SV Angel

Ex‑a16z Partner Slams VCs for 'Political Infiltration' in AI

John O’Farrell, a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who resigned in 2025, published an op-ed criticizing what he called an attempted "political infiltration" by parts of the AI industry. O’Farrell singled out the PAC Leading the Future — whose backers include Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and AI company Perplexity — and said it had raised over $125 million to influence politicians on AI policy. The piece warns that large political spending by wealthy tech investors risks a backlash and undermines trust, and argues the industry should engage constructively on regulation rather than trying to silence debate. The article also notes recent context: President Donald Trump signed an AI executive order in June 2026 that asks companies to voluntarily provide models for government assessment.

Origin Lab raises $8M to sell game data to AI labs

Origin Lab announced an $8 million seed round to build a marketplace that helps video game companies license and sell in-game assets and footage as training data for AI 'world model' labs. The round was led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars and FPV, plus angel investors including Twitch co‑founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. Origin Lab — led by co‑CEO and co‑founder Anne‑Margot Rodde — converts game assets (renderings, walkthrough footage, etc.) into formats usable for training models used to understand physical-world dynamics. Lightspeed partner Faraz Fatemi said the deal reflects growing demand for high-quality training data and the revenue potential of data vendors serving major AI labs.

Investors Back Skye's AI iPhone Home Screen

Skye, an iPhone app from Signull Labs still in private testing, has raised more than $3.58 million in pre-seed funding and attracted a waitlist of “tens of thousands” of users ahead of a planned rollout. Built by a small team led by founder Nirav Savjani (who posts as signüll), Skye uses iOS widgets to create an "agentic homescreen" that surfaces ambient, personalized AI-driven insights — weather, context-aware recommendations, health signals — and can draft emails, prep for meetings, send reminders and flag suspicious bank charges via authorized connections. Early investors named in reporting include a16z (Andreesen Horowitz), True Ventures, SV Angel and Offline Ventures. PitchBook lists a post-money valuation of $19.5 million. The founder has said the app will launch to its waitlist soon but gave no firm timetable.