An empirical agenda for AI🔬, How Does Thrive Do It?🎨, Everyone is building the same thing🧩

Another week, another pulse check on Tech.

From top insights and reports to new funds, VC jobs, resources, and the hottest deals, here’s everything you need to stay ahead 👇

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In-Depth Insights 🔍

• An empirical agenda for AI🔬

  Stripe Economics will use payments, business formation, and sentiment data to study AI’s effects on productivity, labor markets, firm structure, and agent-driven commerce. Its research will also examine economic risks and the market for intelligence, with opportunities for external researchers to collaborate. [ and ]

• When Will We Make God? 🧠

  Hyperscalers are investing billions in AI systems that could automate AI research itself, accelerating progress toward more capable systems and potentially superintelligence. Scaling laws, longer task horizons, benchmark gains, AI-generated code, and prediction markets inform forecasts ranging from one to ten years. []

• Brazil’s Hard Assets Could Capture Value From the AI Boom 🇧🇷

  Past technology booms, from railroads to radio and the dot-com era, directed capital toward physical inputs such as electricity, metals, land, and food. Brazil’s renewable power, quartz, copper, graphite, rare earths, and farmland position the country to supply resources demanded by AI infrastructure. [Drew Crawford]

• How Does Thrive Do It?🎨

  Thrive Capital cultivates its reputation through high-profile deals, founder endorsements, design leadership, merchandise, and personalized gifts rather than a conventional publishing strategy. Thrive Holdings takes a different approach by hiring a storyteller to document the accounting and IT services businesses it acquires. [Laurie Owen]

• How Founders Can Recognize the Right Time to Raise VC 💰

  No single revenue threshold or growth rate determines fundraising readiness, particularly as AI accelerates growth and software competitors can emerge within months. The Decisive Moment framework focuses on aligning the business opportunity, the reason for raising, and an investor prepared to recognize the opportunity. [Aaron Harris]

• Fintech is Dead🏦

  As mobile and cloud become standard financial infrastructure, competitive advantage may shift toward AI models making decisions, tokens maintaining shared records, and agents operating as customers with wallets. Stripe, Revolut, Ramp, Robinhood, and Nubank already offer products across these areas, setting the stage for an AI-first, token-first financial giant. [Simon Taylor]

• Harvey and Legora Rethink AI Pricing to Repair Gross Margins 🧮

  Harvey’s gross margins reportedly reached -50% in June as usage costs rose under flat seat-based pricing, prompting it to adopt a fine-tuned open-weight model that can cost up to 90% less than frontier alternatives. Legora is moving toward consumption-based pricing and model routing, highlighting how AI software companies must align pricing with inference costs and account for AI expenses in COGS. []

• SaaStr Explores a $5 Postgres Mirror After a $240,000 Agent API Estimate 🗄️

  New agent-access charges from Salesforce, Atlassian, and HubSpot could make automated API usage expensive, with one estimate putting SaaStr’s annual bill at $240,000 for 35,000 to 40,000 daily calls. Its AI VP of Revenue proposed mirroring the system of record into a $5 Postgres instance, while an analysis of 22,000 attendees found that 49.7% of executives had changed jobs within 16 months. []

• Everyone is building the same thing 🧩

  AI-native startups increasingly rely on similar technical foundations, including agent loops, connectors, memory, and sandboxes, making their products and pitches harder to distinguish. Deep domain expertise, customer empathy, and a clear value proposition offer stronger differentiation than another standard AI stack. [Angular Ventures]

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Interesting Reports 📊

• Financial Network Intelligence Becomes Critical to AI-Era Fraud Prevention 🛡️

  Generative AI makes fake identities, forged documents, and impersonation easier to scale, with global fraud losses projected to reach $40 billion within the next few years. Static identity checks and some biometric defenses are increasingly vulnerable, while behavioral patterns across institutions and platforms offer additional signals for detecting fraud. Build a Personal Stock [PLAID]

• AI Video Creation Shifts Toward Real-Time Direction and Model Orchestration 🎬

  Generative video is moving beyond prompt-and-wait workflows toward conversational direction of scenes, actions, and camera shots through AI agents. Changing agent infrastructure while keeping the underlying model fixed can improve performance by up to 6x, making orchestration across video, image, voice, and sound models a key production advantage. [Inaki Bererguer]

  

