AI | Nvidia spent July stitching together more than $750 billion in new and potential AI agreements. A partnership with SK Group worth $500 billion-plus in two-way business, building over 2 gigawatts of data centers on the Korean Peninsula; a $1 billion investment in Naver to triple the size of a Brookfield-built facility; and talks to backstop as much as $250 billion so OpenAI can lease compute from a US data center project. Nvidia is financing the companies that then buy its own chips, which inflates demand for the chips, which justifies financing more companies. Critics have flagged this “you buy from me, I invest in you” circularity for months across Nvidia, OpenAI, and SoftBank. Even Jensen conceded the $500 billion SK figure is a blend of chip purchases and SK's own spending, not a clean number. Across the Pacific, Chinese providers now serve roughly 45% of all OpenRouter traffic, up from under 2% a year ago, and Xiaomi's MiMo-V2-Pro became the most-used model on the platform by weekly token volume. China now processes about 140 trillion tokens a day nationally, up from 100 billion at the start of 2024. Moonshot AI paused new Kimi subscriptions after its K3 launch after a six times surge in daily sales and what the company called “unprecedented compute challenges.” Moonshot is unwinding its offshore structure for a possible Hong Kong listing, has Goldman and CICC advising, and is raising toward a $30 billion valuation with $300M ARR, up from $100M in March.

IPO WATCH | Wall Street got paid about $500 million to take SpaceX public, with leads Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley collecting around $100 million each, before the "soft dollars" that hedge funds pay for allocation into the hottest deals. Global investment banking revenue rose 24% in the first half to $61.4 billion, the best deal environment since 2021. Although surprisingly, while everyone was chasing SpaceX, US biotech and pharma IPOs returned a 55% weighted average this year against a 4.4% loss for the broader IPO market. Proceeds topped $5 billion, roughly 3x last year. The best-performing US IPO of any sector in 2026 is Veradermics, a hair-loss drug company up over 500% since February.

ECONOMY | The US added just 57,000 jobs in June against expectations near 113,000, breaking a three-month hot streak, even as unemployment ticked down to 4.2%. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has held the policy rate at 3.50%-3.75% and refuses to give forward guidance. The problem hasn't changed since March: officials now see headline inflation running 3.6% this year, up from 2.7% previously, so they can't cut to support hiring without risking a re-acceleration. Traders took a September hike off the table after the report but still price a possible October move. Tech layoffs have piled up as companies redirect headcount into AI infrastructure, and Jamie Dimon said this month that AI has let JPMorgan cut up to 40% of jobs in certain roles.

ENERGY | The AI power crunch keeps reshaping the grid. Meta plans to start manufacturing its in-house Iris chip in September, part of an MTIA roadmap aimed at cutting compute costs and loosening its reliance on Nvidia and AMD, with Broadcom designing and TSMC fabricating. Meta is targeting 7 gigawatts of compute online in 2026, growing to 14 GW by 2027, with AI infrastructure spending as high as $145 billion this year. The cadence is a new chip roughly every six months, far faster than the industry's annual cycle, and the internal memo admits that adopting the latest GPUs at Meta's scale “has been a heavy lift.”

STRIPE'S SHOPPING SPREE | Stripe, still private at a $159 billion valuation, went on a shopping spree. First, Stripe and PE firm Advent offered more than $53 billion for PayPal at $60.50 a share, a 28% premium backed by roughly $50 billion in committed financing, with Block chipping into $17 billion of equity. The combined entity would process around $3.7 trillion a year. PayPal's board reportedly thinks the offer was too low. The company peaked near a $360 billion market cap in 2021 and sank to about $36 billion this year. Stripe then opened talks to buy OpenRouter for roughly $10 billion, against a $1.3 billion valuation set in May, a 7.7x markup in two months on about $50 million of annualized revenue. OpenRouter is the scoreboard everyone cites for the model race. With them, Stripe is looking to control the infrastructure of the agentic economy, positioning them to track and manage agent to agent payments.

THE PE PIGGY BANK | Jay Lucas, 71, founder of Manhattan private equity firm Lucas Brand Equity, pleaded guilty July 24 in the Southern District of New York to securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. He raised more than $50 million by telling investors it would fund early-stage health and wellness companies, then diverted much of it to a luxury skincare venture run by his wife, a small-town newspaper, alimony, rent, and political consultants, using new investor money to pay earlier backers. Internal employee messages quoted in the indictment called his spending “literally fraudulent.” 👮

MARKETPLACE MISCHIEF | A CBC investigation found that, per StubHub's own SEC filings, CEO Eric Baker is part owner and managing director of Andro Capital, a fund that scalps millions of dollars of tickets on StubHub's own platform, while the company publicly calls itself “a marketplace for fans” that “does not own, possess, or sell tickets.” StubHub also partners with an Andro affiliate that bankrolls other large-scale resellers. StubHub moved $9.2 billion in ticket transactions in 2025, and industry estimates suggest 70-80% of resale tickets are controlled by mass scalpers. StubHub cancelled thousands of World Cup orders this summer, drawing probes from the Texas AG and two proposed class actions, months after a $10 million FTC settlement over deceptive pricing.

SLOP BOWL SENTENCING | Cava, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain that IPO'd to fanfare in 2023, got hit with a $2.2 billion shareholder derivative lawsuit unsealed July 28 in Delaware Chancery Court. The Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund alleges that founders, directors, and backers used confidential internal forecasts to dump shares at hype-inflated prices while feeding the public a fake story about accelerating growth. Entities tied to Belgian billionaire Eric Wittouck allegedly offloaded nearly $1.8 billion in stock, while board and management sold roughly another $500 million between August 2024 and March 2025, before a February-March 2025 run of disappointing disclosures popped the bubble. The stock has fallen from a 12-month high above $172 to the mid-$60s. It's a derivative suit, so any clawback would flow back to the company, and if it survives a motion to dismiss, discovery could pry open the board's private conversations about when to sell. 🥗

22580: From GPT2 to Kimi3 🤖

Grip Strength ✊

Capital Allocation is Dead 💰

The SPV is Dead, Long Live the SPV 🗡️

Leopold is Back [2 hr]

How to Build Breakout Products [0.5 hr]

Solana’s Plan to Replace Wall Street [1.5 hr]

August 3rd, a Roots Happy Hour in Kansas City with leading operators and technical talent, co-hosted with Husch Blackwell and Social Balances.

August 4th, the Residency demo day in San Francisco.

August 5th, a Roots Happy Hour in St. Louis with leading founders and operators, hosted in partnership with Cultivation Capital, TechSTL, and Transitions Law Group.

August 12th, a Roots Happy Hour in Miami with top HealthTech talent, co-hosted with Elan Adler at OneImaging.

August 25th, a Roots Happy Hour in Springfield with leading operators and technical talent, co-hosted with Codefi and eFactory.

Hosted a Roots Happy Hour in Atlanta with top fintech talent, co-hosted with our founders at Transend.

Hosted a Roots Happy Hour in Columbia, MO, with leading operators and technical talent.

Hosted a Roots Happy Hour in Chicago with leading operators from legacy industries, co-hosted with SNAK and Paul Hastings.

Atlanta-based Falcomm closed a $12M Series A

Glimmr wrapped a $2M Seed, based in Kansas

Healant, a North Carolina-based company, closed a $4.6M Seed

Columbus-based Healia Health raised a $14M Series A

Utah-based Curant.ai raised an $3.1M Seed

Chicago-based startups closed a few rounds this month

Across Texas

Minnesota-based Rise Modular wrapped a $4M Seed