China continues to love OpenClaw

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ClawHub expands to China: ClawHub, the official skill marketplace for OpenClaw, distributes the files that teach your agent how to perform specialized tasks. An official mirror site aimed at Chinese developers launched on Wednesday, supported by TikTok owner ByteDance’s infrastructure. (They’re only supplying the tech stack, mind you, not taking any ownership or control over the platform itself.) This is, of course, just the latest example of the Chinese tech industry’s enthusiasm for All Things Claw. In addition to ByteDance, mega-conglomerates Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu have also rushed to embrace not the virtual assistant itself but also its native ecosystem.
Delving even deeper into the Delve situation: You recall Delve, the compliance startup that’s been accused by a whistleblower of a range of allegations, from fabricating SOC 2 and ISO 27001 evidence to rubber-stamping reports and routing customers through overseas audit mills. The same anonymous whistleblower — DeepDelver — now claims that the company pitched a fork of an open-source tool (Sim.ai’s SimStudio) to a potential client as its own proprietary software (renamed “Pathways”). This doesn’t quite meet the standard of the prior allegations (though it DOES violate the Apache software license). But it speaks to the (alleged!) climate at Delve, and raises questions about the at times delicate line between Silicon Valley “hustle culture” and just plain old fashioned dishonesty.
Cognichip raises $60 million: The startup is developing a deep learning model that helps engineers design new computer chips, under the theory that present-day AI can already start helping us build ever more powerful AI systems. As we’ve seen over the last few years, meaningfully significant advancements in high-end, powerful AI chips can sometimes take years to move from conception to mass production. (How long we were reading about these Nvidia Blackwells before they started getting installed in racks?) Cognichip founder/CEO Faraj Aalaei argues that chip design could soon look more like software design, where AI tools provide an invaluable time saver for human developers. He’s apparently made a convincing case; the company raised a fresh $60 million round after emerging from stealth just last year. That’s $93 million so far in funding since their founding in 2024.

TWiST 500

TWiST 500 startup Poolside builds specialized and hyper-reliable AI tools for writing software code, with an eye toward partnerships with governments and enterprises. They’re also aiming more explicitly toward developing AGI than your average AI outfit. On a 2025 podcast, co-founders Eiso Kant and Jason Warner laid out their thesis: models built for deep-focused specialization are more likely to forge a real path to AGI than general-purpose models.

The company has now set their sights on a 2-gigawatt West Texas data center, which they’re calling “Project Horizon.” In an October 2025 blog post, Kant and Warner suggest controlling the infrastructure layer is the next logical step for the company.

That 2025 deal hinged on participation from CoreWeave, the AI cloud computing giant, which had agreed to serve as the site’s “anchor tenant” and provide Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems, including more than 40,000 GPUs.

Which brings us to the present day, when the Financial Times reports that Poolside’s partnership with CoreWeave fallen apart, as the companies can’t seem to come together on timelines. A CoreWeave spokesperson said the company and Poolside “ultimately chose to pursue different paths for their own strategic and timing reasons.”

Additionally, FT suggests that Poolside has been unable to raise sufficient funds for the project, and is struggling to convince investors that it can train truly frontier, cutting-edge AI models that will compete with releases from OpenAI and Anthropic. (A separate $1 billion investment deal from Nvidia also appears to have fallen apart.)

Where does this leave Poolside? Shopping the concept around to remaining industry players, like Google. Without a well-capitalized anchor tenant, the entire project could vaporize faster than your ice cubes in the Texas summer heat. (Trust me on this one, August is brutal.) – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2270: We’re back with a new VC roundtable, featuring special guests Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund, Salen Churi of Trust Ventures, and Larsen Jensen of Harpoon Ventures. Together they’re reacting to the SpaceX confidential IPO filing, the AI enthusiasm gap between the tech world and the American public, and Marc Andreessen’s viral “don’t be introspective” rant.

E2269: We’re back on our OpenClaw BS, with special guest (and Google AI PM) Shubham Saboo sharing his Top 5 Tips for getting more out of your AI agents. Find out why Shubham created a team of 6 agents (named for his favorite sitcom characters) and he he gets them to work together, seamlessly, 24/7. Plus we’ve got new demos from MoltWorld — a virtual playground where agents collaborate — and AgentMail, which hooks your agent up with their own email address.

E2268: Jason and Lon welcome AstroForge founder and CEO Matt Gialich to the show. The space mining company hopes to refine platinum group metals (PGMs) from asteroids. Their last two missions have failed, but there’s still hope for the DeepSpace-2 project, piggybacking on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later on this year. Plus we’ve got Sam Dare from Templar (Subnet 3) to explain how he trained a 72 billion parameter AI model across a decentralized network of computers, and a demo of open-source Granola rival OpenOats from creator Yazin Alirhayim.

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Our 36th LAUNCH Accelerator cohort has kicked off. If you’re an early stage investor and want to take a look at this cohort first-hand during an exclusive pitch session, please email bianca@launch.co!

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