Mercor

Google Buys Spirit Airlines Emails and Chats for $10M

Google won a court‑supervised bankruptcy auction to buy a large corpus of internal Spirit Airlines data for about $10 million, according to filings. The package reportedly includes roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, more than 17 million OneDrive files, about 20 million SharePoint files, 516 software repositories (≈30 million lines of code) and marketing, finance and operations records. Customer profiles and loyalty data are excluded; Google says a third party will remove personally identifiable information before transfer and that the dataset could be used to improve products and train AI models. The sale is pending U.S. bankruptcy court approval after an objection by the Association of Flight Attendants‑CWA and a hearing was moved to Sept. 9. Spirit suspended operations earlier this year amid a second insolvency, citing sharply higher jet‑fuel costs.

Why ChatGPT Doesn't Know Your Startup

A developer tested 48 AI-native startups to measure how language models recognize brands by name versus by category. A model without web access correctly described only 4 of 48 startups by name, while a search-grounded model surfaced 28 of them when asked for the best tools in their category. The post identifies three main causes for name invisibility—training cutoff, generic names, and sites that render only in browser JavaScript—and recommends Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): serve a plain category statement in the page HTML, add third-party mentions, and fix crawler readability. The author also describes Tabkeel, a checker that runs an AI mirror to test how a site is read and whether it surfaces in category queries.

Dual-valuation startup deals go mainstream amid AI boom

Newcomer reports that 'dual valuation' or two-tranche financings — where a single announced round includes tranches priced at materially different valuations — are becoming common in the current AI-driven funding frenzy. The newsletter highlights Starcloud, a space data-center startup that announced a $170M raise at a $1.1B valuation but whose first tranche was completed at roughly $250M and a later tranche priced at more than four times that amount. Supporters say prestige investors justify higher prices; critics argue the practice can be deceptive and harmful to employees. Brendan Foody (CEO, Mercor) publicly criticized the tactic, while Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire called it rare. Weston Moyer (MVP Ventures) estimates about 25% of recent deals have featured dual valuations.