LFG ventures

what do you think it stands for?

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/VIeayTaJd7

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

OpenAI cleared Washington's review and launched GPT-5.6 worldwide. xAI answered with Grok 4.5 at commodity prices. Anthropic locked up 401 megawatts in Kentucky for 20 years. SpaceX hit the Nasdaq-100 fifteen trading days after its IPO. Aalo Atomics went critical. Anduril landed its first NATO contract, and Kalshi is taking New York to the Second Circuit. A lot to unpack this week.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 @OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 globally on July 9 in three price tiers ($1 to $5 per million input tokens), directly undercutting Claude and Grok just weeks after clearing a national security review that had limited it to 20 vetted partners.

🤖 @xai (now @SpaceXAI) launched Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 per million tokens, an Opus class pricing assault on Anthropic and OpenAI, though it lands against reportedly softening usage of the Grok app itself.

⚡ @AnthropicAI locked a 20 year, 401 MW compute lease with TeraWulf worth roughly $19B, securing power years ahead of need with first capacity online in H2 2027 and a full ramp by early 2028.

🚀 @SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 just 15 trading days post-IPO under a new fast track rule for mega listings, forcing about $4.3B in passive buying while a July 4 Falcon 9 flew orbital semiconductor test pods for Besxar as part of a reported 12 flight booking.

⚛️ @AaloAtomics hit criticality on its Aalo-X reactor at Idaho National Lab, the fourth advanced reactor to clear DOE's pilot program and pushing it past its executive order goal, with an 18 month path to a commercial Aalo Pod.

🛡️ @anduriltech landed its first direct NATO contract, a nine month Lattice evaluation for the eAirC2 data platform that opens a European procurement channel beyond the US DoD, with 32 allied countries watching.

⚖️ @Kalshi appealed to the Second Circuit after an SDNY judge refused to block New York's crackdown on its sports contracts, its highest volume product and the engine behind a record $31.5B notional month in June.

👀 Watch List

🏗️ @CrusoeAI is reportedly in talks to raise $3B at a $30B valuation, triple October's mark, backed by 4.9 GW of contracted capacity across OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, and Meta, while pushing into higher margin managed AI software with new fine-tuning and inference products.

🌐 @vercel now handles 6 million deployments a day, about half triggered by coding agents, and over a trillion daily tokens through its model-agnostic AI gateway, positioning it as the toll road that gets paid no matter which lab wins.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/BUKimlr3a9

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

Anthropic turned its flagship models back on worldwide after Washington reversed its export ban. Erebor is raising at $8B with deposits nearly quadrupled. OpenAI pushed its IPO to 2027 and taped out its first custom chip. Apptronik opened a 90,000 square foot robot factory in Austin. Strike won one license to run Bitcoin across all 27 EU states, and Kraken wired itself into European banks.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 @AnthropicAI restored global access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after the export ban lifted in record time, shipped a new cybersecurity classifier, and landed a deal making Claude available to every California state agency at a 50% discount.

💻 @OpenAI is leaning toward pushing its IPO to 2027 even as SoftBank shares dropped and roughly $38B evaporated, while it ships its first custom inference ASIC with Broadcom and expands Plaid banking data down to the $20 tier.

🏛️ @ereborbank is in early talks to raise at a minimum $8B valuation, nearly double its December mark, after deposits quadrupled to $4.05B since March with profitability targeted by year-end.

🦾 @Apptronik opened a 90,000 square foot humanoid data factory in Austin and unveiled Apollo 2, betting that owning proprietary robot data from fleets at Google DeepMind, Mercedes-Benz, and GXO is the real moat.

₿ @Strike secured full MiCA authorization from Malta just before the July 1 deadline, letting it passport regulated Bitcoin services across all 27 EU member states under a single license.

🐙 @krakenfx launched Kraken Prime to give European banks execution across 20-plus venues and MiCA-conformant custody, while parent Payward is in talks for a 15% stake in Aave near $385M.

👀 Watch List

🤖 @Figure_robot put F.03 to work on BMW's Spartanburg assembly line running a complex sequencing task, its first live automotive production deployment.

🚁 @zipline partnered with Wonder to bring on-demand drone meal delivery to Texas, starting in Dallas in January 2027 via its Dropbox pickup system.

