Venture Geopolitics Issue 53

23 June 2026

One year of Venture Geopolitics!

And so much has changed. We arguably have an entire reshuffling of global power underway.

A year ago, we had been confronted by Greenland and a first round of tariffs. We did not yet have Maduro, Iran, Hormuz or Mythos. Together, those chapters have diminished American credibility: Greenland showed that the US might not always be a reliable ally; Iran and Hormuz suggested that its military and economic power is less overwhelming than assumed; and Mythos/Fable reinforced Europe’s dawning realisation that it cannot depend on America for strategic technologies and resources.

Europe’s economy is almost the same size as America’s - $28 trillion against $29 trillion - and it is slowly learning to act collectively. More importantly, in a world where power increasingly derives from data centres rather than aircraft carriers, Europe may have a route towards greater strategic independence through renewable energy. Hormuz has underlined the strategic value of energy that cannot be blockaded or cut off, just as the US is stepping back from it: this week, the Trump administration agreed to pay Invenergy $765 million to abandon four offshore wind leases, part of roughly $2.5 billion committed to killing approved renewable projects.

One year in feels like a good time to zoom out - not only in time, but in geography. Venture Geopolitics has still barely scratched the surface, guiltily reflecting the tight-knit world of Western intellectuals and VCs that tends to discuss the stories already being discussed: Silicon Valley, frontier models, China, Brussels and Westminster. These are the stories of today. But what might be the stories of tomorrow?

What could parts of Africa become if abundant land and solar power were paired with serious institutions and secure infrastructure? What happens when India combines its population and technical base with dramatically cheaper renewable energy? The inputs into technological power - and therefore global political power - are changing. They may soon favour far more places than our current conversation admits.

Perhaps the UK is a microcosm. Power has been concentrated in Westminster and London for centuries, but Andy Burnham is now the frontrunner to replace Keir Starmer: not only is he not from Eton, he is not even from London! A prime minister whose authority was built in Greater Manchester, alongside further local devolution, could begin shifting political gravity away from the capital. Could this be the path ahead at a global level too - power dispersing from Washington, Beijing, London and Brussels towards more interesting things happening in more different places?

It is easy as a VC not to think deeply about the wider picture of power, war, politics and national sovereignty. There is always another founder to meet or LP to pitch. But when technology - and specifically AI - will help define the next generations of humankind, it is worth considering how its growth will shape, and be shaped by, geopolitics.

One short year in, we are barely scratching the surface. Thank you for reading, subscribing, challenging the arguments and sending kind words. I am looking forward to meandering further and wider with you in the year ahead.

IPOs / Publics

• Tech stocks ‘tumbled’ over concerns AI valuations had run ahead of fundamentals - the Nasdaq 100 fell 3.3%, chipmakers dropped 8% & South Korea’s Kospi plunged 10% on forced liquidation by leveraged retail investors. Attention turns to Micron’s Weds earnings as a key test of whether AI infra demand can sustain the rally (here)

• Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley are both working on OpenAI & Anthropic IPOs (expected autumn 2026), using separate internal teams to prevent information sharing between the rival AI companies - an unusual arrangement of direct competitors going public simultaneously with the same lead underwriters! (here)

• Lime plans to name Uber as an anchor investor in its IPO, cementing a six-year relationship in which Uber holds over 10% of the e-scooter firm & generates 14% of its revenue through its app. Lime posted $170M Q1 revenue (+32% YoY), turned cash-flow positive in 2024 (here)

• Kalshi (prediction markets) is in early-stage IPO discussions with investment banks, with a listing likely beyond 2027. The CFTC-regulated platform now reports $2B+ annualised revenue & $178B in trading volume after raising $1B at $22B in May 2026 (here)

• EigenQ (post-quantum cryptography & quantum sensing) to go public via SPAC merger with Silicon Valley Acquisition at $3B, targeting government, defence & critical infrastructure customers concerned about ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks (here)

• Apple will raise prices across its product line to offset surging memory & storage chip costs, CEO Tim Cook told WSJ in an exclusive interview, calling the increases ‘unavoidable’ after trying to shield customers from supply-chain cost inflation (here)

• AWS is in talks to sell its Trainium AI chips to other data centres, a move CEO Andy Jassy flagged as a $50B annual revenue opportunity - roughly the size of Intel - though the company has historically sold out capacity to its own cloud customers & must compete with Nvidia for TSMC foundry allocation (here)

