We've raised $140M in new financing, including a $100M Series B led by @insightpartners , with participation from @overmatchvc, and returning investors @firstround, @QuietCapital, @SteelAtlasVC, TMV and more, plus a $40M venture debt facility from @Stifel, to grow the largest pro-mariner data network in the world. Read more from TechCrunch's @sokane1: techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/ma…

Today we’re announcing we’ve raised $20M in seed financing led by @QuietCapital , with participation from @GradientVC , @haystackvc and @CompoundVC and other amazing folks to build the verification layer for AI-driven biology. We are also delighted to be welcoming @vqctran who is joining us from @GoogleDeepMind as a co-founder. AI is not going to cure all diseases without a verification substrate - a scalable environment where models can test predictions and learn against living human biology. AI is becoming increasingly capable of generating biological hypotheses, therapeutic candidates and experimental designs. But generating ideas is advancing much faster than our ability to test what those ideas will actually do in human biology. Existing systems force a tradeoff: the most biologically relevant approaches are slow and expensive, while faster in vitro and computational systems often lack the fidelity needed to capture human response. Polyphron’s bet is that tissue is the fastest, cheapest, most parallelizable verification substrate that still contains the biology that matters and we believe the path to biological superintelligence runs through closed-loop interaction with these living and simulated human systems. Thank you to @axios for covering the announcement. Link to our new website in the thread.

there are no more moats anymore. moats are dead. was talking to a friend of mine who's a CEO of a rapidly growing startup (~$1B revenue). we're small investors. He told me that he has only taken one one-week vacation in the last eight years of his startup. I was like, "Hey this is crazy. You're gonna burn out. This is pretty serious." he said, "Auren, I don't know what to do. We don't have no moat." am like, "What are you talking about? The business is going great!" he said, "We have incredible competitors. We sell AI products and so we're selling to the smartest people in the world. If we don't have the best product that week, they won't buy us. If we don't have the best product for two weeks, our customers will churn. We don't have a moat." I started thinking about it: who does have a moat? There are just no moats anymore. Nobody has a moat. Everyone will switch their software providers in a heartbeat for better product or for cheaper product or for faster product. Anyone will switch. We looked at our 200 companies at Flex Capital and how they're buying software and AI services today. Almost all of their vendors are on month-to-month contracts or on usage-based contracts. That means they can switch immediately. The reason they have everyone on month-to-month is that they have no idea if they're going to be using those tools two months from now. They may not even be using those tools two weeks from now. Everything is changing so fast all the time. The only moat you have in software is that you have the best product. There are just no other moats. It used to be back in the day that you have a mediocre product and you'd be using it for years. we just dealt with all these of mediocre software systems, mediocre cloud providers, mediocre data providers, mediocre APIs. we dealt with it because the switching costs are really hard. Nowadays it's really easy to change software. It's really easy to change APIs. it's really easy to change AI infrastructure. It's super easy. You can change it in a heartbeat and every other vendor will help you switch. Of course, your AI tools will help you switch as well. All these things that used to give very high customer lock-in just don't exist anymore and so they're just no more moats. Moats are dead.  you just need to work insane hours all the time because the only thing you have is your product. goodbye moat, goodbye predictable revenues, goodbye 2010s era.

It’s ironic that in this post AI world, when I talk to any early stage founder and ask them what the bottleneck is in their business, the response nearly 100% of the time is great people.

We are pleased to share that Taalas has agreed to join AMD. We built Taalas to rethink AI inference from the ground up: hardware designed around the model, rather than the other way around. The result is the world's fastest and most cost-effective inference silicon. Joining AMD gives us the scale, engineering resources, and global reach to bring that work to the world – and to accelerate what comes after it. We are also excited to build on AMD's long-standing presence in Canada and its continued commitment to the country's AI ecosystem. Many of us grew up at AMD Canada, and are looking forward to coming home. We are proud of what this team has built, and even more excited about what comes next. ir.amd.com/news-events/press…

Investors think in probabilities Founders think in possibilities

This $58 million $MU trade I posted 38 days ago is now worth over $1 BILLION Easily the craziest trade I’ve ever seen

SCARCE ASSET SUPERCYCLE notboring.co/p/scarce-assets