AI | NVIDIA's GTC conference took over San Jose March 16-19, and Jensen Huang delivered his annual leather-jacket sermon at the SAP Center. The biggest theme was agentic AI, which Huang declared has reached an "inflection point" and is driving a fundamental shift in computing needs, creating massive demand for faster inference, as agents spawn other agents and require constant orchestration and data transfer. The hardware story centered on the next generation of compute: Vera Rubin, scheduled to ship to customers later this year, comprises 1.3 million components and will deliver 10 times more performance per watt than its predecessor, Grace Blackwell. Alongside it, Huang unveiled the Groq 3 LPX rack, built from NVIDIA's $20B Groq acquisition, which houses 256 LPUs designed to sit alongside the Rubin system and increase tokens-per-watt performance by 35 times. On software, NVIDIA announced NemoClaw, a reference stack that layers NVIDIA's enterprise software atop the autonomous AI agent platform OpenClaw, enabling companies to deploy always-on agents with built-in security and privacy guardrails with a single command. In automotive, Huang announced that Nissan, BYD, Geely, Isuzu, and Hyundai are building level 4 autonomous vehicles on NVIDIA's Drive Hyperion program, and that Uber will launch a robo-taxi fleet powered by NVIDIA's Drive AV software across 28 cities in four continents by 2028. Huang said the "ChatGPT moment of self-driving cars has arrived". OpenAI made one of its most surprising moves of the year: it shut down Sora, the short-form video app that went viral just six months after its September 2025 launch, and killed the $1 billion Disney licensing deal alongside it. OpenAI was spending an estimated $15 million per day in inference costs at Sora's peak, against just $2.1 million in total lifetime in-app revenue. Downloads had already fallen 66% from their November peak, and OpenAI admitted the economics were "completely unsustainable." The compute freed by the shutdown is being redirected toward robotics research and GPT-5.4's computational capabilities. Say goodbye to the AI slop videos of tech CEOs doing TikTok Dances.

ECONOMY | The Iran war is now the dominant economic story of March, and Wall Street is repricing risk in real time. Goldman Sachs raised its recession probability by 5 percentage points to 30% this week, revised its headline PCE inflation forecast up to 3.1% by December, and nudged its full-year GDP growth estimate down to 2.1%, all on the back of surging oil prices triggered by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. JPMorgan puts recession odds at 35%, Bank of America argues recession risks are underpriced, and Morgan Stanley has already pushed its first expected Fed rate cut from June to September. The Fed, meanwhile, is boxed in: it can't cut rates to support a softening labor market without risking reigniting inflation that's already running above target. The U.S. economy created just 116,000 jobs in all of 2025 and lost 92,000 in February. The unemployment rate has held at 4.4%, but that's been driven more by a dearth of firing than any burst in hiring, and outside of health care, payrolls in every other sector declined by more than half a million over the past year. At the pump, gas prices have risen $1.02 per gallon over the past month, an increase of 35%, with economists noting that an oil shock has preceded virtually every U.S. recession since the Great Depression, outside of Covid. A NerdWallet survey in March found that 65% of respondents expect a recession in the next 12 months, up 6 percentage points from the previous month. The bull case, offered by BNP Paribas, is that America is now the world's largest crude producer and net energy exporter. This structural advantage didn't exist during the 1970s oil shocks, meaning higher prices redistribute income within the U.S. rather than draining it abroad. The bear case is that the traditional stabilizers, Fed rate cuts and fiscal stimulus, have almost no room to operate with inflation still sticky and the national debt sitting at $39 trillion.

VENTURE CAPITAL | U.S. startup funding slowed dramatically in March after January and February's historic megarounds, with American companies raising around $13 billion so far this month, a fraction of the prior two months. But the story was different across the Atlantic: European startup funding hit its highest point of the year in March, boosted by megarounds for AI infrastructure company Nscale and AI startup Advanced Machine Intelligence. Yann LeCun's Advanced Machine Intelligence raised $1 billion to develop world models that learn from and interact with the physical world, marking the largest seed round in European startup history. In robotics, Mind Robotics, a Rivian spinout, closed a $500 million Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz to automate industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale. In comparison, Rhoda AI emerged from stealth with $450 million in Series A funding for video-trained robot world models. Nexthop AI raised $500 million in a Series B led by Lightspeed, with a16z joining, to build AI-optimized networking infrastructure.

VALUATIONS | Valuations for AI are accelerating downstream and so are unicorn valuations, which could continue to compress exits and IPOs.

UNICORNS | There are a lot more unicorns left to fall.

