This Week in Tech (Week Ending Feb 13, 2026)
TL;DR - 📈 Jobs report; 💰Anthropic's latest fundraise
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Happy early Valentine’s / Galentine’s! 💕 Tech news below:
TL;DR -
📈 The jobs report announced this week was very positive, supporting a boost in the markets.
⭐️Anthropic raised another $30B in a Series G at a valuation of $380B
What’s a 401(k) mullet?
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📈 The U.S. economy added a whopping 130,000 jobs in January, while the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3%. The update is a much welcome change from the lackluster 2025 - The labor market had virtually no growth last year; just 181,000 jobs added, compared with 1.4 million in 2024. Of note: The job gains remain concentrated by industry, with health care and social assistance accounting for the bulk of last month’s gain.
3️⃣ Lawmakers left Washington Thursday without a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security — all but ensuring a partial government shutdown starting Friday night. This would mark the third shutdown of President Trump’s second term, with Democrats again seizing on government funding as one of their only ways to confront the White House over its immigration crackdown.
🇨🇳 The chairs of the U.S. House China and Foreign Affairs committees sent a letter urging the Trump administration to close loopholes in export controls that allow China to gain access to advanced chip-making equipment.
The push comes after media reports in December that China made progress developing advanced chip-making machines, either by upgrading older equipment or by building prototypes using scavenged parts.
🙅🏻♀️🚘Kids don’t like driving anymore: The share of U.S. 16-year-olds with a driver’s license has plummeted from roughly 50% in 1983 to just 25% in 2022. It may be tied to a larger generational shift — less sex, less drinking, less going out.
🏡U.S. homeowners are staying put for the longest time in at least 25 years, largely thanks to their low mortgage rates.
🤖 The U.S. is experiencing an investment boom from AI and the infrastructure that makes it possible — but much of those economic gains aren’t reaching workers. That disconnect between strong growth and comparatively anemic results for workers may sound like a unique challenge of 2026. In fact, it’s part of a longer-run phenomenon that the AI boom is poised to exacerbate.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
💃TikTok is preliminarily found to be in breach of the Digital Markets Act for its “addictive design,” including features like infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications. TikTok also launched an opt-in Local Feed in the U.S. leveraging users’ precise location. TikTok’s new Local Feed will show you nearby shopping, dining, events, news, and more
💳Stripe is preparing a potential tender offer that could value the payments company at more than $140 billion. That would put the company’s valuation well above the $107 billion mark at which it bought back shares from investors last fall.
🚗Lyft is opening its ride-hailing app to teens. Only a parent or guardian can create a teen account and drivers who are matched with these underage passengers must meet additional criteria and pass yearly background checks.
📣Earnings
🎶Spotify’s revenue grew 7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, in line with the third quarter. A 4% drop in ad revenue partly offset 8% higher subscription revenue. Plus: Spotify has hit a record 751M monthly users thanks to Wrapped and other new free features.
🚗Lyft reported 3% higher revenue of $1.6 billion in the fourth quarter, sending its stock plunging 15% in after-hours trading. But Lyft said that excluding changes to legal, tax, and regulatory reserves, its revenue would have risen 13%.
🛍️Shopify shares were down around 11% by midday Wednesday, reversing a nearly 12% premarket jump that had followed the release of the e-commerce software maker’s latest financial results. That volatile trading likely reflects general investor fears about AI’s impact on software companies that have been triggering sharp selloffs in companies across the sector.
🚀SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a “self-growing city” on the Moon, which could be achieved in less than 10 years.
💻 Microsoft says hackers are exploiting critical zero-day bugs to target Windows and Office users: Critical security flaws targeting Windows and Office users allow hackers to take complete control of a victim’s computer by clicking a malicious link or opening a file.
🤳Instagram’s head testified in a landmark trial that social media was not “clinically addictive”. Adam Mosseri is the first social media executive to testify as lawyers for K.G.M., a 20-year-old girl from Chico, Calif., try to convince a jury that Meta’s and YouTube’s product designs are addictive and have caused K.G.M. mental health problems.
🤡 X recently hit $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue from selling subscriptions
💊Amazon Pharmacy is expanding same-day delivery to nearly 4,500 US cities.
🤖 AI News
OpenAI
OpenAI on Monday announced it’s beginning to test ads in the U.S. for users on its Free and Go subscription tiers.
Plus: the NYTimes looks at OpenAI’s attempts to grow revenue to match its plans to spend tens of billions of dollars.
OpenAI also disbanded its mission alignment team, which focused on ‘safe’ and ‘trustworthy’ AI development.
OpenAI announced the release of a light-weight version of its agentic coding tool Codex, the latest model of which OpenAI launched earlier this month. GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is described by the company as a “smaller version” of that model, one that is designed for faster inference.
📈 The share of U.S. companies paying for Anthropic’s AI tools and services jumped in January. Anthropic's new software coding product — Claude Code — went viral earlier this year and helped drive adoption. Of note: Anthropic isn’t gaining users at OpenAI’s expense since about 79% of OpenAI users also pay for Anthropic.
