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Humans& helps real people collab with AI: The company comes from former Anthropic, xAI, and Google staffers who shared a similar concern: big AI firms keep designing models and tools intended to replace human workers, rather than help to make them more productive and efficient. Their new startup, Humans&, trains models and develops products that facilitate deeper human-machine collaboration. For example, an interactive chatbot that requests more specific information from users before coming up with answers, or an AI agent that can join a group text thread and make helpful contributions. This alternative vision for our AI-powered future intrigued some in Silicon Valley; the company raised $480 million in seed funding from Nvidia, Google Ventures, Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, and others.
Nvidia backs Baseten: Nvidia’s got cash to throw around, and they’re certainly doing so this week. The chip giant put $150 million into TWiST 500 startup Baseten, as part of a new Series E round adding $300 million total to the company’s coffers and bringing their valuation up to a healthy $5 billion. Baseten provides the infrastructure that allows enterprises to integrate machine learning and AI models into their pre-existing processes. (For example, they recently partnered with Dutch outfit Nebius to provide text-to-video inferencing across the US, France, and Finland.) The connection for Nvidia is straight-forward: the simpler it is for companies to run heavy AI workloads, the more compute (and thus, Nvidia chips) the world will require.
Beehiiv expects to double revenue this year: The TWiST 500 newsletter concern (on which I’m writing this edition of the Ticker presently) has benefitted from a major boom in interest for newsletters more generally. According to CEO and co-founder Tyler Denk, who spoke about Beehiiv’s growth with Reuters, they’re looking to hit $50 million in revenue this year, around double their take from the year before. Denk credits Beehiiv’s embedded ad network — which frees creators from relying exclusively on subscribers to stay afloat — with a major role in the platform’s recent success. Beehiiv now counts more than 40,000 total monthly users, including almost 15,000 paying subscribers. Many of them are apparently refugees from more prominent rival Substack, which — unlike Beehiiv’s flat-fee model — charges 10% of its creators’ earnings.

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Jason has long predicted on the pod that AI companies, and particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT, would soon have no choice but to offer advertising alongside their outputs. The company is publicly putting tons of cash into beefing up their power and data infrastructure, and though their chatbot remains significantly popular worldwide, there’s widespread and very vocal concern that their present revenue can’t possibly keep up with the speed and scale of these capital expenditures.

Well, it’s victory lap for JCal time, because OpenAI has indeed confirmed that they plan to begin testing ChatGPT ads for some US users, and have already started showing them to some users in India. Americans on the free or $8/month “Go” plans will potentially begin seeing ads in their results within the next few weeks, while the costlier tiers will remain ad-free (for now). The ads at this point are targeted for relevant products and services, and are clearly distinguished from the actual AI output.

Also this week, OpenAI signed a new three-year agreement with SaaS and cloud computing giant ServiceNow. OpenAI will supply the company with intelligence models to power fresh AI agents and voice applications, and ServiceNow also plans to integrate GPT-5.2 into their enterprise workflow platform. It’s part of a larger effort by ServiceNow to reframe their offerings around the metaphor of an “AI Control Tower.” (Essentially, this means vertically integrating into a centralized platform that manages and oversees all of a major enterprise’s AI applications.)

If you can believe it, there’s EVEN MORE OpenAI news to report! On Tuesday, the company confirmed that it will roll out age prediction and verification globally. These tools allow OpenAI to determine whether or not a particular user is over the age of 18, and thus whether or not to subject their account to “additional protections designed to reduce exposure to sensitive content.” OpenAI is teaming on identity verification with third-party company (and TWiST 500 startup) Persona. Their system has been off to a rocky start over on the popular gaming community platform Roblox. Perhaps OpenAI has plans to begin locking it down? – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2236: On a can’t miss edition of TWiST Tokyo, Jason sits down with long-time friend of the pod and iconic angel investor Thomas McInerney. Together, they discuss his long list of legendary investments, from Notion to SpaceX to Uber to Anthopic, and get deep on the strategy and philosophy behind them. Find out how the angel investing landscape has shifted, why founders need to stay both humble and smart, why it’s important for investors to maintain optimism, and much more.

E2235: Jason loves Japan’s Uniqlo brand, so the opportunity to speak with board member Kathy Matsui (also one of the country’s top VCs) was too good to pass up. Once they’re done checking out JCal’s latest style, the conversation turns to Japan’s startup revolution, why the country’s economic recovery seemed to take so long, and why her firm MPower Partners is seeking companies reflecting “Japan Dynamism” for their second fund.

E2234: In a special Tuesday ep, Jason chats with Alex Shieh of The Antifraud Company. Did you know that, under the US government’s False Claims Act, Americans who uncover fraud get to keep up to 30% of the recovered funds? It’s such a good deal, Shieh turned it into a business model for his startup. PLUS on the latest TWiST Flashback, we take a look back at a classic 2016 interview with Boom founder Blake Scholl.

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