ANTHROPIC FAILED THE VIBE CHECK | Anthropic closed out March with two embarrassing security lapses. First, a misconfigured CMS tool left nearly 3,000 internal files publicly accessible, including a draft blog post revealing an unreleased model called Claude Mythos, which Anthropic has since confirmed is its most capable model to date, representing what the company calls a "step change" in AI with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity. The same cache of documents also revealed details of a planned invite-only CEO summit in Europe that Dario Amodei will attend, described as an intimate gathering at an 18th-century manor in the English countryside. Then, just days later, a routine Claude Code update accidentally pushed a 59.8 MB internal debugging file to the public npm registry, exposing around 500,000 lines of source code. Within hours, the codebase was mirrored and dissected across GitHub, amassing thousands of forks. The leaked code handed competitors a detailed look at Claude Code's three-layer memory architecture, an autonomous background mode called KAIROS that allows the agent to keep working and consolidating memory even when a user is idle, and a full unreleased feature roadmap. Claude Code generates an estimated $2.5 billion in annualized recurring revenue, with 80% coming from enterprise clients who pay, in part, for the belief that the technology powering their workflows is proprietary and protected. Oops. 🙃

FAKE COMPLIANCE | An anonymous Substack post published this month accuses compliance startup Delve of "falsely" convincing "hundreds of customers they were compliant" with privacy and security regulations, potentially exposing those customers to criminal liability under HIPAA and hefty fines under GDPR. Delve is a Y Combinator-backed startup that raised $32 million at a $300 million valuation, with over 1,000 customers in over 50 countries, having helped clients land "nine-figure deals and federal contracts." The whistleblower, going by "DeepDelver," alleges the scandal began in December when client audit reports were leaked through a publicly accessible Google Sheet, and when leadership denied a breach, security employees across companies began pooling resources to investigate. Their conclusion: Delve "fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests, and processes that never happened," then forced customers to "choose between adopting fake evidence or performing mostly manual work with little real automation or AI." Lead investor Insight Partners initially scrubbed its investment announcement from its website before restoring it, and Delve has halted product demonstrations amid the investigation. The Forbes 30 Under 30 fraud pipeline never fails to deliver. 👮

HE NEVER LEFT | Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called Atoms, focused on robotics across food, mining, and transportation, rolling his existing ghost kitchen company CloudKitchens into it. Kalanick announced on the TBPN podcast after operating in stealth for eight years, built around one thesis: "Can you get a meal delivered to you so efficiently that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store? Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car." The company is building what Kalanick calls a "wheelbase for robots": specialized industrial machines rather than humanoids, organized into Atoms Food, Atoms Mining, and Atoms Transport. The headline reunion is with Anthony Levandowski: Kalanick said he is on the verge of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup Levandowski founded after serving 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google's self-driving project. Kalanick recruited Levandowski to Uber in 2016; Google sued; Uber settled; Levandowski went to prison; and now the two are back building autonomous systems for mines together. Is TK going to take back Silicon Valley after his dramatic exit from Uber? 🤔

ENERGY | With the Iran War at the forefront, the U.S. energy grid is in the spotlight. Data centers alone are projected to require twice the energy in 2035 compared to 2024, and without significant action, the risk to the energy supply will continue to increase, leaving the country and its defense more exposed. The military is now taking this seriously in ways that could reshape the broader energy investment landscape. The U.S. Army has announced plans to build ten to twelve small modular reactors on bases over the next ten years through its Janus Program, powering installations entirely from within the fence line and freeing them from the risks of the commercial grid. The a16z American Dynamism team put the stakes plainly in a podcast this month with the CTO of the U.S. Army: the battlefield is increasingly electronics-heavy, the Army's legacy power infrastructure built around diesel generators is struggling to keep up, and fuel convoys are a liability. On the commercial side, the NRC is expected to make several SMR licensing decisions this year, Meta has entered into an agreement with Terrapower for up to eight Natrium nuclear plants, and the White House has launched a DOE pilot program targeting at least three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026. Hyperscalers are projected to spend nearly $700B in 2026 on AI infrastructure; aka data centers and energy infra, outpacing current energy capacity.

Size of the Prize & Run the Distance 🏃‍♂️

Digital Twins 🤖

There are only two paths left for software 🗺️

Art of Hiring 👔

Willy Schlacks | Turning struggle into a $7B IPO [1 hr]

Inside Canada’s Fastest AI Company [1.5 hr]

Brett Calhoun | Redbud VC [0.5 hr]

TBPN [0.5 hr]

Sierra Ventures Emerging Manager and Pre-Seed Summit

Happy hour with over 60 leading AI builders with Midwest roots in SF

Dined with 15 outsider tech builders in NYC

Hosted over 50 outsider tech entrepreneurs at a happy hour in NYC

Portfolio company dinner in NYC with 5 of our companies based in NYC

The Residency demo day

Joining the Gr8er Plains Summit in Omaha

Hosting Missouri Startup Weekend
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Ann Arbor-based EGI Battery wrapped a $10M Seed round

Capacity wrapped a $30M Series E, based in St. Louis

City Detect, an Alabama-based company, closed a $13M Series A

Colorado-based Sierra Space raised a $550M Series C

Minneapolis-based Q-Rounds raised a $1.8M Seed

Chicago-based startups closed a few rounds this month

Across Texas

Indy-based Yourco wrapped a $6M Series A