Venture Geopolitics Issue 27
23 December 2025
IPOs / Public
2 US IPOs popped >40% on day 1, both pricing in the upper half of ranges in a thin pre-Christmas window: (1) Medline (medical supplies distributor) raised $6.2B in the biggest IPO since 2021, a “real economy” deal in a market still dominated by AI narratives, (2) Andersen Group (the US tax & consulting firm started by alumni of Enron’s collapsed accounting firm Arthur Andersen) also priced strongly, signalling that investors will buy boring cashflows if the price is right (here and here)
SpaceX (launch & satellite systems) started an investment-banking bake-off for an IPO that could raise >$30B at ~$1.5T - a signal that 2026 may become a liquidity year! Morgan Stanley seen as front runner (here)
Amazon in talks to invest $10B in OpenAI, a strategically neat triangle given Amazon’s position as the primary backer of Anthropic while Microsoft is entangled with both (here)
Amazon Alexa now works with Angi, Expedia, Square & Yelp - pushing the assistant from Q&A into bookings, payments & scheduling (here)
Meta’s China ad exposure looks uglier on inspection, with Reuters reporting ~20% of 2024 China revenue tied to ads for scams, gambling, pornography & other prohibited content (here)
Nvidia acquired SchedMD (Slurm workload manager maintainer), extending its open-source footprint deeper into HPC + AI orchestration where developer defaults quietly become platform power (here)
Oracle credit jitters are back, after a reported pull-out by Blue Owl from financing a $10B Michigan data centre & mounting market anxiety that Oracle is a leveraged proxy for AI capex payback timing (here)
Alphabet agreed to buy Intersect Power for $4.75B, effectively vertically integrating clean power + data-centre siting to bypass grid bottlenecks that utilities can’t upgrade fast enough (here)
Tiktok deal looks like it is finally happening, with the company actually signing the deal to spin off the US assets into a consortium led by Larry Ellison (whose family also owns Paramount / CBS and is trying to buy Warner Bros.) & Silverlake, with ByteDance retaining 19.9% - still contingent on Beijing’s consent. TikTok Shop has also rolled out a new feature that allows users to purchase digital gift cards - a small feature that nudges TikTok toward being a payments & balance-sheet platform (here and here)
Big Dogs
Databricks (data & AI platform) is raising $4B at $134B - reportedly a “Series L” (!) (here)
Notion (productivity software) is letting employees sell ~$300M of shares at $11B as it balances retention, liquidity pressure & pre-IPO optionality (here)
Lovable (Swedish “vibe coding” app builder) raised $330M at $6.6B with backing from strategic investors including Alphabet & Nvidia, a reminder that the big platforms now fund the tools that generate demand for their compute (here)
Fuse Energy (UK energy startup) raised $70M at $5B (here)
Blackstone is in early talks with Revolut on a wealth partnership, another sign that alternative asset managers want distribution pipes as much as they want assets (here)
Venture Capital
Things are winding down…
a16z published a blueprint for a federal AI rulebook, explicitly blending harm prevention (children, consumer abuse, cyber, national security) with growth priorities (talent, infrastructure, R&D, gov modernisation) - industrial policy dressed as safety architecture (here)
Venture Geopolitics
Saudi Arabia is trying to become the world’s cheapest inference engine, betting that abundant land + ultra-cheap solar power can undercut the marginal cost of output tokens. The pitch is simple - hardware is fixed cost, electricity is variable cost & inference economics increasingly turn on energy pricing. With projects like Al Shuaiba producing power at ~1 cent/kWh, Saudi argues it can sell output tokens materially below prevailing rates while still making the unit economics work. A new company, Humain, has centralised the efforts under the leadership of Tareq Amin, boss of Aramco Digital, the tech arm of the state-owned energy company. This is state capacity applied to compute - fast permitting, site aggregation, capital coordination & procurement diplomacy. Humain claims it identified 200+ potential sites with access to 15.6GW of supply in its first 2 weeks - the kind of scale private developers struggle to assemble without sovereign leverage (here)
Google & Apple warned some visa-holder employees not to travel, reflecting tightening US social-media vetting & unpredictable re-entry delays. This is a quiet but meaningful constraint on the labour inputs of US tech - if mobility friction rises, talent markets become less global in practice even before formal immigration reform (here)
Macron announced a €8B nuclear-powered aircraft carrier plan, explicitly framed around reducing reliance on the US - European strategic autonomy expressed as industrial procurement rather than speeches (here)
China is running a ‘Manhattan project’ to replicate EUV lithography, reportedly recruiting former ASML engineers & targeting domestic capability on a 2028–2030 timeline. EUV has been treated as the West’s last clean compute chokepoint, but replication isn’t only physics - it’s the supplier ecosystem, uptime, yields, metrology & maintenance. Even partial progress compresses the export-control “buffer”, turning a decade-long moat into a shorter, riskier window (here)
