8:28 Fund

AI | Quantum | Defense

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

Boston Tech & Venture Events - Nov 9–15

15 events this week, including State of Deep Tech VC, Fundraising 101 at the Harvard i-lab and two AI healthcare hackathons.

Links Below

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

This week's defense money skipped drone makers.

Five rounds raised $663M Nov 9–10, led by Onodrim's $300M Series A for a supplier rollup and Nominal's $240M Series C for test software. #DefenseTech

Source: Resilience Media, Tectonic, SiliconANGLE, PBN, Pomegra

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

11/14 Boston AI Healthcare Hackathon with Claude: https://t.co/pvkW5XIPBr
11/14 NASA Space Apps Challenge Boston: https://t.co/7OwhnRDens
11/15 Boston Built Week kicks off: https://t.co/Uv1SyrgIaK

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

Boston Tech & Venture Events - Nov 9–15

15 events this week, including State of Deep Tech VC, Fundraising 101 at the Harvard i-lab and two AI healthcare hackathons.

Links Below

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

11/12 Boston Physical AI Workshop & Meetup: https://t.co/RRBCuIJc7K
11/12 Venture Café Thursday Gathering: https://t.co/ORJDhI2mTM
11/13 AI Community Conference Boston: https://t.co/rqisGB0Y8L
11/13 MIT Energy & Climate Night: https://t.co/LFp19au5Wq

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

15 of 34 new Crunchbase unicorns were aerospace & defense, industrial, chip or robotics startups, vs 11 in AI models and AI data. All three Massachusetts names were hard tech.

Source: Crunchbase News, Nov 10

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

Hardware took 86% of the week's biggest US rounds.

Defense, drones, space, EV trucks and robotics raised $4.9B of $5.7B in the 11 largest US rounds (Oct 31–Nov 6), led by Shield AI's $2B. Watertown's Tutor Intelligence ($75M) made the list.

Source: Crunchbase News

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AI's sell-off hit chipmakers twice as hard as the Nasdaq.

Micron fell 17.5% and AMD 17.3% on Nov 5; Nvidia lost 9.3%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 12.3%, versus 5.5% for the Nasdaq.

Source: StockTitan, Yahoo Finance, Nov 5

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Nearly half of IonQ's record quarter came from a chip foundry.

IonQ booked $173.8M in Q3 revenue, up from $80.1M in Q2. SkyWater's foundry, acquired July 31, added $83.5M; IonQ's own platform grew 127% YoY to $90.3M. #quantum

Source: IonQ Q3 2026 results, Nov 5

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

@Techmeme @JimRundle CrowdStrike keeps buying the AI security layer rather than building it: SGNL ($740M) and Seraphic (reported ~$420M) in January, Pangea ($260M) last year, now Fiddler and Dreadnode. The exit path for agent-security founders is getting clearer.

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

One AI inference round outweighed six others combined.

Fal raised a $1.3B Series F at ~$16B, 85% of the $1.54B raised by seven US startups Nov 3–4. Boston's Lazarus AI ($43M) and Corridian ($38M seed) ranked third and fourth.

Source: Tech Startups, Nov 4

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

This week's deep tech money went to hardware.

Northwood Space raised $375M (space), Salience Labs $125M (photonics), Watertown's Tutor Intelligence $75M (robots) and New England's Corridian $38M (cargo subs).

Source: TechCrunch, Evertiq, SiliconANGLE, Pomegra

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

Anthropic’s updated S-1 backs this: price cuts cost it ~$600M of revenue from Q2 to Q3, while compute costs rose 77% to $9.9B. Selling tokens gets harder each quarter.

The AI natives that survive will own what labs can’t copy from traces: proprietary data and the customer.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Its very interesting to note the pace of application features from the foundational model companies. As the cost of the marginal token approaches zero, the value is not in selling tokens. It is very clearly in moving up the stack and owning the application layer.

The first victim will not be established SaaS but AI Natives that spend heavily on the labs now - legal, sales, customer service AI Natives tbc. This is the lowest hanging fruit and the roadmap is clear from the traces and spans the model companies have from these companies already.

The next are the "connective tissue" applications that make using the models a foundational part of a workflow.

Take the google doc editing flows in OpenAI. Take the google drive/doc integration into chats.

Both are very good.

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

October's No. 2 venture round went to a Massachusetts factory builder.

Framingham's Re:Build raised $2.1B led by General Catalyst, a state record (CFS: $1.8B in 2021). Only DeepSeek ($15.9B) raised more worldwide.

Source: Crunchbase News; Boston Globe

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

11/7 Creative Entrepreneurship Summit: https://t.co/W5iRkzMbEL
11/8 HBS Energy & Climate Conference: https://t.co/qv4CxD5j2g

[8:28 Fund @828Fund]

Boston Tech & Venture Events - Nov 3–8

12 events this week, including TechCrunch Founder Summit, a VC reverse pitch and two hackathons.

Links below

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11/5 Founders & Funders: BOS VC Reverse Pitch: https://t.co/kN44ddElVv
11/5 Japan Innovation Night at Venture Café: https://t.co/ORJDhI2UJk
11/6 Code Metal Forge Hackathon: https://t.co/516EIFMNwP
11/6 MIT Energy & Climate Hack: https://t.co/lUUn964RwP