Are you still holding onto crypto? Listen to this one-minute podcast for the one thing you must do right now.
🦗 Bugs in the system: Insects aren’t paying off. Some of the biggest insect-farming startups have gone bust, and investors are tapping out. The pitch: sustainable protein. The reality: not cheap enough, not scalable yet. But researchers think genetic engineering (without the scary GMO label) could fix it, turning flies into nutrient factories and faster breeders.
$500 million
How much funding Perplexity AI is about to land, pushing its valuation to $14 billion. For context, it was $3 billion last June. So what’s the buzz? They’re pulling in around $100 million in annual recurring revenue and plan to launch an AI agent web browser called Comet. You could say investors are seeing stars.
This leaves a mark: For the first time in over 20 years, Google searches through Apple’s Safari browser have dropped. Not a shocker. More people are using ChatGPT and Perplexity instead. Investors sold on the news, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) lost around $250 billion in market value in a single day, or about the GDP of Finland or Portugal.
💸 Fake it till you fund it: A tech founder got charged with fraud after lying about his shopping app, Nate, using AI for universal checkouts. Turns out it was actually human contractors from the Philippines and Romania behind the scenes (plus a few bots). He still raised over $40 million from investors before getting caught.
📉 Historic crash: On Tuesday, AI chipmaker NVIDIA’s stock tanked 9.5%, wiping out $279 billion of the company’s value. Wow! That’s the biggest single-day loss ever for a U.S. company. For perspective, only 27 companies worldwide are worth as much as NVIDIA lost. Investors are worried about AI and the U.S. economy. NVIDIA has denied reports it received a subpoena from the DOJ over antitrust concerns.