🛡️ @Overland_AI_X won a $20M Pentagon contract to build autonomous ground resupply vehicles, becoming the first ground autonomy company to prime a US military production deal.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/1RX33BEsRR

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

Anthropic poached a Nobel laureate, confirmed a Series H, and got tangled in a Senate data fight. Kalshi is chasing $40B while suing one state and getting sued in another. SpaceX floated a $20B bond days after going public. OpenAI taped out its first custom chip, then got asked to gate the next one. Groq banked $650M. Perplexity pushed up the stack into legal. Kraken dropped a Solana DEX inside the app. Aalo got the federal signature to switch on its reactor. A lot to unpack this week.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🤖 @AnthropicAI hired Nobel laureate John Jumper from DeepMind, secured a Micron-backed Series H, but faced Senate heat over 28.8M scraped conversations, a looming ID policy, and two major outages in three weeks.

🎯 @Kalshi is in talks to raise near $40B on $2B annualized revenue, with an IPO on the horizon, but is fighting state regulators in Illinois and Kentucky while expanding into Canada and getting blocked in 55 countries.

🚀 @SpaceX launched a $20B bond sale post-IPO, flew its first Starfall cargo-return capsule, and is selling $6.3B in GPU capacity to Reflection AI at roughly $150M/month.

💻 @OpenAI unveiled its first custom ASIC (Jalapeño) with Broadcom, launched a cybersecurity partner program, and had its next model GPT-5.6 preemptively gated by the White House to government-approved partners only.

⚡ @GroqInc raised $650M to pivot from chip vendor to inference-cloud operator, targeting 200MW of capacity by 2027.

⚖️ @perplexity_ai launched an enterprise legal AI agent integrated with Microsoft 365, Docusign, Carta, and Ironclad, its first push into vertical enterprise and recurring seat revenue.

🐙 @krakenfx embedded Solana DEX trading directly into its main app, giving 100+ countries access to 2,500 on-chain tokens without a seed phrase.

⚛️ @AaloAtomics received final DOE authorization to switch on its Critical Test Reactor at Idaho National Lab, the first new reactor there in 50 years, built specifically for AI data centers.

👀 Watch List

⚛️ @valaratomics reached criticality at its Ward 250 test reactor in Utah, the first DOE pilot outside a national lab, and began power ascension toward its 100 kWt target.

🛠️ @HadrianInc is reportedly in talks for a $7.5B raise, nearly 5x its January valuation, though the company disputes the figures.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/OTqEr9k5Dt

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

PsiQuantum broke ground in Australia on what it calls the world's first utility-scale quantum computer. A court filing outed xAI's Grok as the AI behind 2,000 strikes on Iran. Anduril landed the Air Force's first drone-wingman production contracts, and SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor for $60B. Neuralink tapped Samsung for its next brain chip, while Paradromics put its first BCI in a patient. And Anthropic's most powerful models went dark after a standoff with Washington.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

⚛️ @PsiQuantum broke ground in Queensland, Australia on what it says will be the world's first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, backed by one of the largest cryoplants ever built for quantum, due online in late 2027.

💻 @SpaceX bought AI coding startup Cursor for $60B in stock just three days after its historic IPO, preempting a $2B raise that was already in final stages with a16z, Thrive, and Nvidia.

🧠 @neuralink tapped Samsung to build its fourth-gen brain chip on a 4nm process, moving off TSMC, with two-way neural communication capability designed to eventually restore vision, with test chips shipping early 2027.

🎯 @xai had its Grok Gov Model exposed in a DOJ environmental filing, revealing it helped US forces hit 2,000 targets with 2,000 munitions in 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury inside Project Maven.

🦾 @AnthropicAI pulled its two most powerful models, Mythos and Fable, offline after export controls were imposed over foreign access concerns and a persistent communication breakdown with the White House.

🧬 @paradromics completed the first human implant of its Connexus brain-computer interface at University of Michigan Health, enrolling a Michigan woman who lost the ability to speak for a six-year FDA-cleared feasibility study.

👀 Watch List

🛩️ @shieldaitech won the production contract to put its Hivemind autonomy software on the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft, now competing with Anduril and Collins to become the program's primary autonomy provider by 2027.

🏭 @noxmetals raised an $11.5M seed backed by Hyperion, Y Combinator, and Palmer Luckey to use AI to compress industrial aluminum quoting from days to seconds and revive a WW2-era, 30,000-square-foot Detroit factory this summer.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

BIG DAY.

Congrats @SpaceX!

Ad Astra🚀

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/ACL4oNc7SQ

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

We first invested in SpaceX in 2021. Six SpaceX and two xAI investments later, today is the day. SpaceX goes public in the largest IPO in history, with investment-grade ratings in hand and an orbital data center in the mix. OpenAI quietly filed its S-1 and is reportedly weighing price cuts. Anthropic shipped its most capable model ever, and Dario went long on policy. Saronic's drone boat just made military history in the Gulf of Oman.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🚀 @SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under SPCX at $135/share, raising $75B at a $1.75T valuation, the largest IPO ever, with Google and Anthropic already locked in as anchor compute customers and an orbital data center satellite targeting demo by late 2027.