Europe agreed €90B in loans for Ukraine but not via seized Russian assets, avoiding the “robbery” legal line while still signalling support - then Ukraine reportedly struck a Russian shadow-fleet tanker soon after, showing both reliance on financing & continued escalation capacity (here)
The US passed a $900B defence policy bill, modernising procurement, pressuring transparency on strikes, & limiting troop drawdowns in Europe below 76,000 for >45 days without consultation. The key point is institutional - Congress is trying to reassert oversight while the executive runs a more unilateral security posture. Even allies should read the constraint language as a signal of domestic disagreement about US commitments (here)
Trump halted 5 offshore wind projects citing national security (an unclassified report from the Energy Department had found that wind farms could “interfere with radar systems”). Reported costs of $15–50M per week for project companies. The practical effect is grid fragility in slow motion - blocking one of the fastest scalable sources of new power while AI demand climbs (here)
Regulation
Trump signed an executive order to curb state-level AI rules, aiming to prevent fragmentation & accelerate deployment, but it quietly assumes Congress can produce a coherent national framework (here)
John Carreyrou & other authors filed suit against major AI labs over pirated books, targeting Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI & Perplexity (here)
iRobot “had a rough year” - with the Amazon deal blocked by regulators, bankruptcy following & a proposed takeover by Shenzhen-based PICEA Robotics. The intended regulatory logic was “stop concentration & protect consumers” - the outcome is that a US household robotics pioneer ends up under Chinese ownership, showing how competition policy can collide with strategic outcomes when the state has no industrial fallback plan (here)
UK ministers want OS-level nudity detection on devices, pressuring Apple & Google to embed scanning capability at the operating-system layer to curb underage access to pornography - a child-safety objective that drags the state straight into the architecture of personal computing (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
Google released A2UI, a framework for LLM agents to generate GUIs in a standardised way - the quiet move here is interface power: whoever defines how agents “render” actions shapes how users experience agency (here)
Yann LeCun is raising €500M for a new AI lab at €3B pre-launch, with Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs expected to be announced in January
This is the European AI brand premium in real time - elite research pedigree can still command scale financing even before product, but the open question is whether Europe can turn that into enduring ownership rather than another export of talent + IP (here)Salesforce is openly tempering enterprise expectations for LLM agents, leaning harder on deterministic automation inside Agentforce because LLMs remain too costly & unpredictable for many critical workflows (here)
Investors are ramping up trading in CDS tied to major tech companies as AI infrastructure borrowing surges & concerns grow that an $88B wave of new debt could expose portfolios to a potential AI bust (here)
Multi-agent systems show sharp task-dependence, with research suggesting up to +80% gains on parallel tasks but up to -70% on sequential tasks - adding agents is not scaling, architecture is scaling (here)
AI models are starting to match experts at analysing language itself, a milestone that matters because it implies models are improving not only at tasks, but at meta-reasoning about the medium the economy runs on (here)
Agent interoperability standards are now forming, with major labs backing protocols & adtech groups creating “Agentic Advertising” standards. Standards bodies are a platform-cycle move - sometimes they institutionalise openness, sometimes they freeze incumbents into place. Either way, the presence of standards efforts signals that agents are shifting from products into infrastructure (here)
Defence
Ukraine reportedly used an underwater drone to hit a Russian harbour & cripple a submarine, another data point that autonomy is rewriting naval assumptions at low cost & high strategic effect (here)
The US agreed an $11B weapons sale to Taiwan, continuing the pattern of deterrence-by-supply even as US foreign policy signals remain mixed elsewhere (here)
UK defence leadership is openly describing grey-zone attack as the current baseline, with senior speeches highlighting cyber, sabotage, subsea threats, drones near bases & influence operations as “below-threshold” pressure (here)
The chair of the UK defence committee called progress ‘glacial’, warning Britain is not moving fast enough on a whole-of-society home defence approach despite rising hybrid threats (here)
Cybersecurity
ServiceNow agreed to acquire Armis for $7.75B, a big premium outcome for an OT/IoT asset visibility company that had been aiming for a 2026–2027 IPO. Armis hit $340M ARR with >50% YoY growth, illustrating the enduring willingness to pay for control-plane security - especially where unmanaged assets create blind spots across physical infrastructure (here)