• Intel jumped 10% after Trump announced a partnership with Apple to design & build chips in the US, the latest in a series of wins (following Nvidia & Musk’s Terafab deal) that have lifted Intel 464% in 12 mo to a $609B market cap (here)

• SpaceX signed a $6.3B compute deal with Reflection AI (the Nvidia-backed open-source AI lab valued at $25B), providing access to GB300 chips at Colossus 2 in Memphis for $150M/mo through 2029 (here)

Big Dogs

• Trump administration is demanding Anthropic ensure Fable 5’s guardrails cannot be jailbroken before rerelease, a technical requirement effectively impossible to guarantee (here)

• JPMorgan blocked Hong Kong staff from accessing Anthropic’s Claude models via internal LLM drop-down menus, following Goldman’s similar move - both citing licensing terms that exclude Greater China (here)

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged G7 leaders to ‘resist the temptation to splinter’ over AI rollout, days after the US blocked export of his company’s Mythos & Fable models on national security grounds (here)

• John Jumper, Google DeepMind VP & 2024 Nobel Chemistry laureate (for AlphaFold), left for Anthropic days after researcher Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI - highlighting a talent drain as Google reportedly struggles in AI coding tools where rivals have gained momentum (here)

• Manus’ early Chinese investors (HSG, ZhenFund, Tencent) plan to buy back the AI agent startup from Meta at the original $2B acquisition price after Beijing ordered the deal unwound in April. Manus has quadrupled annualized revenue to $400-500M since Meta’s December 2025 purchase & is now considering a Hong Kong listing (here)

Regulation

• The Bank of England eased its planned stablecoin rules, scrapping ownership caps in favour of a £40B issuance limit & lowering required central bank reserves from 40% to 30%, after crypto firms warned the original proposals would be more restrictive than US rules & undermine London’s competitiveness (here)

• The US Department of Justice intervened in support of xAI in a lawsuit seeking to shut down 57 unpermitted gas turbines powering its Memphis data centres, arguing Grok is one of four AI models supporting ‘mission-critical’ Pentagon operations including recent Iran strikes & that stopping them would undermine national security (here)

• US Commerce Secretary Lutnick told ASML executives he believes an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine - the only tools capable of printing the most advanced chips - may have reached China, breaching export controls in place since 2017. ASML denies this, saying it tracks every EUV system ever shipped & maintains internal firewalls blocking China staff from EUV access (here)

• The EU-UK summit scheduled for 22 July has been postponed following Keir Starmer’s resignation, halting planned agreements on agrifood, emissions trading & youth mobility. European Council president António Costa said he hopes Starmer’s successor - expected to be Manchester mayor Andy Burnham - will continue efforts to reset cross-Channel relations, with the new PM potentially taking office by mid-July (here)

Venture Capital & Finance

• Abu Dhabi's MGX closed a $50B AI fund - one of the largest ever for AI - sourced from regional sovereign wealth funds, global pensions & institutional investors rather than state capital alone. The fund is already deployed into OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI & a $30B data centre vehicle with BlackRock, Microsoft & Nvidia, & is eyeing a multibillion-dollar acquisition of Singapore-based DayOne. MGX targets $100B AUM & plans to invest $10B/yr, positioning Abu Dhabi as a capital aggregator at the centre of frontier AI infrastructure (here)

• Menlo Ventures raised $3B across two new funds (early-stage XVII & growth-stage Inflection IV) on its 50th anniversary, backing AI infrastructure & applications after anchoring on Anthropic in 2023 (here)

• Earlybird & AVP launched E2D, a €500M growth-stage fund for European defence & dual-use tech, targeting ~20 companies with average €25M tickets across space, air, land, maritime & subsurface domains (here)

• Seedcamp raised $320M ($220M core fund, $100M select) to back European founders from first check through Series B, expanding its US team to bridge transatlantic capital & talent for companies building in AI, robotics & frontier tech (here)

• Mantis VC, founded by The Chainsmokers’ Alex Pall & Drew Taggart, is raising a $100M fund targeting AI, cybersecurity, deep tech & health tech, bringing assets under management to over $300M (here)

• PayPal Ventures, the 10-year-old corporate venture arm with 80+ investments across 3 funds totalling $850M, has paused new activity & is exploring secondary sales via Jefferies as new CEO Enrique Lores restructures to ‘recommit to the fundamentals’ (here)