🌊 @Saronic made history when its Corsair drone boat became the first unmanned surface vessel to rescue personnel in combat, reaching a downed Apache crew in the Gulf of Oman before any ship or helicopter, under a $392M Navy deal already in theater.

🤖 @OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 one week behind Anthropic, with no set timing but the option live, as both race to tap the same finite pool of AI public capital while ChatGPT crosses 1 billion monthly users and a price war on tokens looms.

🧠 @AnthropicAI launched Claude Fable 5 at under half the price of Mythos Preview, top of benchmark across the board, while keeping Mythos 5 gated to vetted cyberdefenders through Project Glasswing, and Dario published a legislative proposal on frontier AI with a job displacement fund attached.

👀 Watch List

🔓 @databricks launched OpenSharing, an open vendor-neutral protocol for sharing AI assets across platforms, with OpenAI, Atlassian, and others already on board, making the same infrastructure play Delta Sharing ran for data, now for the agent stack.

🎯 @allencontrol raised $200M at a $2.2B valuation for its Bullfrog AI-powered drone-killing weapon station, already deployed with the Army and Navy and reportedly 100 for 100 at the Pentagon's TREX 2026 counter-drone test.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/5Cd1LBkO80

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

SpaceX slipped a dilution warning into its IPO filing and got FAA clearance to build things in orbit. Anthropic filed its own draft S-1 and widened Project Glasswing to 150 more organizations. OpenAI broke ground on a $7B Stargate campus in Michigan. Kalshi cleared $17B in a single month and turned to court Wall Street. Saronic put its first autonomous warship in the water. A lot to unpack this week.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🚀 @SpaceX updated its IPO filing to flag potential equity issuances, widely read as groundwork for a Tesla merger after its reported $75B Nasdaq listing. Musk's Class B shares keep control locked regardless. FAA also cleared two test reentries of Starfall, a disk-shaped capsule designed for in-space manufacturing. One company, two massive bets.

🧠 @AnthropicAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 near a reported $1T valuation. Project Glasswing expanded to 150+ organizations across 15+ countries, surfacing over 10,000 high-severity security flaws via Claude Mythos Preview. The Claude Partner Network added a tiered Services Track with 10,000+ certified consultants. A company about to go public moving fast on all fronts.

🏗️ @OpenAI and Oracle broke ground on a $7B, 1+ gigawatt campus in Saline Township. Three buildings, 250 acres, 2,500 construction roles. Joins the $450B+ Stargate buildout across five states. Also dropping $45M in Codex credits to 400,000 Michigan students.

📊 @Kalshi hit $17B in volume in May alone, up 2,500%+ year-over-year. Now going institutional with Tradeweb data deals, FIS clearing, margin trading, and waived fees on large block trades. Bernstein projects prediction market volumes hitting $1T by 2030. The casino is built. Wall Street is pulling up a chair.

🚢 @Saronic launched its first 180-foot autonomous surface vessel, hull to water in under a year. Runs 25+ knots, 5,400 nautical mile range, 150 metric tons of payload. Louisiana shipyard targets 20 hulls a year by end of 2026. A direct shot at the Navy's MUSV program.

👀 Watch List

🛰️ @GoToImpulse raised a $500M Series D at $4.26B, pushing total funding past $1B. Builds orbital transfer vehicles that reposition satellites post-launch. Helios kick stage targets 2027 with same-day trips to GEO. Hiring 200 engineers, not offloading to AI. Launch is solved. Everything after it is the opportunity.

🧲 @westmagco is mass-producing the motors and actuators that power robots, drones, and weapons, a category China dominates. Backed by a16z, Founders Fund, and Lux with an $11M seed. Strategy: aggregate demand, scale until costs approach raw materials. Target is tens of thousands of motors a month by year-end. Humanoids and missiles run downstream of actuators. Right now, so does China.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/jtXdd1sj8D

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

Anthropic is the most valuable AI company on the planet at $965B. SpaceX flew its biggest Starship yet and landed American Airlines for 500+ jets. xAI says Grok V9 ships in three weeks and is coming for Claude on coding. Retro Biosciences is now worth $1.8B. Anthropic's Chris Olah went to the Vatican. Perplexity got sued by CNN.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 @AnthropicAI closed a $65B Series H at a $965B valuation, nearly triple its February mark, with run-rate revenue now at $47B. Claude Opus 4.8 dropped the same day and an IPO is reportedly in the works. Co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican for the Pope's AI encyclical, warning that frontier labs operate inside incentives that can pull against doing the right thing.