Exein (embedded security) raised €100M at ~€700M, backing a thesis that security must be embedded at the device/firmware layer as attacks increasingly cross from digital compromise into physical consequence (here)
PromptPwnd exposed a new CI/CD attack surface for coding agents, using prompt injection in GitHub Actions / GitLab workflows to exfiltrate secrets & steal tokens. The structural issue is non-human identities with broad repo access. If organisations remove humans from loops to gain speed, they must build observability + rollback for agent actions - otherwise productivity gains come with fragile control (here)
France’s La Poste suffered suspected DDoS disruption, knocking postal & banking systems offline while the country manages multiple recent incidents. Even when attribution is murky, repeated disruption matters - it trains institutions & the public to accept degraded service as normal (here)
Thailand framed border conflict with Cambodia as a war on scam compounds, targeting cyberscam centres that have become economically significant. The uncomfortable layer is forced labour - many compounds are populated by trafficked workers, blurring law enforcement, geopolitics & human rights into one operational theatre (here)
Energy
US senators are probing AI data centres driving up household electricity bills, naming Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, CoreWeave, Digital Realty & Equinix. Data centres were >4% of US electricity consumption in 2023, with government analysts estimating ~12% by end-2026. The political risk is obvious - grid capex gets socialised through rates while AI upside accrues to private balance sheets (here)
TAE Technologies is merging with Trump Media in a $6B deal, a fusion startup pairing with a political media vehicle to access capital & ride the AI power narrative. It’s also a signal about the new American deal loop - energy, compute, politics & capital formation are fusing into one story, regardless of how implausible the timelines sound (here)
Oilfield services firms are pivoting into data-centre power & cooling, with Baker Hughes, Halliburton & SLB repackaging industrial capability toward AI infrastructure as drilling demand weakens (here)
The US is dismantling a major climate research institution, moving against the National Center for Atmospheric Research - a direct hit on state scientific capacity exactly when climate volatility is becoming an operational variable for grids, defence & insurance (here)
Crypto
YouTube added PYUSD as a creator payout option, putting PayPal’s stablecoin into a mainstream distribution rail rather than a crypto-native niche (here)
Intuit partnered with Circle to integrate USDC, embedding stablecoin rails into TurboTax, QuickBooks & Credit Karma - programmable payments moving from speculation into back-office plumbing (here)
JPMorgan is considering crypto trading for institutional clients, reviewing spot & derivatives - an incremental step that still signals where the centre of gravity is moving (here)
FDIC approved Erebor Bank’s deposit-insurance application, advancing a crypto-focused bank backed by prominent defence-tech-aligned founders & investors toward launch (here)
Coinbase partnered with Kalshi, pushing prediction markets into a major retail trading surface & broadening the category beyond its current specialist user base (here)
Crypto theft hit a record $2.7B in 2025, driven by the $1.4B Bybit breach attributed to North Korean hackers - the largest known crypto theft ever & one of the largest financial heists in history (here)
EVs / AVs
A San Francisco power outage halted Waymo vehicles at dead traffic lights, creating congestion as vehicles waited to confirm intersection state. The interesting question is operational resilience - autonomy works best in normality, but public acceptance will be set by edge cases like outages, disasters & emergency scenarios (here)
Data on the crash frequency of Waymos suggests that Waymos are much, much safer than human drivers (to the point that some people are calling for widespread adoption) - shifting autonomy from novelty to public health argument. The same does not seem to be true for Tesla’s robotaxis (here)
Waymo is in talks to raise >$15B at >$100B (here)
Luminar (lidar maker) filed for Chapter 11, after losing a major contract & defaulting on loans (here)
Uber & Lyft plan to test Baidu robotaxis in London in 2026, adding China’s Apollo Go stack into a UK regulatory environment already preparing for Waymo & local AV players (here)
Robotics
Galbot raised >$300M, another marker that robotics is pulling larger cheques as autonomy shifts from software promise to hardware delivery (here)
UPS is buying truck-unloading robots from Pickle Robotics, unglamorous but economically real - logistics automation tends to scale not through humanoids but through narrow, high-ROI task machines (here)
Quantum
QuantumDiamonds plans a €152M quantum chip inspection facility in Munich, a reminder that the quantum supply chain is as much about metrology & manufacturing tooling as it is about qubits (here)