Benchmark

Starcloud Raises $250M for Orbital Data Centers

Starcloud, a startup building satellites for AI inference in orbit, added a $250 million extension to its March $170 million Series A, valuing the company at $2.3 billion. The funding will scale manufacturing and advance its largest spacecraft, Starcloud-3, which is intended to fly on SpaceX’s Starship. Investors in the extension include Manhattan West Ventures, Nvidia (reported $25M), Cisco, Benchmark, EQT and others. Starcloud plans rideshare launches of two 8 kW compute satellites (Starcloud-2) in 2027, has requested FCC permission to operate 88,000 spacecraft, and is building a 100,000 sq ft production facility in Woodinville, Washington. The company is collaborating with Nvidia on space-ready GPU development and aims to fly Nvidia’s Vera Rubin Space-1 chip in late 2028.

Travis Kalanick: '1% of VCs Are Helpful'

On David Senra’s podcast (aired the prior weekend), Travis Kalanick — founder of Uber and founder of robotics company Atoms — criticized venture capitalists, saying roughly 10% meet a ‘do no harm’ standard and only about 1% are truly helpful. The interview revisits Kalanick’s 2017 boardroom battle involving Benchmark’s Bill Gurley; Kalanick says founders should avoid a victim mentality, sharpen pitches to create bidding wars, and be cautious about management optics. The piece notes Atoms recently raised $1.7 billion in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining Atoms’ board. The article also records other founders (including Mark Pincus) airing grievances about VC behavior.

Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI as Hottest AI Upstart

Anthropic has accelerated ahead of OpenAI in the frontier AI model race, more than doubling its revenue from Q1 to Q2 while OpenAI’s revenue rose about 18% and its operating margins worsened, the Wall Street Journal reported. Reuters reported that Anthropic projects as much as $200 billion in 2028 revenue versus OpenAI’s $47 billion run rate disclosed in May. Analysts say the shift could reshape partner and supplier dynamics: companies tied to OpenAI (Oracle, CoreWeave, Broadcom, SoftBank) may face downside while cloud and chip providers tied to Anthropic (Google/Alphabet, Amazon) could benefit because Anthropic sources most compute from Google and Amazon. Market observers note interoperability via open-weight models and the potential for commoditization of frontier AI, but most do not expect OpenAI to disappear. The story is framed as market analysis with implications for stocks and industry supply chains.