15 VC Jobs & SpaceX is breaking more than barriers.

Welcome back Chronicler!

I hope you’re enjoying the World Cup, VAMOS ESPAÑA 🇪🇸

This week, Beijing proved that no corporate structure survives a sovereign order, forcing Meta to unwind its $2B Manus acquisition and exposing the "China-shedding" playbook for what it has always been: wishful thinking. Meanwhile, both OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidentially for IPO in the same week, creating a $3.6 trillion AI listing pipeline that will either confirm private market pricing or tear it apart in public.

Plus: Continuation Funds, and five AI tools reshaping how modern investors source deals and run diligence.

As always, thank you for subscribing and engaging week-in week out. Still a work in progress, but I appreciate all 2,142 of you.

With Love,
Kev

THIS WEEK IN VC & TECH
What matters this week

LEAD STORY

Meta Begins Dismantling $2 Billion Manus Deal as Beijing Orders Unwind

Beijing's unprecedented order to reverse a completed cross-border acquisition, and Meta's compliance, marks a structural shift in how China-origin startups can be monetized by Western acquirers. The Manus deal was supposed to validate the "China-shedding" playbook, where founders relocate to Singapore or another neutral jurisdiction to make their companies viable for US or European buyers. That thesis is now badly damaged: regulators in Beijing have demonstrated they will follow assets regardless of incorporation address, and they will unwind deals even after closing. VCs backing any startup with Chinese founder lineage, Chinese IP ancestry, or Chinese user data now face a new category of acquisition risk that no amount of corporate restructuring may eliminate.

QUICK HITS

OpenAI / Anthropic IPOs  OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 8, one week after Anthropic did the same, creating an AI IPO pipeline Bloomberg now values at $3.6 trillion. For VCs, the simultaneous listings of the two dominant frontier AI labs will function as a sector-wide stress test: if public markets absorb both at expected prices, the private AI asset class gets a durable pricing anchor; if either stumbles, secondary markdowns across AI portfolios will follow fast.

Taiwan chip export controls  Taiwan's government is drafting new legal authority to restrict AI chip and server exports to China, closing a smuggling loophole that has allowed Nvidia hardware to reach Chinese buyers via Taiwanese intermediaries. If enacted, the controls would tighten the hardware bottleneck around Chinese AI development further and reinforce the commercial advantage of startups and cloud providers building on unrestricted Western chip supply.

China sovereign AI infrastructure  China's NDRC is drafting a blueprint for a state-financed national compute network, targeting 80% domestic chip sourcing from suppliers like Huawei and sidelining Nvidia entirely. The plan signals that Beijing is treating AI infrastructure as a sovereign utility, meaning the competitive landscape for cloud and inference providers in Asia is about to bifurcate into two non-interoperable ecosystems, with real consequences for any portfolio company whose go-to-market crosses that divide.

Microsoft / Xbox  Microsoft's Xbox division is preparing major cuts ahead of the June 30 fiscal year close, with new CEO Asha Sharma, an AI executive with no prior gaming background, slashing marketing budgets and headcount to redirect resources toward an AI-native gaming strategy. The pattern is now consistent across Microsoft, Meta, and Uber: AI reorganizations are being used as justification to permanently reduce organizational layers built for a pre-AI cost structure, compressing the addressable market for enterprise SaaS tools that relied on large headcounts as their unit of pricing.

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MONEY IN MOTION
The largest deals that you should know about

SpaceX just pulled off the largest IPO in history

Pricing at $135/share, raising $75B at a $1.75 trillion valuation. SPCX opened at $150 on day one and closed up ~19% at $160.95, and it's currently hovering around $166 with a $2.1T market cap, comfortably above its IPO floor. The order book told the whole story before it even listed: $150B in orders chasing a $75B raise, more than 2x oversubscribed. Between Starlink's recurring revenue, the xAI acquisition, and the sheer defensibility of its launch infrastructure, this isn't just a space play. It's a vertically integrated AI/infra bet that most institutional investors couldn't afford to sit out. Early price action is choppy as expected, but the long-term conviction is clear.