• BAE Systems committed €50M (£43M) to European defence tech VC funds - €25M split between Expeditions & Lakestar - as part of its Launchpad programme designed to spin out internal technologies & back early-stage ventures addressing sovereign capability gaps across energy, manufacturing & defence (here)

• Project Ambition, led by VC Pippa Lamb & HelloFresh co-founder Hamish Shephard, launched at Downing Street during London Tech Week - a culture-focused campaign to reframe ambition & risk-taking in the UK among young people across tech, arts, sport & business (here)

• Bain is using AI to rapidly recreate software from private equity takeover targets, testing whether products are defensible or easily replicable as generative AI collapses development costs. The practice - dubbed ‘vibecoding’ - has been used to mock up hundreds of prototypes for due diligence, with at least one PE buyer dropping a deal after Bain recreated an analytics platform (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Trump advisers weigh how to structure potential government equity in AI firms, with Treasury Secretary Bessent favouring Trump Accounts & Commerce Secretary Lutnick preferring a sovereign wealth fund - both ideas floated by OpenAI & Anthropic - though the proposal faces industry resistance from Microsoft & Meta, scepticism from Republican senators, & structural questions over how non-dividend-paying AI firms would generate returns (here)

• The European Commission selected the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian firm Domyn, to build an open-source frontier AI model covering all 24 EU languages using EuroHPC supercomputers. The project - part of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge - will train a model with 400B+ parameters using 2.5% of EuroHPC capacity for 1 yr, aiming to match global benchmarks while ensuring wide access for European businesses, researchers & public institutions. A clear signal of Brussels backing sovereign AI infrastructure over dependence on US hyperscalers (here)

• Trump reportedly shared & mocked congratulatory texts from Zuckerberg & Bezos post-2024 election victory with associates, according to a new NYT book - a reminder that Big Tech’s rapprochement with the administration remains transactional & fragile despite public gestures (here)

• Beijing tightened capital controls on individuals after outflows hit $809B in 2025, ordering Hong Kong & Singapore brokers to wind down mainland accounts over 2 yr & banning purchases of U.S. stocks. The moves subordinate household wealth to state industrial policy - backing local government debt restructuring & self-reliance priorities - as households with ~$24T in deposits earning 1% seek U.S. rates near 4% following the 2021 property crash (here)

• Canada spent $46.8M on an undisclosed Palantir contract, raising transparency questions around procurement of sensitive data infrastructure from a US defence contractor with close ties to intelligence agencies (here)

• France will replace Palantir’s AI data tools at its DGSI intelligence agency with domestic provider ChapsVision to avoid “strategic dependencies” after Washington restricted foreign access to Anthropic’s latest model. The transition will take several years; France announced €655M in AI investment & a state-wide chatbot built on Mistral AI. Germany’s BfV has also reportedly selected ChapsVision, whilst the UK reviews Palantir’s £330M NHS contract (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Jack Dorsey (Block, Twitter) outlined a vision for AI replacing middle management with an “intelligence layer” that coordinates work, echoing CEO sentiment at Amazon, Coinbase, Airbnb & major banks - middle manager cuts hit 24% of layoffs in 2025 vs 11% in 2020, while spans of control tripled to 16+ reports per manager, pushing many toward a “player-coach” model where AI handles admin while managers focus on unblocking teams & talent development (here)

• Getty Images struck a multi-year display deal with OpenAI to surface licensed images in ChatGPT, sending shares up as much as 200% intraday before settling - but the agreement says nothing about training rights, the issue Getty litigated & lost against Stability AI in 2025 (here)

• Google DeepMind invested $75M in A24 (indie film studio behind Everything Everywhere All At Once & Backrooms) to co-develop AI filmmaking tools with artist input, following Netflix’s acquisition of Ben Affleck’s InterPositive & Amazon MGM’s AI production unit launch (here)

• Stanford’s DeLM framework lets AI agents coordinate directly via shared verified updates rather than routing through a central orchestrator, cutting multi-agent task costs ~50% & improving accuracy 10.5% on SWE-bench Verified (here)

• z.AI’s GLM-5.2, an open-source Chinese model with a 1M token context window, is drawing praise from Silicon Valley for coding performance that rivals Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 & OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 - echoing last year’s DeepSeek R1 moment & renewing questions about US AI lead as China advances through open-source models & distillation while chip controls tighten (here)

