Venture Geopolitics Issue 62

25 August 2026

On holiday this week, so no preamble! Below is the usual summary of what I’ve read.

IPOs / Publics

• IPO market in August lull - pricings light, filings heavier. Anthropic continues to dominate IPO headlines, firming up plans for possible Oct listing (that could raise more than SpaceX). Other hopefuls joined Renaissance fall IPO watchlist incl. General Atlantic, Nscale & Kakao Mobility (here)

• Final US IPO of summer was a “dud” - defence contractor Lyntris priced below range & ended week down -10% (here)

• Aerospace & defence company Ursa Major will go public in ​the US through $2.3B deal ‌with blank-check firm Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. III (here)

• Crusoe (data centre developer) in IPO talks with at least 4 banks incl. JPM, MS, GS & BofA, positioning to list amid continued demand for compute infra (here)

• Shein listing in HK at $26B-27B, down 75% from $100B 2022 peak, after failing to list in NY or London. Faced CSRC objections over Xinjiang disclosures, US/EU trade investigations, closure of <$800 de minimis tax exemptions & allegations over labour & sustainability (here)

• YMTC (flash-memory chips) filed for $4.9B IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market, one of the exchange’s largest-ever listings - yet another signal Beijing is channeling capital into chip champions after US export controls (here)

• Moderna & Merck reported that their personalised mRNA melanoma vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer recurrence or spread in high-risk patients, sending Moderna shares up >100% & validating years of oncology mRNA development ahead of potential 2027 launch (here)

• IBM created a mainframe chip that can run both traditional IBM Z software & Arm-based software on the same processor cores, switching between them almost instantly. Companies could run existing z/OS banking & transaction systems alongside modern Arm Linux apps, AI tools like PyTorch & containers - without rewriting the Arm software first (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic’s Fable 5 accounts for 11% of corporate spending 2mo post-launch, with customers favouring cheaper alternatives including its own Opus 5 & OpenAI’s GPT 5.6, per Ramp data from 70,000 firms. Shift signals price sensitivity & ‘good enough’ performance trumping raw capability for most enterprise use cases (here)

• DeepSeek released experimental multimodal version of its V4 Flash model that adds vision capabilities to flagship text model, claiming performance close to Opus 4.8 on agentic benchmarks - the latest salvo in China’s push to match US frontier models at lower cost (here)

• OpenAI paused some frontier RL training, citing model capabilities advancing faster than alignment & security safeguards (here)

Regulation

• US-Canada trade talks collapsed & escalated after Washington made last-minute demands; new 50% US tariffs on ~$20B of Canadian goods took effect, with Canada subsequently announcing 50% retaliatory tariffs (US Trade Rep labelled it a ‘Chinese-styled counterattack’) (here & here)

• TikTok settled with US Justice Dept for $400M over allegations it illegally collected data from users under 13 without parental consent (here)

• New EU right-to-repair rules now require manufacturers to fix household electronics (phones, washing machines, vacuums) at reasonable cost & timescales, supported by national repair platforms like Ireland’s RepairMyStuff.ie. Brussels estimates will generate €4.8B in growth across the bloc while cutting 35M tonnes of annual consumer waste (here)

• Trump proposed a $103,265 fee for new H-1B visa filings, replacing earlier $100,000 charge struck down by federal appeals court; fee would apply to most new applicants regardless of location, with 30-day public comment period before implementation (here)

• Civil society groups urged FTC to investigate AI firms for buying, scanning & destroying books to train models, arguing the practice eliminates training data rivals need to compete. Anthropic reportedly spent millions acquiring books & physically removing spines to scan pages for Claude; Google, Microsoft & OpenAI face similar copyright lawsuits (here)

Venture Capital

• DOJ investigating Andreessen Horowitz for holding board seats in rival AI companies. The nearly year-long probe, unusually long for a board seat overlap, may signal DOJ setting an example for the broader VC industry or hint at undisclosed issues (here)

• Blackbird Ventures closed a $1B fund backed by Morgan Stanley & Schroders, following Airtree's $650M raise from US institutions last year - both reflecting Australian VCs' push to access offshore capital for larger rounds & secondary liquidity (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Trump administration signed a public-private partnership with London-based Core Power to develop nuclear-powered merchant vessels by 2028, aiming to counter China’s shipbuilding dominance. Core Power raised ~$200M from Mitsui, Mitsubishi & Sumitomo; nuclear propulsion promises 50-75% faster speeds & lower environmental taxes, though insurance, crew training & regulatory frameworks remain unresolved (here)

• Trump abruptly scaled back joint US-South Korea military drills citing his relationship with Kim Jong Un, triggering confusion over whether the move was aimed at North Korea peace talks, punishing Seoul’s drift toward Beijing under President Lee Jae Myung, signalling displeasure over slow Korean investment pledges, or a concession to Xi ahead of his September DC visit (here)