• US Venture Capital Deal Value Reaches $515.8B Through Q3 2026 📈

  AI accounted for 82.7% of US venture deal value, while funds raised $108.5B across 699 vehicles and megafunds captured 78.1% of that capital. Active unicorns reached a record 992 with a combined valuation of $5.7T, and 18 companies went public in Q3, including 12 healthcare businesses. [PitchBook]

• Europe Venture Funding Hits Four-Year Quarterly High at $25B 🇪🇺

  European startups raised $25B in Q3 2026, with AI companies attracting $18.8B, or 75% of the total, the highest share on record. The UK led with $7.5B, followed by Germany at $5B and France at $4.8B, while Mistral’s $3.5B round set a record for a Europe-based company. [Crunchbase News]

• Technology Accounts for 76% of S&P 500 Earnings Growth 📊

  Technology contributed approximately 76% of S&P 500 earnings growth as of late August 2026, reflecting demand for semiconductors, power, and networking infrastructure tied to AI expansion. A100 GPU prices remained at or above their levels at the start of the year, while roughly 2% of US households paid for an AI service as of April. []

Recently Launched Funds 💸

• Endeavor Catalyst closed its fifth fund at $320M, backing high-growth entrepreneurs across global markets.

• Forbion raised $2.6B across two funds to invest in innovative biotech and biopharma companies.

• Headline closed a $400M fund dedicated to backing European founders.

• Graduate Ventures launched its second €125M seed fund to support early-stage startups emerging from the Dutch university ecosystem.

• Linse Capital raised $150M across its early-stage deep-tech strategy and co-investment vehicles, supporting companies in AI, robotics, energy, mobility and space.

• Facktor Ventures launched its inaugural venture fund focused on community health and healthcare innovation.

• LAUNCHub Ventures secured a first close of over €65M for its third fund, targeting pre-seed and seed-stage startups across Central and Southeast Europe.

• Enable Ventures raised $50.31M to invest in technology companies advancing disability inclusion, assistive technology and workplace accessibility.

VC Jobs 💼

• NEA (New York City, NY): VC Fellowship (apply here)

• First Momentum Ventures (Munich, Germany): VC Internship (apply here)

• Living Hope VC (Rotterdam, Netherlands): VC Analyst (apply here)

• Invictus Growth Partners (San Mateo, CA): VC Associate (apply here)

• Koch Disruptive Technologies (Wichita, KS): VC Associate (apply here)

• Glade Brook Capital (Miami, FL): VC Analyst (apply here)

• CVX Ventures (London, England): VC Associate (apply here)

• Plug and Play (Washington, DC): VC Associate (apply here)

• Alpaca VC (New York City, NY): VC Associate (apply here)

• Energy Impact Partners (London, England): VC Associate (apply here)

Hottest Deals 💥

• Type One Energy raised $200M in Series B funding to advance its stellarator-based fusion technology and accelerate commercial fusion power development. (read more)

• General Medicine raised $120M in Series B funding to expand its technology-enabled healthcare services and improve access to medical care. (read more)

• VEIR raised $110M in Series C funding, co-led by Matter Venture Partners and Tyche Partners, to scale superconducting power delivery technology for AI data centers. (read more)

• Universal Quantum raised over $100M in Series A funding to advance its modular quantum-computing technology. (read more)

• Parallel Systems raised $100M in Series C funding led by AVP to scale its autonomous, battery-electric freight rail technology. (read more)

• Nous Research raised $90M at a $1.5B valuation to develop open AI models and expand its AI research capabilities. (read more)

• Spiko raised $90M in Series B funding to expand its regulated tokenized money-market funds across Europe. (read more)

• KymaThera raised $80M in Series B funding to advance its drug-development pipeline. (read more)

• Multiply Labs raised $75M in Series B funding to scale robotic manufacturing systems for cell therapies and advanced medicines. (read more)

• RougeTX raised $58M in Series A funding to advance its biotechnology pipeline toward clinical trials. (read more)

• Stuut raised $52.5M in Series B funding led by Insight Partners to automate enterprise order-to-cash workflows. (read more)

• Yazen raised €50M in funding to expand its digital obesity-treatment platform and medically supervised weight-management services. (read more)

• Gallatin AI raised $50M in Series A funding to develop and scale its AI-powered enterprise technology. (read more)

• Sensible Biotechnologies raised $47M in Series A funding led by Oxford Science Enterprises to scale its cell-based mRNA manufacturing platform. (read more)

• Namespace Labs raised $42M in Series B funding backed by Scale Venture Partners, NEA and 20VC to expand its AI-focused developer infrastructure. (read more)

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