E98: 8/3/25
Microsoft and Amazon beat earnings, Meta's poaching spree continues, Menlo's Enterprise LLM usage report, Stargate Norway, and more
Hi everyone, greetings from Argentina! I’ll be skipping next week due to personal travel time off, but enjoy this week’s newsletter! I’ll be back with the next edition on 8/15.
PNW AI News:
Microsoft FY25 Q4 earnings beats expectations, reporting $76.4B in revenue (+18% YoY) and $27.2B in profits (+24% YoY), largely due to AI-driven Azure business, causing it to surpass a $4 trillion market cap
They reported standalone annual Azure revenue for the first time, surpassing $75B annual revenue (+34% YoY)
They plan to spend a record $30B in quarterly capital in the coming three months to meet surging AI demand, as it races to keep up datacenter capacity
Amazon also beat its Q2 earnings expectations, posting $167.7B in revenue (+13% YoY) and a net income of $18.2B (+34% YoY), squeezing out more profits than expected
They're also investing heavily in its AWS cloud business to fuel AI-related efforts, as it faces economic headwinds within its retail division
AWS reported $30.9B in revenue in Q2 (+17.5% YoY), in line with estimates
Microsoft just released ‘Copilot Mode’ in Edge, bringing the AI assistant directly into the browser to search across open tabs
Microsoft is arguing to keep its consumer AI division from getting dragged into the copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other news organizations, against Microsoft and OpenAI
Amazon is reportedly paying between $20-25M a year to license content from the New York Times for AI training
Fable, known as the ‘Netflix of AI’, launches Showrunner after Amazon supports them with Alexa Fund investment
Microsoft is reportedly nearing a deal to retain access to OpenAI’s tech even after the company’s AGI milestone, a current point of contention in terms of the partnership
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
Meta quietly detected its first self-improving AI systems, betting $72B in infrastructure on “personal superintelligence” strategy rather than work automation
This coincides with Meta’s strong Q2 earnings - revenue rose 22% to $47.5B, driven by AI-enhanced ad targeting, and daily active users climbed to 3.5B
Google DeepMind has launched AlphaEarth Foundations, an AI system that maps Earth’s land and coastal regions with 24% higher accuracy while using 16× less storage than previous satellite imaging approaches.
Instead of storing raw satellite data, it creates “embedding fields”, compact digital summaries at 10-meter resolution that keep detail intact
Chinese AI startup Manus has introduced "Wide Research", an experimental system that spins up over 100 parallel AI agents to tackle a single large-scale task
AI image startup Black Forest Labs and creative platform Krea just released FLUX.1 Krea, an open-weight image model focused on eliminating the typical “AI look” with upgraded photorealism and quality
Cohere introduced Command A Vision, a new model that achieves SOTA performance in multimodal vision tasks for enterprises
Runway’s new Aleph video generation AI model upgrades real footage with AI precision, with iterative producing
Google’s NotebookLM adds ‘Video Overviews’ for multimodal research, integrating Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast into the tool
Researchers from Stanford and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub just developed a “virtual lab” of AI scientists that design, debate, and test biomedical discoveries — already generating COVID-19 nanobody candidates in days
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
Menlo Ventures just released its mid-year LLM market report, revealing that enterprise AI spending is continuing to surge, with Anthropic emerging as the new market leader over OpenAI with a 32% model usage share
OpenAI just announced the launch of Stargate Norway, the company’s first European AI data center that will house 100K Nvidia GPUs and run entirely on renewable energy by late 2026
Meta has approached over a dozen employees at ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, offering massive compensation packages (including one exceeding $1B) to join its superintelligence team
OpenAI has reached $12B in ARR for 2025, with around 700M weekly active users for its ChatGPT platform
AI infrastructure platform Fal raised $125M in new funding from Bessemer, A16Z, and more, at a $1.5B valuation
Anthropic is reportedly set to raise $5B in a new funding round led by Iconiq Capital at a $170B valuation, nearly tripling its previous valuation from March 2025
GitHub Copilot crosses 20M all-time users, with 5M of that in the last 3 months
Tesla and Samsung signed a $16.5B deal for the manufacturing of Tesla’s next-gen AI6 chips, with Elon Musk saying the “strategic importance of this is hard to overstate.”
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Dropzone AI (Seattle, WA) raised $37M in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures, joined by Madrona, In-Q-Tel, PSL Studio, and Decibel Partners
Cybersec augmentation platform designed to deliver pre-trained autonomous AI security agents. - TFTD $57.3M
CEO: Edward Wu
4ag Robotics (Calgary, Canada) raised $29.3M in Series B funding led by Astanor and Cibus Capital, joined by Voyager Capital and several others
CV-guides robotics and automation systems designed to help mushroom farmers in automating various processes - TFTD $50.6M
CEO: Sean O'Conner
Reveal Technology (Bozeman, MT) raised $28.5M in Series B funding led by Ballistic Ventures, joined by Booz Allen Hamilton Ventures, Next Frontier Capital, Defy.vc, Shield Capital, and more
AI-guided drone tasking platform designed for tactical decision-making in defense and public safety. - TFTD $41.9M
CEO: Garrett Smith
Apera AI (Vancouver, Canada) raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding led by BDC Capital, followed on by Flying Fish Ventures, J-Ventures, and Lobby Capital
Computer vision software designed to unlock factory automation by providing robots with human-like 3D intelligent vision and breakthrough reliability - TFTD $14M+
CEO: Sina Afrooze
YearOne (Portland, OR) raised an undisclosed amount in Seed extension funding from Accenture Ventures
AI-powered orchestration platform designed to help organizations elevate the design and delivery lifecycle of digital products - TFTD $2.9M+
CEO: Stephen Ajayi
Ceedar (Victoria, Canada) raised $200K in Pre-Seed funding from Metalab Ventures and Andrew Wilkinson
AI-powered financial management software designed for automated bookkeeping and business insights - TFTD $200K
CEO: Connor Turland