Nvidia's longtime chief resigned on 12 November after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive whom US officials reportedly suspected of passing information to Beijing (TBPN). Colette Kress now holds both the CEO and CFO roles. Nvidia's SEC filing also names Harvey C. Jones as the company's first board chair (Business Insider ·). The espionage claim has since weakened. CNN reported that the intelligence so far does not establish she was a spy, the Justice Department says it has reached no conclusions, and Singapore found insufficient evidence of offences.
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The question likely to last longer concerns export controls. Megaspeed reportedly bought more than $4.8B of Nvidia chips from June 2024 onward. Nvidia acknowledged undercounting about 50,000 units in its Southeast Asian inventory checks. Singapore says chips physically delivered there were under 1% of Nvidia revenue, while Singapore-billed revenue was 22%. Bloomberg's account of Nvidia's general counsel calling Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler relies on unnamed sources. GPU buyers that route through regional intermediaries should expect tighter customer checks.
A side effect: a 24-year-old Singapore engineer who shares Huang's name says joking LinkedIn posts sent about 5,000 visitors to his startup Lycana. He has not said how many subscribed (Business Insider ·).
Pricing private companies
SoftBank led a $500m Series F in Sifted, with Nvidia, Hitachi and T.Capital joining. The figures are company-announced, with no filing among the reviewed sources. In June, Bloomberg's unnamed sources had described a round of about $800m. The roughly 12x forward-revenue multiple depends on Sacra estimates. The Fürstenfeldbruck plant can make 10,000 humanoids a year, but that is capacity; the 2027 target is 1,000–2,000 units.
The Information from investors at about $400bn, up from $330bn-plus last year. That is far below the $600bn-plus reportedly discussed for a founding shareholder's stake. Employees get $241.35 a share. ByteDance is also reportedly seeking to push its IPO or redemption deadline to December 2030, which makes buybacks the main cash-out route. The terms rest on a shareholder letter and one unnamed person.
Newcomer ranks Anthropic first and OpenAI second, with about 70% of the list's roughly $3.5T in the top 10. Rank weights market leadership above valuation, so Cognition ($48B) ranks above Anduril ($90B). Bessemer led Fal's $16B round nine days before the list named Fal the hottest recent fundraise. Its only disclosure is that some listed companies may be in its portfolio.
Contrary GP Investing 101. He uses Jensen's Kerala fish-market study and PitchBook data showing asset values up 21.6% while distributions trail the long-run average. Fish, however, are uniform; startup equity is not.
Exits and consolidation
Salesforce agreed to pay $47.50 a share in cash for Braze, about $5.66B, roughly six weeks after a 26%-growth quarter sent Braze shares down 11% (SaaStr). SaaStr's Jason Lemkin uses the deal to argue that $1B ARR is the new safe scale, citing PagerDuty's flat growth and HubSpot's 19% drop. In Finland, Silo AI co-founder Peter Sarlin's PostScriptum took a majority of deployment consultancy Tech.eu on undisclosed terms, following AMD's ~$665M Silo AI purchase.
Early rounds
Upstarts Media from Costanoa and Kleiner Perkins to fine-tune models for robots that defense manufacturers already own. It says it passed $1M within four months, a figure one outlet calls bookings and others call revenue. This Week in Startups, led by non sibi ventures, backs software that runs Gemma on orbiting satellites. A case study co-published with model supplier Google shows about 64% smaller diagnostic payloads but no accuracy data. TechCrunch · led by Chicago Ventures for on-device voice age checks, ahead of New York's January 2027 SAFE for Kids rules. It has not published error rates. a16z across a seed led by Upfront and an a16z-led Series A; its named customers come from a16z's own post. Crunchbase News. A Crunchbase taste test of seven Target products found most of them middling.
Funds and ecosystems
TechCrunch · Venture, targeting at least $50M. Fund I's net IRR above 50% is self-reported and rests mainly on markups. First-time funds raised just 4.5% of US VC dollars. e27 targets 100+ firms at ₹100 crore in revenue; IvyCap's Vikram Gupta argues years three to five are the gap.
unresolved points: Will Nvidia's probe change GPU resale rules? Does Anthropic's IPO confirm frontier-lab prices? Can ByteDance's $400bn hold beside $600bn private bids?