• Beijing warned it will take "all necessary measures" if Washington expands Iran-related secondary sanctions to major Chinese firms, setting up a potential clash a month before Trump & Xi are set to meet in Washington to discuss extending trade truce. China buys 90% of Iran's oil, much of it through private "teapot" refiners that Beijing has ordered not to comply with existing US sanctions. Further escalation would risk Chinese retaliation via critical minerals / other leverage (here)

• Per the FT, “climate change is driving new geostrategy” - China launched weekly Arctic Ice Silk Road shipping (cutting Europe-Asia transit by half as ice melts), while drought closed Panama Canal lanes (32% volume drop) & halted Rhine/Danube traffic, forcing Romanian nuclear & auto shutdowns. Beijing’s dominance in EVs, batteries & rare earths positions it to control 21st-century logistics & currency power as fossil fuels fade, yet markets still misprice climate risk through short insurance cycles & discount rates that erase 2050 scenarios (here)

• Critics warn niche regulatory battles now crowd out broader voter concerns in US midterms. Crypto, AI & online betting firms have already spent $294M of a record $517M in corporate contributions to 2026 US midterm races (exceeding 2024’s full-cycle total) (here). Meanwhile, Musk expected to deploy up to $200M in Nov midterms (here)

• Andy Burnham’s No 10 North office in Manchester granted lead responsibility for economic growth (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• LinkedIn data shows women accounted for just 26% of US AI hires in 2025 vs 50% in non-AI roles, despite AI postings doubling since 2023 & typical AI roles listing $177K compensation vs $80K for non-AI jobs (here)

• Cursor launched Origin, its code-hosting platform, hours before a 6hr 42min GitHub outage hit 20% error rates across PRs & APIs - dramatising the case for an agent-native forge. Origin mirrors GitHub repos (keeping GitHub as source of truth), integrates Graphite’s stacked PRs, runs existing GitHub Actions unchanged & deploys via Vercel (here)

• AI developer platform Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the company at more than $13B (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Poolside (AI coding models) struck a $6B non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at $12B pre-money - a rare structure that monetises IP before scale whilst retaining equity upside (here)

  • General Intuition (physical AI foundation models) raised funds at $6B from Valor, Point72 & Seven Seven Six weeks after closing $320M at $2.3B, using video game action data to train agents for robotic embodiments (here)

  • Fractile (AI inference chips) is raising $600M at $6.5B, 6x its May valuation, after securing a ~$250M supply deal with Anthropic for chips expected in 2027 (here)

Cybersecurity

• Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for 4 days in July, the first successful closure of such a facility by Tehran-linked groups, though the outage had no impact on wider grid supply. The attack coincided with Iranian strikes on US water infrastructure across 12 states & follows NCSC warnings of over 200 attacks on UK critical infrastructure in the past year (here)

• UK government proposes amendments to its Cyber Security & Resilience Bill granting powers to block companies from high-risk suppliers & mandate phased vendor removal in critical sectors (energy, healthcare, telecoms) following the Iran-linked cyber attack. The move poses cost challenges for energy firms reliant on Chinese solar (>90% global share), batteries & EVs; regulated entities would face 24-hour breach reporting & fines for non-compliance (here)

Defence

• Britain will access Ukraine’s Avengers Labs battlefield dataset - 100,000 drone video streams per month identifying ~70% of enemy targets - to train AI models for autonomous weapons. The agreement makes the UK the first foreign partner to access real combat data Ukraine has previously reserved for domestic firms, in exchange for British AI research & defence tech; includes acoustic sensor data for counter-drone systems. Announced during PM Burnham’s first trip to Kyiv alongside missile tech-sharing, despite recent Kremlin warnings (here)

• Research identified 152 Polymarket wallets likely trading on U.S. military secrets, making $8M collectively with 97% win rates on defence markets. The bigger risk: their bets attracted copycat trades from automated bots & whales, potentially broadcasting classified signals - one wallet wagered on Iran strikes hours before they occurred, triggering $300K in follow-on bets (here)

• A second explosive-laden drone was discovered near Leipzig/Halle airport on 14 August, 10 days after the first device was found next to a Ukrainian cargo plane; both drones carried military-grade explosives (Semtex, PETN, hexogen) but were defective. German Chancellor Merz warned of "unscrupulous" hybrid attacks as investigators race to determine whether Russia or proxies are behind the incidents targeting Europe's fourth-largest air freight hub & major Nato logistics centre (here)

• Optics11 (Dutch fibre-optic sonar) is being tested by the Royal Navy & could be fitted to civilian ships to detect Russian submarines at 60+ miles - offering Britain a scalable countermeasure as Russian naval activity in the Channel rose 33% last year & Moscow deployed its Khabarovsk submarine equipped with Poseidon nuclear torpedos (here)

Space

• SpaceX & AST SpaceMobile are eyeing Grain Management’s 800 MHz spectrum licences, valued at $6B, which cover nearly the entire US & are suited for satellite-to-phone services (here)