OpenAI's pitch to America

Headline Roundup: AI Venture Edition

Lovable just raised $200M at a $1.8B valuation. The Swedish “vibe coding” startup lets anyone build websites and apps with natural language (think Cursor, but for normies).

• They’ve hit 2.3M users, 180K paying subs (plus businesses like Klarna and HubSpot), and $75M ARR in under a year.

• The new capital will go toward growing Lovable’s team (looks like they’re hiring a new Head of Community already).

Rune Technologies raised $24M to fix military logistics. Most defense startups chase hardware—Rune tackles the spreadsheets behind it. Its software, TyrOS, acts as a mission command system for supplies and personnel.

• It works offline in remote environments and predicts and optimizes logistics with deep learning models.

• The tech is already deployed with the Army and Marines. This round of funding will expand integrations and deployments across the military.

Hyper raised $6.3M to handle non-emergency 911 calls. Hyper’s AI voice agent fields non-emergency calls—think barking dogs and stolen Amazon packages—so real dispatchers can focus on the life-and-death ones. It’s already live with multiple centers and plans to scale fast.

While we’re here: Venture funding may be abundant, it’s not always a walk in the park. In a leaked Slack message, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told his team the company will seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, reversing a position he took last year after refusing to accept money from Saudi Arabia.

The reasoning for this week’s about-face? “There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more,” Amodei reportedly said. “If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital. Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier.”

Sam Altman pitches the “third path” for AI and jobs

There are two schools of thought about the impact of generative AI on everyday workers: One predicts a utopia, the other a doomsday scenario. What if there were a "third path?" Sam Altman says it's possible.

The details: At a Federal Reserve conference this week, the OpenAI chief is positioning AI as a tool for democratization—one that puts AI in the hands of the many. He’s making the case that AI tools are already helping workers do more. 

Breaking it down:

• OpenAI says ChatGPT gets 2.5 billion prompts per day, with 330 million from the US.

• Most of those users are on the free plan, but Altman’s team argues those free users are still generating value (building businesses, automating tasks, writing code).

• And that expansion of access is what keeps AI from becoming a winner‑take‑all technology.

Meta refuses to sign EU’s AI code of practice

On Monday, Meta refused to sign the EU’s new AI Code of Practice, a voluntary framework meant to help companies comply with the bloc’s sweeping AI Act, which takes full effect August 2.

The code isn’t legally binding, but it comes with perks: Companies that sign it get reduced scrutiny and more legal clarity under the AI Act, which will require transparency around training data, copyright compliance, and safety risks. Violators face fines of up to 7% of global revenue.

Who’s signing: OpenAI is in. Microsoft is expected to follow. Meta’s the first major holdout.

Why Meta said no: The company says the code goes too far—imposing vague and unnecessary rules that exceed the scope of the AI Act itself. Meta’s global affairs chief warned it could slow down frontier model development in Europe. Over 45 European companies, including Airbus and ASML, have raised similar concerns.

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Product photos, handled at scale

Graficai lets online sellers bulk edit product images with AI—no design skills needed. Upload up to 50 at once and let the tool handle background removal, white space, SEO-friendly alt text, and compression.

How e-commerce business owners can use it: 

• Clean up 100+ product photos for your Shopify or Amazon store in one go

• Prep campaign visuals for Meta Ads or Google Shopping with consistent white backgrounds

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An AI IDE that actually gets your project

Kiro isn’t just for autocompleting code—it maps your specs, generates documentation, and adapts to your whole stack. It’s like onboarding a junior dev who reads all your design docs.

How developers can use it: 

• Prompt Kiro to define and scope a feature with clear requirements before any code is written

• Build end-to-end functionality with tests and documentation that make handoff easier

• Use agents to solve tricky coding challenges or extend a feature across your codebase

• Reduce hallucinations and misalignment by locking in the spec first

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