a London, UK-based AI-driven platform for maritime and supply chain businesses, received $10M in Growth financing from CIBC Innovation Basking.

Atsena Therapeutics, a Durham, NC-based clinical-stage gene therapy company, raised $150M in Series C funding. The round was led by Bain Capital’s Life Sciences team, with participation from an additional new investor, Wellington Management, and existing investors including Lightstone Ventures, Sofinnova Investments, Abingworth, Foundation Fighting Blindness, Hatteras Venture Partners, Osage University Partners, and the Manning Family Foundation.

Adaptive Security, a NYC-based provider of AI-powered social engineering prevention solutions, raised $43M in funding. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and the OpenAI Startup Fund. Additional investors included Abstract Ventures, Eniac Ventures, CrossBeam Ventures and K5, along with executives from Google, Workday, Shopify, Plaid, Paxos and others.

Redpanda, a San Francisco, CA-based data platform to integrate and process real-time data for analytical, operational, and agentic AI workloads, raised $100M in Series D funding at $1 billion valuation. The round was led by GV, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Hydrolix, a Portland, Oregon-based provider of a data lake platform to enhance the economics of log data, closed an $80m Series C funding round. The round was led by QED Investors, joined by Blumberg Capital, Frontline Ventures, Pruven Capital and Sozo Ventures, alongside existing investors that include Akamai, AV8 Ventures, Ericsson Ventures, Nava Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund, S3 Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.

Phonic, a San Francisco, CA-based speech-to-speech platform for building lifelike, conversational voice agents, raised $4M in funding. Backers included Lux Capital and the founders of Replit (Amjad Masad), Hugging Face (Clem Delangue), Applied Intuition (Qasar Younis), and Modal (Erik Bernhardsson).

Unframe, a Cupertino, CA-based AI platform for global enterprises, raised $50M in funding. Backers included Bessemer Venture Partners, TLV Partners, Craft Ventures, Third Point Ventures, SentinelOne Ventures, Cerca Partners, and Terra Nova Ventures.

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NEW VCs IN THE MARKET

🏦 Venture Capital updates

Ballistic Ventures, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity-focused VC firm co-founded by Ted Schlein, is raising a new $100M fund, per an SEC filing. This follows its $360M second fund closed in 2023. Founded in 2021, Ballistic has backed 59 startups and made 6 exits to date.

KEY STORIES IN TECH

📜 Latest in tech

Deel’s comms chief departs amidst spying lawsuit from Rippling:

• Elisabeth Diana, Deel’s head of communications and former Instagram and Facebook exec, has resigned from the company, following allegations that Deel planted a spy inside rival Rippling.

• The resignation comes after Rippling named employee Keith O’Brien in an affidavit detailing four months of espionage, including sharing trade secrets and staging a fake whistleblower narrative.

• Deel denies legal wrongdoing, while Rippling’s lawsuit accuses the company of racketeering and espionage; Deel’s future remains uncertain as it faces scrutiny ahead of a potential IPO.

Klarna and StubHub delay IPOs because of Trump tariff turmoil:

• Klarna and StubHub have postponed their planned IPOs due to stock market volatility triggered by President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, according to The Wall Street Journal.

• Both companies had planned to raise at least $1 billion and were set to begin investor roadshows next week before hitting pause.

• The delays come just weeks after each firm filed for IPOs, signaling growing uncertainty in the reopening of the public markets.

Meta releases Llama 4, a new crop of flagship AI models:

• Meta has released three new AI models — Scout, Maverick, and Behemoth — under its Llama 4 family, trained on text, image, and video data with a focus on visual understanding and efficiency via mixture-of-experts architecture.

• Maverick excels at general assistant tasks with 400B parameters, while Scout supports 10 million token inputs and runs on a single GPU. Behemoth, still in training, is Meta’s largest model yet, with 2T total parameters.

• Llama 4 models are tuned to be less restrictive on controversial topics and more politically neutral, with licensing limitations excluding companies based in the EU and firms with over 700M users unless specially approved.

Meta’s benchmarks for its new AI models are a bit misleading:

• Meta’s new Maverick model ranks second on LM Arena, but researchers found the tested version was an “experimental chat” model optimized for conversations — different from what’s publicly available.

• This discrepancy raises concerns about benchmark manipulation, as developers can't reliably gauge the performance of the released version based on LM Arena scores.

• Observers noted that the LM Arena Maverick responds with excessive emojis and verbose answers, unlike the more reserved version available via Together.ai.

OpenAI struggles to monetize ChatGPT in India despite rapid growth:

• India is ChatGPT’s fastest-growing market, but users there have only spent $8 million on subscriptions since 2023, compared to $330 million in the U.S., according to SensorTower.

• The lack of localized pricing may be a key barrier, as the $20/month plan is costly by Indian digital subscription standards.

• OpenAI is reportedly exploring a partnership with Reliance Jio to expand reach, while downloads from India now account for over 20% of ChatGPT’s Android app installs this year.

Midjourney releases v7, its first new ai image model in a year:

• Midjourney launched its V7 image model, featuring improved prompt adherence, image quality, and detail coherence — and personalization is now enabled by default.

• V7 includes a new “Draft Mode” for faster, cheaper renders and is available in Turbo and Relax versions; standard features like upscaling are not yet supported.

• CEO David Holz describes V7 as a new architecture, emphasizing community feedback during its alpha rollout while the company also explores hardware and video model development.

LAST COFFEE SIP

☕Other news

Trump’s tariffs killed his TikTok deal:

• A TikTok deal to establish a US-based company with majority American ownership was suspended after China signaled disapproval following President Trump's announcement of increased tariffs on Chinese goods.

• Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok's US operations by 75 days, expressing hope to continue negotiations with China despite their dissatisfaction with the reciprocal tariffs now totaling 54%.

• The proposed arrangement, which was nearly finalized before being halted, would have limited ByteDance's stake to under 20% and transferred control to American investors like Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic.

HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES

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