SpaceX and Cursor make it official

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SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B: Back in April, SpaceX announced an agreement to either acquire Cursor owner Anysphere for $60 billion or pay the company $10 billion for its collaborative work on a new AI model. Post-IPO, the companies have made it official (pending regulatory approval, of course). The AI coding agent will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX in exchange for $60 billion worth of the company’s increasingly valuable stock (with a market cap now nearing a staggering $3 trillion). Cursor CEO Michael Truell reports that the newly-merged titan has the goal of building “the world’s most useful AI models.” The move makes practical sense, combining SpaceX/xAI’s voluminous access to fresh compute and the Cursor team’s know-how in terms of developing and fine-tuning frontier coding models. As Lekker Cap CIO Quinn Thompson points out, it also makes a ton of financial sense at this particular historical moment, with SpaceX using “newly printed, low float, retail inflated currency to acquire real businesses ahead of the lockup expiring.”
OpenAI loses billions each year: Leaked financial documents, obtained by independent journalist and noted AI skeptic Ed Zitron and reviewed by the Financial Times, suggest that — while OpenAI’s revenue is growing very quickly — it’s not nearly enough to keep up with their massive expenditures on R&D. The docs suggest OpenAI’s monthly revenues hit nearly $2 billion by the end of last year, but they spent $19.18 billion on R&D in 2025 alone, including $10.59 billion paid directly to Microsoft. Additionally, the company’s “cost of revenue” shut up from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025, likely reflecting the growing number of user prompts requiring inference spend to resolve. Sales and marketing budgets at OAI are climbing too, hitting $5.73 billion in 2025. That adds up to a “net loss” of just over $5 billion in 2024 and $39 billion in 2025. Perhaps cutting down on “side quests” and focusing the company on a narrower mandate was not just smart strategy, but an essential way to counterbalance all this excessive spending.
Databricks picks up Panther Labs: The T500 analytics and intelligence platform helps enterprises build and maintain their data pipelines, and use this data to train their own AI models. Over the past year, they’ve made an aggressive push into cybersecurity, with the thesis that it’s largely a data problem for large enterprises. Databricks launched an AI tool called “Lakewatch” back in March, and in the intervening months, they’ve made a number of related acquisitions. The latest is Panther Labs, which organizes data source and security concerns in a way that makes it easier for AI agents to respond without human intervention.

TWiST 500

We’ve had SF AI voice interest Bland on the T500 list for a while now but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to actually write about them.

The company designs customer service voice agents that are capable of extended conversations and multi-step transactions. Many competitors rely on third party models with smaller context windows, ideally suited for fast and repeated kinds of calls. Password resets, changing appointments, and so forth.

Bland designed its own proprietary voice models, and are primarily designed for longer conversations in specialized and heavily regulated fields like health care. (An average Bland call runs 30-45 minutes.) Fortune gives the example of an agent helping a patient decide, based on tests and their medical chart, whether or not to set up an appointment or immediately call emergency services.

In fact, founder Sobham Nejad was inspired to start the company based on a health care-related scenario. An aunt was denied medical treatment after failing to get a human from her insurance company on the phone. Bland’s technology is designed to avoid these kinds of disappointing results.

The company just closed a $50 million Series C, led by Dell Technologies Capital. Piotr Dabkowski, the CTO of fellow voice AI startup ElevenLabs, is also an investor. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2300: Lon and Jason chat with Skyler Chan, the founder of GRU Space. You may have heard of them during their viral press run earlier this year, after announcing plans to build a hotel on the Moon. (Reserve your spot today for just $1 million!) But beyond the marketing hype, GRU has a real plan to autonomously manufacture bricks out of lunar regolith, which can then be used to build any kind of structure, including an American moon base. PLUS we’re selecting the winner of our $5K bounty for a live AI podcast fact checker. Lon demos all three finalists, then Jason selects his fave.

E2299: Two days before SpaceX launches the largest IPO in history at a flat $135/share, our VC roundtable drops a scorcher: The top 1% of seed deals might actually be underpriced. Plus: the "Sequoia scam" dual-tranche controversy, tokens-for-equity deals, and whether Claude Fable 5 is a true step function.
Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures), Michael Downing (Castalia Capital), and Paige Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures) join Alex to go deep on Seed investing, startup economics, AI spend, and the impact of smarter AI on the founder journey.

E2298: Jason goes solo dolo this week, in a blockbuster episode capturing his reaction to the “Bad VC Stories” going around X, the Everything App. Jason recalls some of the high and low points of his career in venture fundraising, including an incredible story about legendary investor John Doerr going the extra mile to attend his Mahalo pitch. PLUS Jason chats with Sue Khim of Brilliant about the education company’s new AI tutor, Koji, and how actually empowering users can help the industry turn around its bad reputation.

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