• Researchers at Shanghai AI Laboratory introduced Self-Harness, a framework enabling LLM agents to rewrite their own operating rules by mining failure patterns, proposing targeted fixes, & validating changes through regression tests - delivering 33-60% performance gains on tool-use benchmarks (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Baseten (AI inference platform) raised $1.5B in a dual-tier round at $11B-$13B, betting on demand for lower-cost alternatives to frontier models as inference workloads scale (here)

  • DeepSeek raised $7.4B at $50B+ valuation with an unusual condition - investors must agree not to poach staff or encourage spin-outs, reflecting escalating talent competition in Chinese AI (here)

Cybersecurity

• Accenture is acquiring Dragos (OT threat detection), runZero (attack-surface intelligence) & NetRise (firmware-level visibility) for $4.175B combined enterprise value to build an end-to-end operational technology (xOT) cybersecurity platform. The trio generated ~$208M ARR as of June 2026 (53% YoY growth); Accenture aims to expand from its existing OT services lead into the broader $27B OT software market (forecast to reach $59B by 2031) (here)

• Nation-state attackers are increasingly using residential proxy networks - routing traffic through millions of compromised home devices (routers, IoT) - to mask their origin & evade detection, a technique uncovered after Microsoft & Comcast investigated a sophisticated breach 2 years ago. The tactic weaponises everyday consumer electronics, complicating attribution & defence for both private sector & government defenders (here)

• Five Eyes intelligence agencies issued a rare joint warning that AI models capable of devastating cyberattacks on governments & businesses are months away, urging leaders to treat cyber risk as a core business responsibility. The statement follows the Trump administration blocking foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s Fable model in June, citing national security advice (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Dream (Israeli sovereign AI & cyber defence) raised $260M at $3B, led by Bicycle Capital & Group 11, to expand platforms across Europe, Middle East, Asia & Americas. The firm builds nation-state threat defence (Sphere), autonomous vulnerability hunting (Hero) & sovereign data infrastructure (Atlas) for governments seeking cyber independence from foreign tech stacks (here)

Defence

• Keir Starmer plans to present UK defence spending proposals at NATO despite likely successor Andy Burnham preferring a delay, signalling early fiscal tension over Britain’s % GDP commitment as Labour leadership transitions (here)

• Defence tech start-ups raised $12.3B in venture funding in H1 2026, nearly double the prior year & exceeding 2025’s full-year total of $10B, as conflicts in Ukraine & the Gulf drove demand for next-generation weapons systems including drones, autonomous vessels & battlefield AI (here)

• Britain tested long-range strike weapons under Project Brakestop that can hit targets 300+ miles away (Moscow-range), carrying 250kg warheads at £400K each with planned production of 20/mo (here)

• US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a 6-month review of American forces in Europe, following withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany & cancellation of a long-range fire battalion deployment. He criticised Nato allies for refusing base access during Iran strikes, proposing US financial contributions become contingent on allies’ defence spending & warning Washington will reduce capabilities assigned to Nato’s rapid response pool - including 1 of 2 carrier strike groups & cruise missile submarines (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Stark (German attack drone maker) raised €500M at €3.2B led by Founders Fund & Sequoia, despite political criticism of Thiel’s involvement; the company told the Bundestag that Thiel’s stake - already below 10% - was further diluted & he holds no board seat, special rights, or access to sensitive IP (here)

Space

• NASA awarded Relativity Space a contract to build & launch Aeolus, an orbiter carrying four instruments to Mars by 2028, in a commercial partnership model similar to ISS cargo deals. The mission could beat SpaceX to Mars despite Relativity’s troubled history - its only launch (Terran 1, March 2023) failed mid-flight before Eric Schmidt acquired a majority stake in 2024 & pivoted to the larger Terran R rocket. NASA did not disclose contract value (here)

Robotics

• Hyundai bought SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325M, taking full ownership & committing to deploy the electric Atlas humanoid in its Georgia EV plant by 2028 for parts sequencing, escalating to heavier tasks by 2030 (here)

Quantum

• Trump signed executive orders setting a 2028 target for a quantum computer capable of scientific research, directing Energy Dept & others to work with private sector, while also addressing quantum-related security threats (here)

• Britain launched a £10M National Quantum Standards Network to accelerate commercialisation of quantum technologies, with Science Minister Lord Vallance framing it as infrastructure to translate research into products & services (here)