ByteDance’s new AI video generation model Seedance 2.0, unveiled over the weekend, is generating a lot of buzz on social media, with some calling it a game changer. The new model is the latest indication of how Chinese companies are playing central roles in the advancements of AI video technology.
Zhipu, one of China’s prominent AI developers, has anonymously released its new large language model under a different name on OpenRouter, a popular AI model marketplace for developers. Pony Alpha, a new open-source LLM launched on OpenRouter a few days ago, is Zhipu’s new model, known as GLM-5, in disguise.
Nearly half of xAI’s founding team has now left the company: Whatever the cause of the departures, the cumulative impact is alarming. There is a lot of work left to do at xAI, and an IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has ever faced before.
Facebook's new AI features let users animate their profile pics, restyle their Stories and Memories, and add backgrounds to text posts.
🤖💰Almost a quarter of this year’s Super Bowl ads — 15 of the 66 spots, which sold for an average of $8 million for 30-second slots — featured A.I. That has struck some on Wall Street as ominous. The game in 2022 became known as the Crypto Bowl, when Coinbase, Crypto.com, eToro and FTX spent a combined $54 million on ads. By the end of the year, FTX had declared bankruptcy and Coinbase shares had tanked. Then there was the Super Bowl of 2000, a.k.a. the Dot-Com Bowl, after more than a dozen ad spots were bought by internet start-ups like Pets.com, Epidemic.com and Lifeminders.com. Many shut down months later after the tech stock bubble popped.
Thoughts on AI from Casey Winters, former CPO at Eventbrite:
…building a new consumer network product is like building a new country. And it’s a lot easier to build a new country when there is new land that opens up. Mobile opened up a lot of new land in terms of internet access on the go. Instagram, Tiktok, and Snapchat consumed a bunch of free time people had waiting for coffee, at the DMV, etc. AI hasn’t yet opened up new land, which means as consumer founders we need to steal time and attention from some other product, one that is frequently extremely well optimized at keeping its users’ attention….
…Until AI creates new land, or someone finds a way to manufacture density without it, most attempts will default to magic tricks to go viral and not create lasting value. The opportunity isn’t in the trick. It’s in compounding trust and density over time. The first wave of AI products optimized for speed. The second wave will optimize for structure.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
🚗Uber is acquiring the delivery arm of Turkey’s Getir. The deal will see Uber paying $335 million at the outset to purchase Getir’s food delivery business. Uber will also pay $100 million for a 15% stake in Getir’s grocery, retail and water delivery business.
Candle Media, the media rollup company backed by Blackstone, has sold a majority stake in digital media company ATTN: back to its co-founders.
Fundraising
⭐️Anthropic raised another $30B in Series G, the company announced on Thursday. Anthropic now has a new value of $380B - a huge jump from its previous Series F valuation of $183 billion.
Harvey is reportedly raising at $11B valuation just months after it hit $8B.
Databricks said it had raised $7 billion of fresh capital after hitting a $5.4 billion annual revenue pace in the fourth quarter.
Runway has raised a $315 million round at a $5.3 billion valuation, funds it will use to expand beyond AI video generation and into world models.
Alphabet is set to raise $20 billion in the U.S. bond market, as part of a massive debt sale that will also see the company selling bonds in British pounds and Swiss francs.
Trend - The tech industry has increasingly turned to debt financing to fund exploding spending on data centers and chips. Capital expenditures are slated to take up all of the projected free cash flow at Amazon, and most of it at Alphabet and Meta.
Partnerships
EssilorLuxottica and Meta Platforms sold more than 7 million smart glasses in 2025. Essilor had reported a year ago that only 2 million smart glasses had been sold since the product was launched in 2023.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🏈The Superbowl last Sunday was the second-most-watched Super Bowl and TV event in U.S. history, behind last year’s game. It is also the most-watched show in NBCUniversal’s 100-year history.
💗Amelia Dimoldenberg, the host of Chicken Shop Date, will be starring in and producing a romantic comedy. Side note: Her interview w Louis Theroux (y’know, the one that started the whole “my money don’t jiggle jiggle”) never fails to crack me up.
💎🛒Blame it on Erewhon: Luxury groceries are booming. Consumers “want shopping to feel like an experience.” One grocery comments that it has been flooded with influencers and out-of-towners who come in “all dressed up to do a haul and taste-test everything. It’s social currency.”
❄️Olympics! The winter Olympics in Italy began this past weekend. A couple highlights: Italy’s Francesca Lollobrigida smashed the Olympic 3000m record to open the speed skating competition in Milan, winning Italy’s first gold medal of the 2026 Games and its first-ever gold in women’s speed skating; Decorated US skier Lindsey Vonn had a devastating fall and had to get airlifted out; USA’s “quad god” Ilia Malinin saved Team USA’s figure skating team event title when USA and Japan were tied. (See all the highlights). The current medal count as of Thur night 10pm ET shows Italy in the lead for total medals (USA is in 3rd place), and Norway in the lead for gold medals.
👱🏻 Trending - 401(k) mullets and quarter zips: Gen Z is trying to portray a more professional look amid today’s softening labor market. Plus: boy are rocking bangs now.
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