This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jun 27, 2025)
TL;DR - 🇮🇱🇮🇷Israel, Iran; 🤝M&A from Snap, Rubrik; 🤓👰🏻♀️Bezos' wedding
Hey folks!
TGIF - Tech news below.
TL;DR -
🇮🇱🇮🇷Israel and Iran’s conflict reached a ceasefire this week.
M&A from Snap acquiring Saturn, a social calendar for high school and college students, and Rubrik acquiring Predibase, which helps companies train and fine-tune open source AI models to customize them to their needs.
Who knew prediction markets were so hot: Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, is finalizing a deal to raise more than $200 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion, and Kalshi, another prediction market, has raised $185 million in a round that values the company at $2bn.
🤓👰🏻♀️Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding is happening this coming weekend in Venice - and they have a newly-single celeb bachelor among their guests😏 scroll to the bottom to find out who.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇮🇱🇮🇷Over the weekend, President Trump decided to intervene directly in support of Israel's effort to dismantle Iran's nuclear program. The mission was dubbed "Operation Midnight Hammer" and involved B-2 bombers dropping bombs on Iran’s 3 nuclear sites. All three Iranian targets sustained damage, according to the White House. A ceasefire was announced mid-week and appears to hold.
📈 Despite the surge in negative news - threat of war in the middle East, rising energy prices, high interest rates, and more - the stock market remains buoyant.
The U.S. Senate’s latest version of the “big beautiful” budget bill could include a fresh $25 million in funding for artificial intelligence infrastructure.
👨🏼💼This week’s main character: Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate for New York’s mayoral race and a democratic socialist. Why he matters: The market is nervous bc Mamdani is proposing ambitious and expensive ideas, like a rent freeze, free city buses and the creation of city-owned grocery stores funded by raising the corporate tax rate and income taxes for the city’s millionaires by 2 percent.
📊 Coatue Management has a new markets report with some fun insights.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🎶 Spotify is drawing attention from the U.S. Senate. On Friday, two senators urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company for bundling multiple products into a more expensive subscription, without user consent, and paying creators fewer royalties in the process.
Amazon plans to spend more than $4 billion to triple the size of its delivery network by 2026 and is building one of the largest computers ever on 1,200 acres of cornfield in Indiana. It will power an A.I. system intended to match the human brain.
📹 Ring doorbells and cameras can now provide AI-powered text descriptions of motion that they detect around your property.
🚙 Moarrr robotaxis: Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin. Waymo opened its robotaxi service to the public in Atlanta, offering rides in a 65-square mile area exclusively through the Uber app
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is pitching companies and governments on setting up a manufacturing center in Arizona that could cost as much as $1 trillion. SoftBank is talking to tech companies including chipmaker TSMC and Samsung on the project. The project aims to replicate the thriving tech hub of Shenzhen, China, possibly by manufacturing AI-powered industrial robots.
👓 Meta announced Oakley-branded smart glasses, which are targeted toward athletes. The glasses start at $399 and will be on sale later this summer.
✂️Layoffs: Bumble laid off 30% of its workforce (240 ppl). Rivian laid off 140 ppl, around 1% of the company.
🤖 AI News
💰 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has been eager to recruit AI talent and has been offering $100mill pay packages. Zuckerberg has personally reached out to hundreds of researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, product stars and entrepreneurs to try to get them to join a new Superintelligence lab he’s putting together.
As OpenAI seeks Microsoft’s approval to restructure the startup’s for-profit unit so it can go public, the companies have discussed changes to clauses in their contract that would limit Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s technology after the startup achieves what it calls artificial general intelligence.
💬 Meta announced that it is adding more AI features to WhatsApp, including AI-generated summaries of unread messages.
YouTube is rolling out an AI-powered search results carousel that will show up in searches for shopping, places, or things to do. The feature’s only available to YT Premium subscribers in the U.S., and looks similar to Google’s AI Overviews
📚 Anthropic did not violate copyright law by training its large language models on copies of books because the training was protected under “fair use,” a federal district court in San Francisco ruled. Similarly, a separate judge ruled Meta did not violate copyright law by training its Llama language models on copyrighted books.