🚀 @SpaceX flew Starship V3 for the first time: 407 feet, 33 engines, 20 mock Starlink satellites deployed mid-flight, clean Indian Ocean splashdown. American Airlines confirmed Starlink on 500+ jets by Q1 2027. IPO prospectus filed at a $1.25T combined valuation.

🤖 @xai finished training Grok V9-Medium at 1.5 trillion parameters, three times the size of today's model, trained heavily on Cursor data. Public release in two to three weeks. They know where Claude is strong and are aiming there.

🧬 @RetroBio_ hit a $1.8B valuation targeting age-related disease at the cellular level, backed by Sam Altman, with a stated goal of adding ten years of healthy human lifespan.

🦅 @perplexity_ai got sued by CNN for scraping 17,000+ pieces of content without consent. The Times, Dow Jones, and the New York Post are already in court. Time and Gannett took deals instead. The split is becoming the story.

🏛️ @reflection_ai is opening a DC presence, pitching open-weight superintelligence as a US national security posture. The Trump admin is already writing checks to frontier compute. Open AI policy looks like the next round.

👀 Watch List

🚁 @SkydioHQ is live in Dallas with eight X10 drones responding to 911 calls in under two minutes, thermal imaging and obstacle avoidance included. Flows through a $120.6M Axon contract. The procurement template the rest of the country will copy.

⚛️ @QuantinuumQC filed to raise $1.05B at a $12.7B valuation on Nasdaq under QNT, the first real quantum IPO. Public quantum stocks have surged, the Trump admin holds equity in competitors, and a $100M CHIPS Act check is incoming. Does QNT prove the trade or break it?

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/ewFrWVNDjk

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

SpaceX filed for its IPO. Anthropic bought Stainless, struck a deal with KPMG, and poached Andrej Karpathy. OpenAI beat Musk in court and rolled out guaranteed compute. Neuralink has a new robot can reach any region of the brain. Anduril put a data center in a backpack. Lambda wired up Hudson River Trading. Minnesota tried to ban Kalshi.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🚀 @SpaceX filed its S-1, the most-watched IPO in a generation. Starlink revenue, Starship contracts, and a growing defense footprint. Public markets are finally getting their shot.

🧠 @AnthropicAI acquired Stainless, partnered with KPMG to deploy Claude across 275,000 employees, and hired Andrej Karpathy to lead a new frontier research group. Distribution, enterprise, and talent. The order is the strategy.

🤖 @OpenAI won the Musk trial, launched Guaranteed Capacity for enterprise compute reservations, and added personal finance tools to ChatGPT. The legal overhang is gone. The platform keeps widening.

🧬 @neuralink unveiled a surgical robot that can reach any brain region, opening clinical work in Parkinson's, epilepsy, and depression. Every new region unlocked is a new patient population.

🎒 @anduriltech introduced Voyager Gateway 1, a rugged edge compute platform built for the field. No rear-area cloud dependency. Modern warfare is compute-bound and Anduril keeps showing up where the next contract gets written.

⚡ @LambdaAPI is now powering Hudson River Trading's R&D infrastructure. HRT does not pick vendors casually. The customer roster keeps getting harder to argue with.

📊 @Kalshi is back in a legal fight as Minnesota moves to ban prediction markets. Federal preemption applies. Every skirmish raises the profile.

👀 Watch List

🛰️ @VardaSpace validated autonomous reentry with the W-6 capsule. Reliable downmass is what turns orbital manufacturing into a real business.

🤖 @Figure_robot sorted 249,560 packages over 200 hours with zero failures, powered by its Helix AI stack. Long-duration autonomy is the unlock. And this is the worst the technology will ever be.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/1K8PIhtfO5

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

Anduril closed $5B at a $61B valuation and signed for 1,000+ missiles a year. SpaceX is in talks with Google to put data centers in orbit, and also walked away with nationwide D2D spectrum from the FCC. OpenAI launched Daybreak for cyber defense and stood up a $4B Deployment Company. Anthropic brought Claude to small businesses with PayPal. Beast Industries is building the programmatic ad stack for creators.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🤖 @AnthropicAI secured SpaceX’s entire Colossus 1 compute cluster, bringing 220K NVIDIA GPUs and 300MW+ online within the month. The company also launched Claude finance agents integrated with Microsoft 365, with Moody’s, Verisk, and S&P embedded directly into workflows. Notably, Anthropic was absent from the DoD’s latest classified AI contract awards.