SpaceX | Launch / Satellite Internet / Physical AI | IPO, $75B raise | Multiple

NEURA Robotics |  Physical AI / Humanoid Robotics  |  Series C, $1.4B  |  Tether Link

Iceye |  Space Tech / Satellite Intelligence  |  Series F, $520M  |  General Atlantic   Link

Cyera |  AI Data Security  |  Series G, $600M  |  Evolution Equity Partners Link

NinjaOne |  IT Operations / Endpoint Management  |  Series C Extension, $400M+  |  Wellington Management Link

PhysicsX |  Physics AI / Industrial Simulation  |  Series C, $300M  |  Temasek Link

VENTURE BITE: One Concept in One Minute
CONTINUATION FUNDS

A continuation fund is not a second chance for a struggling portfolio: it is a GP choosing to stay in their best winner rather than being forced to sell it at the wrong time.

CONCEPT

A continuation fund (also called a GP-led secondary or single-asset continuation vehicle) is a structure where a GP transfers one or more portfolio companies from an end-of-life fund into a new vehicle, giving existing LPs the choice to roll their position or take liquidity at a third-party-set NAV. New investors come in alongside rollers to fund the liquidity for those who want out. The GP restarts the carry clock on the new vehicle, which is both the incentive and the main conflict of interest LPs watch closely.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Understand the mechanics of a single-asset continuation fund, how the LP choice works, how the GP earns new carry, and how to spot when the structure benefits LPs versus when it primarily benefits the GP.

WORKED EXAMPLE

 Step 1: GP hires a placement agent and sets a third-party NAV at $175M

(a 3% discount to the internal mark, set by an independent advisor).

 Step 2: Existing LPs are offered a binary choice:

  OPTION A: Roll into the new continuation fund at $175M NAV.

  OPTION B: Take cash out at $175M (sell to new buyers).

Step 3: 60% of LPs by capital choose to roll. 40% take liquidity.

A secondary buyer funds the $70M needed to cash out the 40%.

 Step 4: The GP sets new continuation fund terms:

  New carry: 20%, new hurdle: 8%, new management fee: 1% on NAV.

 Step 5: Company exits at $400M in year 3 of the new vehicle.

  GP carry = 20% x ($400M - $175M) = 20% x $225M = $45M.

 Key contrast: If the GP had sold at $175M in the old fund, carry would

  have been near zero (DPI was 0.6x, well below the 8% hurdle on a $200M

  fund). The continuation fund resets the carry economics entirely.

Quiz (Difficulty: Medium)

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THIS WEEK’S STANDOUT

🕵️‍♂️ Inven AI

Inven is an AI-native deal sourcing platform that continuously maps over 21 million private companies and lets investors describe a thesis in plain language to receive a structured competitive landscape with categorization and scoring. For VCs hunting proprietary deals before they surface in mainstream databases, Inven directly addresses the speed gap between when companies become fundable and when they become widely visible, making it one of the most practically useful sourcing tools in market right now.

💰Fundraisly - Analyzes 300K+ investors and millions of historical deals to map warm network paths, then automates targeted outreach to generate qualified investor meetings, giving VC firms a reverse view of how their LP base and co-investors evaluate inbound deal flow.

🛳️ Carta CRM - Connects front-office deal sourcing and pipeline tracking directly to live fund accounting data including IRR, TVPI, and DPI, so IR and deal teams work from a single source of truth.

🤚🏽Grasp AI - A Stockholm-based AI analyst platform that automates company and market research for VC and PE teams, producing ready-to-present tearsheets and sector reports by connecting AI agents to verified financial datasets, cutting analyst hours on first-pass diligence..

FROM X
Our favorite post from this week

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THE BOARD
VC jobs, curated for you

Here's what you've been waiting for: exciting job opportunities! To maximize your chances, remember these key tips:

That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed this as much as I did curating it, see you next week!
-Kev