Anthropic reached a settlement with a group of authors in a class-action over training data – a watershed for how society prices creativity in the AI era. If training on “shadow libraries” carries real costs, expect licensing marketplaces, cleaner data supply chains and fewer “just scrape it” defences. Meanwhile MIT’s NANDA initiative published a sober read-out on enterprise GenAI from 150 exec interviews, 350 FTE surveys and 300 deployments. The report suggests pilots mostly under-deliver unless tightly scoped, budgets are misallocated, and unofficial usage far outstrips formal adoption – a reality check for boardrooms and vendors alike.
IPOs / Publics
Klarna is targeting a $13B pre-money valuation for its IPO.
Lendbuzz (auto loans via AI for thin-file borrowers) is prepping a Nasdaq IPO at $1–1.5B.
Pattern (brand aggregation across marketplaces; $1.8B 2024 revenue) filed to go public.
London’s IPO fundraising is at a 30-year low – only nine new listings in H1 2025. Synthesia and Bitpanda both said they won’t consider London.
Nvidia – two customers made up 39% of Q2 revenue; Q2 sales were $46.7B, +56% YoY. Hyperscaler dependence cuts both ways for pricing power and resilience!
Microsoft unveiled MAI-Voice-1 (high-fidelity speech – 60s audio generated in <1s on a single GPU) and MAI-1-preview (its first end-to-end foundation model using MoE).
Google
Rolled out Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (“Nano Banana”) to preserve consistent likeness across edits and enable richer natural-language controls.
Google Cloud is developing its own blockchain for payments/financial products.
New AI hurricane model outperformed the National Hurricane Center and leading physics-based systems on Cat-5 Erin – a sign AI may soon rival traditional forecasting.
Apple is weighing whether to buy Perplexity or Mistral as pressure mounts around its Google Search deal.
ByteDance
Surpassed Meta revenue in Q2.
Planning a large tender at a $330B valuation after $48B Q2 revenue.
Big Dogs
Brave found Perplexity’s Comet browser AI sidebar vulnerable to prompt injection – a web page could instruct Comet to exfiltrate data (e.g., via Gmail). Why it matters: agentic browsing magnifies supply-chain risk at page level.
Anthropic settled the authors’ class action (alleged scraping from LibGen-style “shadow libraries”). Statutory damages could have run to $750 per book across ~7M titles (~$1T exposure). Terms remain sealed until expected finalisation on 3 Sept. The company is now said to be raising $10B (up from $5B) at ~$170B given demand. Separately, Anthropic warns of “vibe-hacking” – AI-enabled end-to-end extortion where agents script psychological ransom notes, lowering the bar for lone attackers.
DeepSeek v3.1 – comparable benchmark performance to its reasoning model R1 with 25–50% fewer tokens; muted reception despite meaningful efficiency.
Revolut launched an employee secondary, valuing the company at $75B – +60% vs. last year if it closes.
Framer (website design platform) raised $100M Series D at $2B, led by Meritech and Atomico.
Vercel (frontend cloud) is raising hundreds of millions at ~$9B – 3× last May – after doubling to ~$200M ARR.
Venture Capital Insights
Wilson Sonsini Q2 snapshot: valuations up QoQ; down/flat rounds slightly above historical levels; up rounds increased for a third consecutive quarter.
Avg valuations – Seed $20M, Series A $56M (multi-year high), B $89M (still compressed), C+ $630M (sharp rise).
Avg round sizes – Seed $4.4M, A $13.9M, B $11M, C+ $73M. (Yes, many B rounds are “inside bridges”.)
UK: H1 2025 vs. H1 2024 – deal count (25)%, capital (34)%. Q/Q also down ~(12)%. On current trend, 2025 could be the lowest deal count since 2014.
Capital to build a unicorn – average $340M / median $250M; biggest cluster $200–300M (367 cos). Fifty-four raised >$1B; 186 did it on < $100M.
