🤑How AI Creates Millionaires (According to Nvidia’s CEO)

In This Edition:

• 💰 VCs Went Shopping
• 🎯 How to Actually Win YC (X26 Edition)
• 🤑 How AI Creates Millionaires
• 🤖 The Real AI Bottleneck
• 🚀 What’s Coming in 2026 for Tech Builders

💰VCs Went Shopping

💰 Massive Fundings: Big Checks, Bigger Signals

Here’s a cleaner, newsletter-ready roundup with sharper flow and scannability 👇

Alveus Therapeutics
The two-year-old Philadelphia biotech developing GLP-1 therapies for obesity and metabolic disease closed a $160M Series A. The round was co-led by New Rhein Healthcare Investors, Andera Partners, and Omega Funds, with participation from Sanofi Capital, Kurma Partners, and Avego BioScience Capital.

Corgi
San Francisco–based Corgi, which offers end-to-end insurance products tailored for startups, raised $108M at a $630M valuation. Backers include Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Contrary, SV Angel, and a long list of institutional and angel investors.

Cyera
Cyera pulled in a massive $400M round at a $9B valuation, just six months after its last raise. Led by Blackstone, the funding pushes Cyera’s total capital raised to $1.7B+, reinforcing strong investor appetite for data security platforms.

Diagonal Therapeutics
The Cambridge, MA-based biotech focused on clustering antibody drugs secured a $125M Series B, co-led by Sanofi Ventures and Janus Henderson Investors. Total funding now exceeds $250M.

Mediar Therapeutics
Boston-based Mediar Therapeutics raised a $76M Series B to advance antibody therapies for fibrotic diseases. The round was co-led by Amplitude Ventures and ICG, bringing total funding to $175M.

Parabilis Medicines
Parabilis closed a $305M Series F to accelerate its oncology pipeline targeting intracellular proteins. The round was co-led by RA Capital, Fidelity, and Janus Henderson, taking total capital raised to $250M+.

Rakuten Medical
Rakuten Medical raised $100M in Series F funding to expand its photoimmunotherapy cancer treatments. The round was led by TaiAx Life Science Fund with strong participation from Japanese financial institutions and existing backers.

Valinor Enterprises
Baltimore-based Valinor Enterprises, a holding company focused on defense and government tech, raised a $54M Series A led by Friends & Family Capital. The company has now raised $85M+ in total funding.

🎯 How to Actually Win YC (X26 Edition)

🧠 Founder Guide: How to Actually Win YC (X26 Edition)

Getting into Y Combinator isn’t about having the coolest product—it’s about showing clarity, momentum, and inevitability.

Acceptance rates are brutal (<1%), but YC patterns are surprisingly consistent if you know what to look for.

Here’s what strong founders should focus on before hitting “Apply”:

• Momentum > Ideas
  YC cares deeply about what you’ve done in the last 60–100 days. Progress beats polish.
• Clear, Sharp Answers
  Every YC question is a filter. Rambling kills applications. Precision wins.
• Founder-Market Fit Matters
  Why you? Why now? YC optimizes for conviction and urgency.
• Referrals Are a Force Multiplier
  Warm intros from partners or recent alumni significantly increase surface area. It’s not unfair—it’s how signal works.
• Study What Worked Before
  Reading real accepted applications (old + recent) reveals patterns no blog post explains.
• YC Tells You What They Want
  Their “Request for Startups” list is an underrated roadmap of where capital attention is heading.

Bottom line:

YC isn’t random. It’s a game of signal, speed, and storytelling.

Build momentum. Increase your luck surface area. Then apply. 🚀

🤖The Real AI Bottleneck

🚀Why Data—not Models—is the Real AI Bottleneck

Most AI startups don’t stall because of models.
They stall because they run out of real data.

That’s why Andreessen Horowitz backed Protege with $30M.

Founder takeaway (in one breath):

• Public datasets are exhausted
• The web is fully scraped
• The next AI moat is exclusive, real-world data + infrastructure

Protege is solving this by giving AI teams fast, reliable access to multimodal datasets—healthcare, video, audio, motion capture—without broken pipelines or stitched-together sources.

This isn’t hype.
It’s AI infrastructure.

👉 If you’re building AI, ask yourself: Where does your data advantage come from?

🤑 How AI Creates Millionaires (According to Nvidia’s CEO)

💡Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: AI Will Create More Millionaires Than the Internet Ever Did

“AI will create more millionaires in 5 years than the internet did in 20.”

That’s not hype—that’s a warning from Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the company powering nearly the entire AI stack.

Jensen’s core insight is simple but explosive:

• We’re still early — not even 10% into a multi-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure buildout
• AI is collapsing the gap between ideas and execution
• Small teams can now create outsized value faster than any era before

His belief isn’t about jobs disappearing.
It’s about leverage exploding.

When everyone can build, write, design, and ship with AI—
the winners won’t be the most technical.
They’ll be the fastest to move, experiment, and compound.

Founder takeaway:

Building a cool product won’t guarantee anything—but increasing your luck surface area absolutely will.

🎥 Watch the full Jensen Huang video here → If you’re building in AI, this is required viewing.

🚀What’s Coming in 2026 for Tech Builders

The tech landscape isn’t evolving—it’s reorganizing itself.
Across infrastructure, creativity, cybersecurity, and education, a new pattern is emerging: systems built for AI, workflows powered by AI, and industries reshaped around AI.

