Venture Capital
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The official channel of V3V Ventures. We share updates on our investments, portfolio companies, and fund activities.

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๐Ÿ’ฐ Hugging Face turns down $500M from Nvidia to stay independent

๐Ÿ–ฑ Hugging Face declined a $500M investment offer from Nvidia that implied a valuation of about $7B. The talks surfaced a few months ago, with the company currently valued closer to $5B.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The reason was control. Hugging Face did not want a single large investor to gain outsized influence over its strategy and long term direction. The team said its goal is to keep AI broadly accessible rather than align it with one major playerโ€™s interests.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The company can afford that stance. In 2025, Hugging Face was profitable, driven by enterprise customers paying for advanced features. Roughly 3% of users fall into that category.

Independence over a premium check.

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30+ robotics companies worth watching in 2026.

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๐Ÿง  Flapping Airplanes raises $180M to rethink how AI learns

๐Ÿ–ฑ Flapping Airplanes is a new AI research startup founded by the Spector brothers and Aidan Smith. One of the founders, Ben Spector, previously ran an incubator that worked with teams like Cursor. The company has already raised $180M and is hiring.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The team is focused on training efficiency. They argue that modern models are trained on nearly all available data, while humans reach higher reasoning ability after seeing only a few billion tokens.

๐Ÿ–ฑ Their estimate is that humans process data 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more efficiently than current models.

๐Ÿ–ฑ To close that gap, Flapping Airplanes plans to rethink core assumptions, including architectures, loss functions, and gradient descent itself. The company says its current goal is foundational research, not near term commercialization.

This is a bet against brute force scaling.

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๐Ÿ’ผ SoftBank plans another $30B investment into OpenAI

๐Ÿ–ฑ SoftBank is preparing to invest an additional $30B into OpenAI. The group already owns about 11% and Masayoshi Son wants to increase that stake.

๐Ÿ–ฑ OpenAI is actively raising capital. Sam Altman has been meeting investors from the Middle East as part of the process.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The target is at least $50B in new funding. The implied valuation range is $750B to $830B.

Capital concentration around OpenAI keeps accelerating.

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โ€œIdeas are 5%. Execution is 95%.โ€

~ Daniel Ek

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The quickest $2,000,000 deal on Shark Tank.

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Before he became one of the richest people on Earth, Jeff Bezos had to explain who he was and what Amazon did.

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๐ŸŽž Garry Tan on why success breaks people who play the wrong game

๐Ÿ–ฑ Garry Tan released a short video on how money, fame, and power quietly turn into traps. He points to cases like Sam Bankman-Fried as examples of scoreboards taking over decision making.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The idea is simple. If you do not change the rules early, the game changes you. Money becomes the metric. Clout replaces progress. Burnout follows.

Short and worth a watch if you want something to think about over the weekend.

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The only major tech billionaires who werenโ€™t named in the Epstein files

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POV: VCs are rushing to secure a stake in Anthropic ahead of its IPO

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๐Ÿ” WD-40 keeps its formula locked behind extreme secrecy

๐Ÿ–ฑ The formula for WD-40 is guarded through a tightly controlled internal system. The current CEO was allowed to see it only after more than 30 years at the company.

๐Ÿ–ฑ WD-40 CEO Steve Brass gained access in 2024 together with the CFO. They viewed the handwritten formula during a bank visit after advance notice, multiple NDAs, and with a key held by the companyโ€™s chief lawyer. The document is stored in a Bank of America vault in San Diego.

๐Ÿ–ฑ Only one original copy exists. Most employees work with encoded versions and never see the real formula, including senior R&D staff.

For WD-40, secrecy itself remains part of the productโ€™s long-term moat.

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๐ŸŽฎ Game stocks slide after Google shows Project Genie

๐Ÿ–ฑ Shares across the gaming industry fell after Google unveiled Project Genie, an AI system that generates interactive digital worlds from simple text prompts.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The announcement raised concerns about new competition and pressure on traditional game development workflows.

๐Ÿ–ฑ In Japan, stocks of Nintendo dropped within a 1.3โ€“7% range. Capcom and Konami moved lower in the same session.

๐Ÿ–ฑ In Hong Kong, Chinese developers also declined. Tencent and NetEase fell by about 2โ€“4%.

The move followed similar weakness earlier in US-listed gaming platform stocks.

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๐ŸŽ Williams F1 names Claude its official โ€œThinking Partnerโ€

๐Ÿ–ฑ Williams Racing signed a multi-year partnership with Anthropic and Atlassian. Claude becomes the teamโ€™s official โ€œThinking Partner.โ€

๐Ÿ–ฑ Williams says it will use Claude as a decision support assistant for reasoning and analysis across the team.

๐Ÿ–ฑ Use cases include helping engineers interpret telemetry plus technical docs, supporting race scenario work plus post-race analysis, and speeding up internal knowledge workflows from R&D to management.

A notable detail: the focus is on explainable reasoning, with Claude expected to show how it reached an answer, not only the output.

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Venture Capital
โš ๏ธ$4B OpenAI stake surfaces as Musk lawsuit reopens Altman ouster Court filings in Elon Muskโ€™s case against OpenAI revealed internal emails suggesting co-founder Ilya Sutskever held a vested equity stake worth roughly $4B as of late 2023, adding a new financialโ€ฆ
๐Ÿ“ง Leaked email claims Sutskever pushed Altmanโ€™s 2023 firing over internal conflict

๐Ÿ–ฑ A newly surfaced email from Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, written days after Sam Altman was fired in 2023, offers an alternative version of events.

๐Ÿ–ฑ In the message to Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw, Scott suggests Ilya Sutskever drove the decision and that the reasons went beyond AI safety.

๐Ÿ–ฑ According to the email, tensions inside OpenAI had grown around compute allocation. The Applied side, including ChatGPT and the API, received priority because it generated revenue.

๐Ÿ–ฑ Research teams faced GPU shortages and blamed Applied. Altman tried to expand capacity, but Scott claims Sutskever presented the situation to the board differently.

๐Ÿ–ฑ The email also points to personal friction. Altman promoted Jakub Pachocki to lead core model research, after which progress accelerated.

๐Ÿ–ฑ Scott writes that Sutskever struggled with this shift, as a former subordinate began solving problems he had not. The email frames this dynamic as a key trigger behind the board move.

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