Europe has produced ~700 companies at $100M+ revenue (“thoroughbreds”).
For the first time in US history there are more ETFs than listed stocks – a liquidity and indexing tell.
ARR bars for Series A have doubled in four years:
Top decile raises A at $10M+ ARR; top quartile ~ $7M.
Median ARR ~ $3M (vs. $1.3M in 2021) for US B2B software.
Lower-quartile founders increasingly screened out.
Private equity raised $592B in the 12 months to June – lowest in seven years despite sweetened terms.
Venture Geopolitics
India was hit with 50% US tariffs on Wednesday; PM Modi urged “make in India, spend in India.”
Early-stage US startups raise >7× European peers for similar products (Zapflow) – valuations then compound 3–7×. Structural funding gap persists across stages.
A whistle-blower alleges DOGE members uploaded 450M US Social Security records – names, birthplaces, citizenship, and family SSNs – exposing most Americans to compromise risk.
200+ firms and associations urged the European Commission to act on sovereign cloud under “EuroStack”, warning Europe could be near-totally dependent on non-EU tech within three years without a decisive strategy.
China’s AI infra crisis – billions spent on data centres now under-utilised as demand mismatches supply; a caution on state-led capex before product–market fit.
France – President Macron vowed a strong response to protect Europe’s digital sovereignty after President Trump threatened fresh tariffs/export controls against countries with DSTs or rules that “harm American tech”.
A poll says half of Americans think Trump will run again despite the constitutional ban.
EU is accelerating digital euro plans after US stablecoin legislation surprised Europe.
China released its new national AI strategy paper.
UK – Octopus Energy founder Greg Jackson will advise government on efficiency. Also, US officials claimed the UK dropped demands for a backdoor to Apple’s encryption; UK has neither confirmed nor rescinded.
Strategic Sectors
Stablecoins
In recent weeks Stripe, Circle and Dinari each announced stablecoin-centric blockchains. Robinhood and others have taken a similar route – build networks optimised for your own ecosystem to capture more value via distribution. The upside looks bounded: a company-centred chain can hum inside its own loop, but lacks universal appeal. Adyen won’t settle on Stripe’s rails; Tether won’t use Circle’s – reinforcing moats while doing little for global payment inefficiencies (fragmented liquidity, opaque settlement, divergent messaging).
Defence
SIPRI: 2024 delivered the steepest YoY rise in world military spend since 1988 – up 9.4% to $2,718B, lifting defence to 2.5% of world GDP.
UK MoD: with dual-use tech ascendant, the best innovation is often outside primes; bring startups/scale-ups/SMEs and private investors into the tent.
EU Commission will provide €150B in loans for defence procurement where 65%+ of end-product cost is in the EU, Norway or Ukraine. Non-EU firms must sign bilateral deals – the UK is first in line.
AI
Ramp’s AI Index (paid AI subscriptions) shows accelerating adoption with sharp sector variance:
Tech 70% (still 30% unconverted).
Finance 57%.
Manufacturing 41% (doubled in a year) – AI moving into traditional industries.
Laggards: Retail 33%, Healthcare 29%, Construction 26%, Accommodation/Food 21% – biggest headroom for growth.
MIT NANDA’s enterprise GenAI study (150 execs, 350 staff, 300 deployments):
Only ~5% of pilots drive rapid revenue gains; most don’t dent P&L.
Winners pick one high-value pain-point and execute precisely with vendors tailoring to real workflows.
Budget misfires – >50% spend goes to Sales & Marketing, but highest ROI is back-office automation (ops, outsourcing cuts, agency savings).
Regulated firms persisting with in-house builds often underperform.
A ~50% gap between official adoption (~40%) and actual employee use (~90%) implies shadow AI delivers much of today’s value – governance and enablement need to catch up.
Robotics
Apptronik (humanoid robots; Apollo) is raising a round that could push valuation to $5B.