🎯 @Kalshi confirmed a $1B Series F at a $22B valuation led by Coatue, with participation from Sequoia, a16z, and Paradigm. The company doubled from its $11B valuation just five months ago as institutional trading volume surged 800% and annualized volume hit $178B. Regulatory pressure from multiple states remains the biggest near-term risk.

🛰️ @anduriltech unveiled its Golden Dome coalition alongside K2 Space, Voyager, Impulse Space, Inversion Space, and Sandia to support America’s orbital missile defense initiative. The DoD awarded up to $3.2B combined for development of space-based interceptors, with integrated demonstrations targeted for 2028.

⚛️ @AaloAtomics received DOE-Idaho approval for the Documented Safety Analysis of its Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor and is now entering the final Operational Readiness Review phase. The company remains one of the few startups attempting to fully design, license, and operate private nuclear infrastructure for AI-scale energy demand.

🦑 @krakenfx launched Crypto + xStocks Bundles, combining tokenized stocks and ETFs with crypto assets into auto-rebalanced portfolios like “S&P 500 + Bitcoin.” The move further blurs the line between traditional finance and digital assets as tokenized equities continue gaining traction globally.

🔮 @perplexity_ai and Snap officially ended their proposed $400M AI integration partnership that would have embedded Perplexity directly into Snapchat for its 943M monthly users. While broader rollout talks collapsed, Perplexity will remain active on the platform as an advertiser.

👀 Watch List

🧠 @cerebras priced its IPO at up to a $26.6B valuation, another major signal that public markets are reopening for AI infrastructure companies. OpenAI’s hardware commitments continue strengthening the company’s positioning.

🌊 @_panthalassa raised $140M for floating, wave-powered AI data centers designed as massive offshore steel orbs cooled by seawater. The company is backed by Peter Thiel, John Doerr, Marc Benioff, and other major tech investors, with deployment targeted for 2027.

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

https://t.co/Ard4waPWye

[LFG ventures @LFGventures]

Anthropic took all of SpaceX's Colossus 1 compute. Kalshi doubled to $22B in five months. Anduril is leading the team building America's missile shield in orbit. Aalo got cleared to go critical. Kraken bundled crypto and stocks into one tap. Perplexity and Snap broke up.

A lot to unpack this week.

Let's get into it.

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🤖 @AnthropicAI is taking SpaceX's entire Colossus 1 data center: 300MW+ and 220K NVIDIA GPUs online within the month, with stated interest in multi-gigawatt orbital compute. They also launched Claude finance agents with Microsoft 365, including 10 templates and Moody's, Verisk, and S&P embedded as native apps. The DoD signed classified-network AI deals with eight providers and Anthropic was not on the list.

🎯 @Kalshi confirmed a $1B Series F at $22B, led by Coatue with Sequoia, a16z, and Paradigm. That doubles the $11B mark from five months ago. Institutional volume jumped 800% in six months, annualized volume tripled to $178B, and Kalshi hosts 90% of US prediction market activity. Headwind: cease-and-desist orders from Nevada, NJ, and Illinois.

🛰️ @anduriltech named its Golden Dome coalition: K2 Space, Voyager Technologies, Impulse Space, Inversion Space, and Sandia. The DoD awarded 12 companies up to $3.2B combined to develop space-based interceptors. Integrated demo targeted for 2028.

⚛️ @AaloAtomics got DOE-Idaho approval for the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor's Documented Safety Analysis. Now in the final Operational Readiness Review. One of few private companies designing, licensing, AND operating its own nuclear facilities, the actual unlock for powering AI data centers on customer sites.

🦑 @krakenfx launched Crypto + xStocks Bundles, combining tokenized US stocks/ETFs with digital assets, auto-rebalanced (S&P 500 + Bitcoin, Big Tech + Crypto). xStocks cleared $25B in volume last year. Kraken+ members get zero fees. Not yet in the US.

🔮 @perplexity_ai and Snap ended their $400M integration that would have made Perplexity the default AI inside Snapchat for 943M monthly users. Snap cited no agreement on broader rollout. Perplexity remains active on Snap as an advertiser.

👀 Watch List

🧠 @cerebras priced its IPO at up to $3.5B, $115-125/share, valuing the AI chipmaker at up to $26.6B (up from $23B in February). OpenAI committed significant capital to Cerebras hardware. Strongest signal yet that AI infrastructure is entering the public market window.

🌊 @_panthalassa raised $140M led by Peter Thiel for floating, wave-powered AI data centers: 85-meter steel orbs in the open ocean converting wave motion into electricity, cooled by seawater. Backers include John Doerr, Marc Benioff, Max Levchin, Hanwha, Super Micro, and Dylan Field. Commercial deployment in 2027.