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Welcome back Chronicler!
This week the public markets started putting a price on AI, and they did not love the number. Anthropic pulled and reissued its IPO range within 80 minutes, SoftBank booked its first loss in almost two years on a data center write-down, and voters said no to data centers in 44 of 45 local ballots. Meanwhile, Sequoia tore up its own operating model and Zipline tripled its valuation on drone delivery.
Plus: 15 VC Jobs, and a new AI sourcing tool in The Stack.
As always, thank you for subscribing and engaging week-in week out.
With Love,
Kev
THIS WEEK IN VC & TECH
What matters this week
LEAD STORY
Late on Nov 9, Anthropic sent bankers a draft filing showing about 867 million shares at $70 to $80, called the figures inaccurate roughly 80 minutes later, and then filed 825 million shares at $70 to $78 for a Nasdaq listing under ANT that could trade as soon as Nov 19. That puts the top end near $1.4 trillion, with some institutions pushing for $1.1 to $1.3 trillion, below the $1.5 trillion Anthropic had wanted.
The lesson for VCs: public buyers, not the last private round, now decide what frontier AI is worth, and they are trimming the price before the roadshow even starts. Growth investors holding marks set off AI comparables should expect a markdown when this deal prices, and should plan secondaries and exit timing around that number, not their last internal price.
The largest AI listing in history lost pricing power before its first roadshow meeting.
QUICK HITS
SoftBank's Surprise Loss SoftBank posted a 1.12 trillion yen quarterly loss, its first in almost two years, driven by a $3.7B write-down on US data center power projects. The biggest AI backer outside the US is pulling back on infrastructure, a warning for any deal underwritten on a cheap compute buildout.
The Data Center Backlash Restrictions on data centers passed in 44 of the 45 completed local referendums in the midterms, and Morgan Stanley is now warning of project delays. For AI infrastructure startups, power and permitting risk is set by state politics, not just by the grid.
Nvidia's Board Probe Nvidia's independent directors hired outside counsel to review Jensen Huang's ties to a Megaspeed executive whom US officials reportedly believe gathered intelligence for Beijing, while her company bought more than $4.8B in Nvidia chips. With a closed-door House briefing set for Nov 18, expect tighter export-control pressure across the whole AI hardware stack.
Redalpine's New Fund The Zurich-founded early backer of Mistral and N26 closed its $250M eighth fund, 25% larger than its 2024 vehicle, for $1M to $15M early-stage checks into robotics and AI drug discovery. Europe's early-stage funds are still growing while the AI megadeals wobble.
PRESENTED BY Kalshi
The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold
28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.
So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.
This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.
Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.
MONEY IN MOTION
The deals that shaped the week
Zipline raised $1.5B at a $21.5B valuation, roughly triple its last mark, which makes drone delivery one of the most valuable physical-world bets in venture. With Walmart taking its partnership nationwide, investors are now paying for logistics at scale, not just the promise of autonomy.
Zipline | Drone delivery / logistics | Growth round, $1.5B | Paradigm, WCM, Layer Global | Nov 5, 2026 Link
Fal | AI inference infrastructure | Series F, $1.3B ($1.65B with Series E) | Bessemer Venture Partners | Nov 3, 2026 Link
Applied Compute | AI cloud / training and inference | $350M | Elad Gil | Nov 3, 2026 Link
Nominal | Hardware testing software / defense | Series C, $240M | Lightspeed, Insight Partners | Nov 9, 2026 Link
Harbinger | EV trucks / defense | Series D, $240M | Tiger Global, Capricorn, Ridgeline | Nov 5, 2026 Link
Money is going to two places: AI compute and inference (Fal, Applied Compute) and physical-world companies with defense exposure (Zipline, Nominal, Harbinger). Valuations doubled or tripled within months for companies with real revenue or real deployments, even with an AI stock sell-off underway.
AI TOOLKIT FOR VCs
Our curated stack for the modern investor
Real-time dictation, built in-house, benchmarked against the big labs
Real-time speech recognition is harder than batch transcription. You don't get to wait for the end of the sentence. Wispr Flow built its own real-time model, Canto.
On a challenge set of messy audio (music, traffic, nearby voices, whispering, far-field speech), it had the lowest word error rate among the real-time models tested. It also tied for the lowest error rate on LibriSpeech. On 10 hours of real dictations from 2,300+ speakers, it beat every model tested, including Google, OpenAI, AssemblyAI and Deepgram.
Talk to Cursor, Claude Code or Slack, and get clean, formatted text as you go. Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android.
THIS WEEK'S STANDOUT
PitchBook launched Origin at Web Summit, a standalone AI-native sourcing product for early-stage venture covering about 25 million companies (15 million of them new to PitchBook) and 250 million people profiles. It uses behavioral signals, founder intelligence and its own ML models to surface stealth, pre-funding and bootstrapped companies, with investor-tuned scoring, real-time alerts and CRM integrations. The biggest private markets data vendor is now going head-on with Harmonic-style tools for the pre-seed and seed hunt.
73 Strings Extraction Agent - Pulls KPIs from portfolio company reports, maps them to your fund's reporting structure and links every figure back to its source sentence, with human sign-off before anything saves.
Portfolio by Hemrock - The open-source fund admin app now lets AI agents draft journal entries, gather K-1 inputs and pull LP statements over MCP, all staged for approval and audit-logged.
iConnections Violet - The AI capital-introduction platform now has Preqin private markets data built in, so GPs can research allocators and prep for LP meetings in one place.
Claude Data and Claude Sheets - Anthropic's new tools connect Claude to data warehouses and CRMs and add team spreadsheets, so you can build portfolio KPI views or pipeline analyses in plain language.
FROM X
This week's best take
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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:
Apply early and tailor your application to each specific job posting.
Research the Venture Capital firm thoroughly, including their portfolio companies and investment thesis.
Customize your CV to highlight the strengths most relevant to the role.
Go the extra mile: Identify a startup that aligns with the VC's portfolio and investment strategy. Then, craft a two-page memo explaining why you believe it would be an excellent fit for their investment
🔥Must Apply | 🌱Impact Investing | 🧑💻Remote Role | 🥳Easy Apply
🇺🇸 Toyota Research Institute - VC Associate
🇺🇸 Citi Ventures - Investor
🇺🇸 Morgan Stanley - Vice President Growth & Innovation
🇺🇸 UoM Biomedical Fund - Analyst
🇺🇸 Vanguard - Head of Venture Investing
🇺🇸 Future Back Ventures - Managing Partner
🇬🇧 Entrepreneurs First - Senior Associate
🇬🇧 HSBC Ventures - Director
🇬🇧 Goldman Sachs Private Credit - Analyst
🇬🇧 Eurazeo - Internship
🇬🇧 Blackrock - Venture & Growth Debt Analyst
🇫🇷 Bpi - Junior Analyst
🇫🇷 Eurazeo - Internship
🇩🇪 BIVF - Investment Manager
🇪🇸 Plug & Play Tech Center - Fund Operations Manager
How was the newsletter today?
That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed this as much as I did curating it, see you next week!
-Kev