🔍 What’s Changing Fast

• Data chaos becomes the new battleground
Enterprises realize models aren’t the problem—messy multimodal data is.
• Agent-native infrastructure rises
Workloads move from human-paced clicks to machine-speed coordination.
• Creativity goes multimodal
Images, voice, video, and environments fuse into seamless storytelling tools.
• Systems of record lose dominance
Execution shifts to intelligent layers that act across platforms.
• Personalization becomes the default
Healthcare, education, and media pivot from “for everyone” to “for each one.”

💡 The Big Takeaway

2026 rewards builders who design for agents, not humans—and who see coordination, not capability, as the true moat.

📣 Ready to explore what this future unlocks? 👉 Dive into the complete analysis to see which shifts matter most for your roadmap—and where the biggest 2026 opportunities are emerging.

🎯 Startups Buzz

🔒 The VC Secrets Founders Aren’t Supposed to Know

Every investor has two conversations:

➡️ The one they have with you in the meeting…
➡️ And the one they never say out loud.

From quiet deal-breakers to subtle power plays hidden in term sheets, there’s a whole side of fundraising founders rarely see — until it’s too late.

What if you could read the signals VCs hope you miss?
What if you knew the questions they really judge you on?

The truth is: the transparency gap in VC isn’t accidental.
But once you understand how investors think behind closed doors, your entire fundraising strategy changes.

👉 Unlock the unspoken VC playbook before your next pitch.

📉 The Startup Metric That’s Misleading More Founders Than You Think

Some charts look great… right up until the moment your runway disappears.
Founders love showcasing “monthly users,” traffic spikes, and pretty dashboards — but those vanity metrics often hide the uncomfortable truth: they don’t predict survival.

In fact, the numbers that look impressive on pitch decks might be the very ones masking stagnation, weak demand, or a leaky funnel.

If your growth feels good but isn’t converting into durability, you might be tracking the wrong things entirely.

So what actually matters?

👉 Here are the only three metrics that reveal whether your startup is built to survive.

💡 Why Lean Startups Win First

The Lean Startup flips the old model—no more bloated plans, endless revisions, or delayed launches. Instead, founders win by testing fast, validating real demand, and refining through continuous learning. With tools like the Social Lean Canvas and a simple seven-month roadmap, even early-stage founders can move from idea to revenue without getting stuck in complexity.

If you want to launch smarter—not slower—tap into the frameworks top founders use to de-risk ideas and accelerate traction. Explore deeper insights, follow the full Lean Startup roadmap, and join a community building faster, leaner, and more intelligently than ever. Your iteration advantage starts now.

🔥 ICYMI: Founder Resources You Probably Missed

These high-impact reads have been powering sharper pitches, smarter fundraising, and faster investor yeses. If you missed them, now’s the time to catch up before everyone else does.

🚀 Harvard’s Startup Guide: Turning Ideas Into Impact
The hidden frameworks elite founders quietly rely on.

📚 The Ultimate Fundraising Resource Stack
A vault of tools most founders don’t know exists.

🔑 The Most Overlooked Key to Fundraising Success
YC founders swear by this — yet most ignore it.

🔥 Paul Graham’s ‘Small, Intense Fire’
The mindset shift that separates funded from forgotten.

🧠 What Sam Altman Wants Every Founder to Know
The blunt guidance founders rarely hear early enough.

📊 Venture Math Demystified
Why VCs say no — even when your pitch feels strong.

💡 200+ Easy Ways to Make Money Using AI
Surprising, practical income ideas you can start today.

🚀 100+ VCs & Accelerators You Should Know
A curated map of investors actively backing early teams.

📘 Ben Horowitz’s High-Stakes Leadership Playbook
How great founders act when everything breaks at once.

🤖 29 Angels & VCs Funding AI Startups Right Now
Verified, active investors hunting for their next AI bet.

💼 50 Recently Funded B2B Startups
What’s getting funded right now — and why.

🔥WEB PICKS

Anthropic Scores Enterprise Win with Allianz
Anthropic continues its enterprise momentum by partnering with Munich-based insurance giant Allianz to deploy Claude models across internal teams, including Claude Code and custom AI agents that speed up workflows — a sign of generative AI gaining traction in regulated industries.

GTMfund Reinvents AI Era Go-to-Market
In a Build Mode podcast deep dive, GTMfund partner Paul Irving argues that the old SaaS distribution playbook is obsolete in the AI era. Instead of stacking teams and channels, startups should get creative with targeted distribution, lean go-to-market moves, and network-first growth engines.

LG’s CLOid Home Robot: Impressive Demo, Open Questions
At CES 2026, LG showcased CLOid, an AI-powered home robot designed to handle chores from laundry to breakfast. Early impressions highlight impressive capabilities but leave unanswered questions about practical utility, speed, and real-world readiness — a glimpse at the future of “zero-labor” homes.

OpenAI Acquires Convogo’s Team in Strategic Move
OpenAI is kicking off the year by acqui-hiring the team behind executive-coaching AI startup Convogo. The deal strengthens OpenAI’s talent and expertise for building business-focused AI services, as the Convogo founders join to help expand AI tooling.