🗣️ ElevenLabs, an AI voice platform, just launched 11ai, an in-house voice assistant that connects to tools via Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol to execute tasks rather than just answer questions.
🛑 Cloudflare, the giant cloud service company, is working on a new tool that will stop content scraping on a macro scale. And every publisher is on board with it.
🧡 that’s sweet: Entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian brought an old photo of him and his mom to life with Midjourney.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Snap acquired Saturn, a social calendar for high school and college students. Snap says it will continue to operate Saturn as a stand-alone app, while also bringing the startup’s calendar expertise to Snapchat.
Rubrik, a data cybersecurity company, announced its intent to acquire Predibase, which helps companies train and fine-tune open source AI models to customize them to their needs.
The Federal Trade Commission said it will approve Omnicom Group's $13.5 billion acquisition of rival Interpublic Group, but only if the agencies agree they won't bar ads based on politics.
Snyk, a cybersecurity company, announced that it has acquired Swiss AI security research startup Invariant Labs for an undisclosed price.
Xero, a NZ based accounting software company, will pay $2.5 billion to acquire Melio, a New York startup that sells bill payments software to small and medium-sized businesses, as part of Xero’s U.S. expansion strategy.
Fundraising
Harvey, a legal AI startup, raised $300 million in Series E funding at a $5 billion valuation.
Commure, which develops AI software for healthcare providers, raised $200 million in funding.
Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, is finalizing a deal to raise more than $200 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion.
Kalshi, another prediction market, has raised $185 million in a round that values the company at $2bn.
Abridge, an AI medical scribe startup, raised a $300 million Series E funding round at a $5.3 billion valuation
Partnerships
Reddit is reportedly negotiating with Sam Altman’s Tools For Humanity to integrate the company’s iris-scanning World ID Orb system, allowing users to provide proof of humanity while staying anonymous.
IPO
Wealthfront, the 17-year-old robo advisor that manages millennials’ money, confidentially submitted its paperwork to regulators for an initial public offering.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
PSA: the new California “no touch” law is now in place, which bans even touching your cellphone while driving.
🏀 🏆The Oklahoma City Thunder won the NBA championship over the Indiana Pacers.
🇰🇪🏃🏾♀️Kenyan runner Faith Kipyegon made history this week when she ran the fastest mile ever run by a woman (4:06.42)
⚽️Did you know: Lionel Messi isn't just the highest-paid player in Major League Soccer — his annual salary is greater than the entire payroll of 21 teams. Messi’s total comp this year is $20.4mill, whil the avg comp for mLS players is just under $650k.
Jannik Sinner, the world’s top tennis player, being 🔥
📰Did you know: Only 17% of Americans pay for news (including yours truly). I do it so you don’t have to, you’re welcome ;)
🕶️ Anna Wintour is planning to step down as the editor-in-chief of U.S. Vogue, but she'll continue as global editorial director for the magazine, which she has led since 1988.
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has returned to theaters to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The film became a queer millennial touchstone thanks to its accessibility via digital piracy, allowing closeted teens to view it privately.
Disney's Pixar saw its worst-ever box office debut over the weekend with its sci-fi adventure film "Elio" earning just $21 million domestically after reportedly spending at least $250 million on production and marketing.
A New Yorker article ponders if young people are having enough sex - it seems Gen Z isn’t that interested. Writer Jia Tolentino suggests the deeper issue may be Gen Z’s growing discomfort with intimacy.
🤓👰🏻♀️Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding is happening this coming weekend in Venice with its celebrity-studded guests. Also, people are razzing their wedding invitations lol: “you can’t buy taste”.
💔 So apparently Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom have called it quits. And Bloom is in Venice for Bezos’ wedding and has been seen with Kim Kardashian 👀
✍️Enjoy this delightfully awkward and funny Wes Anderson and Coppola directed Montblanc commercial.
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