🚀 Space Beyond founder plans $249 space funerals with a SpaceX launch

🖱 Ryan Mitchell, founder of Space Beyond, plans a launch in late 2027 after securing a deal with SpaceX. The price point is $249 per customer, far below the usual cost that runs into the thousands.

🖱 The service sends 1 gram of ashes into orbit using CubeSats. These small satellites were originally developed at NASA and measure 10 x 10 x 10 cm, with multiple payloads packed into one unit. The satellite stays in orbit for about 5 years before burning up in the atmosphere, with its path trackable from Earth.

🖱 Mitchell is an engineer who previously worked at NASA and Blue Origin, leaving in 2025 to start the project. Falling launch costs and shared satellite missions make it possible to bundle many orders into a single flight.

Cheap access comes from sharing space rather than owning it.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

📣OpenAI sells ChatGPT ads at NFL level prices

🖱 OpenAI has started selling ad placements inside ChatGPT at prices close to NFL broadcast video ads, according to The Information. Rates are around $60 per 1,000 impressions, which is well above typical pricing from Meta and Google.

🖱 The analytics offered to advertisers remain basic. OpenAI reports total impressions and total clicks, without showing the query context where ads appeared or what users did after clicking.

🖱 This leaves advertisers paying premium prices with limited visibility. A fuller ad stack would require deeper tracking and tooling, which does not exist yet.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

Be Elon

🖱 Choose the hardest business on Earth: rockets
🖱 Start SpaceX
🖱 Join Tesla as a startup, take control, push out founders
🖱 Run both companies to the edge in 2008
🖱 Survive by one successful rocket launch that wins a ~$1.6B NASA contract
🖱 Figure out how to make rockets reusable
🖱 Launch a car into space. Because you can
🖱 Turn EVs from a joke into the world’s most valuable car company
🖱 Buy Twitter for $44B. Save free speech on the internet
🖱 Fire most people
🖱 Rename it after the company you lost 25 years ago
🖱 Start an AI company to race the one you helped create
🖱 Run six companies. CEO of four at the same time
🖱 Decide saving humanity is a systems problem
🖱 And treat it like it’s your full-time job

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

🛒 Waabi secures $1B to scale autonomous trucking

🖱 Waabi raised $1B to expand its self driving technology for trucks, with plans to adapt it for passenger cars later. Today, its vehicles operate with a safety driver on board.

🖱 The company says a fully autonomous truck is already ready and is expected to enter public roads this year. The system is built first for long haul freight, where routes are more predictable and utilization is higher.

🖱 $250M of the round comes as milestone based payments from Uber. The funding supports deployment of 25,000 Waabi robotaxis on the Uber platform.

Freight remains the entry point for autonomy at scale.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

💰 Hugging Face turns down $500M from Nvidia to stay independent

🖱 Hugging Face declined a $500M investment offer from Nvidia that implied a valuation of about $7B. The talks surfaced a few months ago, with the company currently valued closer to $5B.

🖱 The reason was control. Hugging Face did not want a single large investor to gain outsized influence over its strategy and long term direction. The team said its goal is to keep AI broadly accessible rather than align it with one major player’s interests.

🖱 The company can afford that stance. In 2025, Hugging Face was profitable, driven by enterprise customers paying for advanced features. Roughly 3% of users fall into that category.

Independence over a premium check.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

30+ robotics companies worth watching in 2026.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

🧠 Flapping Airplanes raises $180M to rethink how AI learns

🖱 Flapping Airplanes is a new AI research startup founded by the Spector brothers and Aidan Smith. One of the founders, Ben Spector, previously ran an incubator that worked with teams like Cursor. The company has already raised $180M and is hiring.

🖱 The team is focused on training efficiency. They argue that modern models are trained on nearly all available data, while humans reach higher reasoning ability after seeing only a few billion tokens.

🖱 Their estimate is that humans process data 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more efficiently than current models.

🖱 To close that gap, Flapping Airplanes plans to rethink core assumptions, including architectures, loss functions, and gradient descent itself. The company says its current goal is foundational research, not near term commercialization.

This is a bet against brute force scaling.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

💼 SoftBank plans another $30B investment into OpenAI

🖱 SoftBank is preparing to invest an additional $30B into OpenAI. The group already owns about 11% and Masayoshi Son wants to increase that stake.

🖱 OpenAI is actively raising capital. Sam Altman has been meeting investors from the Middle East as part of the process.

🖱 The target is at least $50B in new funding. The implied valuation range is $750B to $830B.

Capital concentration around OpenAI keeps accelerating.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

“Ideas are 5%. Execution is 95%.”

~ Daniel Ek

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

The quickest $2,000,000 deal on Shark Tank.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

Before he became one of the richest people on Earth, Jeff Bezos had to explain who he was and what Amazon did.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

🎞 Garry Tan on why success breaks people who play the wrong game

🖱 Garry Tan released a short video on how money, fame, and power quietly turn into traps. He points to cases like Sam Bankman-Fried as examples of scoreboards taking over decision making.

🖱 The idea is simple. If you do not change the rules early, the game changes you. Money becomes the metric. Clout replaces progress. Burnout follows.

Short and worth a watch if you want something to think about over the weekend.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

POV: VCs are rushing to secure a stake in Anthropic ahead of its IPO

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

🔐 WD-40 keeps its formula locked behind extreme secrecy

🖱 The formula for WD-40 is guarded through a tightly controlled internal system. The current CEO was allowed to see it only after more than 30 years at the company.

🖱 WD-40 CEO Steve Brass gained access in 2024 together with the CFO. They viewed the handwritten formula during a bank visit after advance notice, multiple NDAs, and with a key held by the company’s chief lawyer. The document is stored in a Bank of America vault in San Diego.

🖱 Only one original copy exists. Most employees work with encoded versions and never see the real formula, including senior R&D staff.

For WD-40, secrecy itself remains part of the product’s long-term moat.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

How to activate the Superconscious mind

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

🎮 Game stocks slide after Google shows Project Genie

🖱 Shares across the gaming industry fell after Google unveiled Project Genie, an AI system that generates interactive digital worlds from simple text prompts.

🖱 The announcement raised concerns about new competition and pressure on traditional game development workflows.

🖱 In Japan, stocks of Nintendo dropped within a 1.3–7% range. Capcom and Konami moved lower in the same session.

🖱 In Hong Kong, Chinese developers also declined. Tencent and NetEase fell by about 2–4%.

The move followed similar weakness earlier in US-listed gaming platform stocks.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture

🏎 Williams F1 names Claude its official “Thinking Partner”

🖱 Williams Racing signed a multi-year partnership with Anthropic and Atlassian. Claude becomes the team’s official “Thinking Partner.”

🖱 Williams says it will use Claude as a decision support assistant for reasoning and analysis across the team.

🖱 Use cases include helping engineers interpret telemetry plus technical docs, supporting race scenario work plus post-race analysis, and speeding up internal knowledge workflows from R&D to management.

A notable detail: the focus is on explainable reasoning, with Claude expected to show how it reached an answer, not only the output.

✔️ Subscribe on @venture