Factories, Funding, & Frontier Tech

📡 Radar

🐙 Release The Kraken (Into The Public Markets)

Crypto exchange Kraken has confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S., targeting a listing in early 2026 as it rides recent regulatory momentum and market optimism. The move follows a new funding round that pushed its valuation to about $20 billion, up more than 30 percent in under two months. Kraken is also expanding beyond crypto into equities and derivatives, giving it a stronger position as it moves toward the public markets. We will update all LFG investors as this develops.

💬 ChatGPT Gets Group Chats

OpenAI rolled out group chats in ChatGPT, letting multiple people collaborate with the same AI in one shared space. Users can bring in different GPTs, pin them to a room, and use the assistant to summarize, track tasks, or brainstorm in real time across a team. It is a small product tweak on the surface, but nudges ChatGPT from a solo tool into more of a coordination layer for small groups and lightweight teams. Interesting evolution happening here. OpenAI

🤖 xAI Targets a $230B Valuation

Elon Musk’s xAI is in advanced talks to raise $15 billion in fresh equity at a $230 billion valuation, more than double where it was marked when it absorbed X earlier this year. The money fuels Colossus, the planned supercomputer footprint in Memphis, and a broader land grab for AI infrastructure and talent. If this round closes as reported, xAI moves firmly into the top tier of AI platforms by valuation, not far behind the public mega caps it wants to compete with. Reuters

🔥 Bezos Lights Up Project Prometheus

Jeff Bezos is backing Project Prometheus, a new AI venture focused on applying advanced models to physical industries like manufacturing, logistics, and energy. The company has reportedly raised several billion dollars already and is recruiting aggressively from top labs, with a mandate to build AI that moves atoms, not just pixels. It is a reminder that the next wave of value will not only be in chatbots, but in AI that rewires how real world systems operate. NYT

⚡️ Big Tech Bets on Claude

Anthropic’s valuation has reportedly jumped to roughly $350 billion after Microsoft and NVIDIA committed up to $15 billion in new investment and Anthropic agreed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute. The partnerships cement a deeper cloud and hardware foundation and put Claude in direct competition with OpenAI at true frontier scale. Claude will be integrated across Microsoft products, while Anthropic and NVIDIA co develop next generation hardware and software for more efficient training and inference. With this level of capital and distribution behind it, Anthropic is now one of the most structurally advantaged players in the entire model ecosystem. Anthropic

👷‍♂️ Lambda Raises $1.5B for AI Factory Buildout

Lambda secured over $1.5 billion from TWG Global and USIT to build what it calls “superintelligence cloud infrastructure.” The company plans to stand up massive GPU clusters, including a new 100 megawatt AI factory in Kansas City that was announced recently, aimed at serving model labs and enterprises that cannot get enough capacity. With an IPO on the horizon, Lambda is positioning itself as one of the core independent infrastructure providers behind the current AI boom. Lambda

🛰️ PsiQuantum Teams Up With Lockheed

PsiQuantum inked a deal with Lockheed Martin to explore how fault tolerant quantum computing can support aerospace and defense workloads. The partnership focuses on long horizon problems like materials, routing, and complex simulations that are hard to tackle with classical hardware. It is early days for commercial quantum, but this is the kind of customer and use case that can turn lab science into durable contracted revenue. Axios

💳 Ramp Hits $32B Valuation

Ramp just raised another $300 million at a $32 billion valuation, only three months after its last round at $22.5 billion. The company says it is now at more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, with over 50,000 customers using its corporate card and spend platform. In a year where plenty of fintech got flattened, Ramp is quietly turning into one of the most durable software businesses in the stack. WSJ

🌐 Google Levels Up with Gemini

We usually keep The Markup focused on private companies, but Gemini 3 is worth calling out. Google rolled out its latest flagship model with major upgrades in reasoning, coding, and multimodal performance across text, audio, and video. The release leans into agents and tools, positioning Gemini as the engine behind everything from Workspace copilots to consumer search. With Google’s massive data advantage, Gemini is our pick for the top LLM in the space by year end. Google

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Act as a budget-conscious travel planner. Create a 5-day, 4-night family trip to Rosemary Beach, Florida for 4 people (kids ages 1 and 3).

Constraints:

• Budget: $4,500 total (excluding flights)

• Accommodation: Vacation rental walking distance to the beach

• Must-Do: One full beach day, a visit to Alys Beach, and a kid-friendly bike ride

Tasks:

• Build a detailed 5-day itinerary with meals, activities, and quiet time.

• Provide a budget breakdown that stays under $4,500.

• Suggest one indoor and one outdoor backup activity for toddlers.

🧠 Updates

🤠 LFG x 8VC

Rob was at the 8VC Annual Meeting this week in Austin, hosted by Joe Lonsdale and team. The crowd was a little over a hundred people, mostly LPs across their funds. The message was loud and clear: we need more power, we need to equip our warfighter with the best technology possible, and we need to move fast. Rob caught up with Joe between sessions to talk Anduril and Erebor, and somehow walked away even more bullish than before. Already looking forward to next year.

🛩️ A New Class of Aircraft

Speaking of Anduril, Palmer and the team have been building Omen since 2019, evolving it from the Ghost platform and pushing through more than 30 prototypes to solve the propulsion and manufacturing challenges that stopped everyone else. The result is a one-thousand-pound hybrid-electric tail-sitter that lifts off like a helicopter, cruises like a jet, and needs no runway for strike missions. Through the EDGE partnership, a UAE customer has already ordered 50 units, with production running through Anduril’s Ohio factory. We are proud investors and fired up to see how fast this company continues to ship real technology. Thread below with details.

🎵 Breaking Rust

Admittedly, no one here is itching to listen to AI-generated country music, but this Breaking Rust track is annoyingly catchy and somehow climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart. It is not replacing Morgan Wallen anytime soon, but you have to respect the vibe.

🎤 Deep Dive

Chris Camillo isn’t just an investor in many of our deals. He’s a personal friend and one of the sharpest independent minds in the game. He turned $80K into $40M+ not through Wall Street models or technical charts, but by watching what real people were buying before it hit analyst reports. His “social arbitrage” style pulls signals from TikTok, Google Trends, and whatever teens are wearing at the mall to front-run cultural shifts before they become market moves.

He also co-founded Dumb Money, a YouTube channel that became a cult favorite during the meme-stock era. Chris’s core belief is simple. Culture moves markets. And if you catch the signal early enough, you don’t need to be on Wall Street to make big money.

He argues that the market's "boom/bust" sentiment around AI is primarily caused by investors failing to gain a deep understanding of the technology's long-term power. He believes the convergence of AI and embodied AI (robotics) will create an "infinite labor machine," representing the single most transformative economic event of our lives.

The key to successful investing is to develop the conviction necessary to ignore short-term market noise and volatility. By fully understanding the macro shift, which he compares to realizing the potential of the first iPhone, investors can confidently remain invested in productive assets. Camillo stresses that if you believe in the ultimate economic acceleration driven by this revolution, temporary market fluctuations "don't matter."

He was on Iced Coffee Hour last week and gave us insights into where he is deploying capital today and would be a great listen over the weekend.

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