NVIDIA & China are best friends again, or are they?

Welcome back Chronicler!

This week Washington confirmed what a lot of us suspected: the 'reopening' of Nvidia chip sales to China is mostly paperwork so far, with only a trickle of H200s actually shipping under the new license regime. Compute scarcity in China isn't easing, which keeps propping up valuations for AI infrastructure startups everywhere else.

Meanwhile the checks kept flying: a chipmaker, a rocket engine startup, and a video generation company all landed nine and ten figure rounds in the same week, proof that capital is chasing hard tech and vertical AI just as hard as it's chasing frontier labs.

Plus: how tag-along rights give minority holders an exit when the majority sells, and a startup intelligence tool VCs are using to find deals before they hit the usual databases.

As always, thank you for subscribing and engaging week in week out. Still a work in progress, but I appreciate all 2,281 of you.

With Love,
Kev

THIS WEEK IN VC & TECH
What matters this week

LEAD STORY

US confirms first Nvidia H200 chip shipments to China under new license regime

A senior Commerce official told Congress that only a handful of Nvidia H200 chips have actually reached China and Hong Kong under the license system Washington rolled out this spring, confirming that the reopening of China sales is symbolic rather than commercially meaningful for now. For VCs, this matters less for Nvidia's revenue and more as a signal: compute scarcity in China is not easing, which keeps propping up valuations for US and allied AI infrastructure startups that Chinese buyers cannot access, while incentivizing domestic Chinese chip alternatives that could eventually compete globally. The gap between the political theater of licensed sales and the trickle of actual volume also tells portfolio companies dependent on Nvidia supply that allocation to non-China customers remains effectively unconstrained by these headlines. Expect GPU-dependent AI startups to keep treating chip export policy as a tailwind rather than a risk, at least through this news cycle.

QUICK HITS

White House / AI power costs  The administration is organizing utilities and hyperscalers around a new voluntary pledge to keep AI-driven electricity demand from raising costs for households and businesses. Power availability and pricing remain the binding constraint on AI infrastructure buildouts that many VC-backed companies depend on for compute access.

Perfect Corp going private  The AI beauty and AR software company, controlled by founder Alice Chang, signed a definitive merger agreement to take the NYSE-listed firm private at a 48 percent premium. It is a rare example of an Asian-founded AI company exiting the public markets rather than debuting on them.

KNDS IPO  Europe's defense sector notched one of its largest listings in years as the Franco-German tank maker went public via a pure secondary sale, cashing out the founding family after 144 years while France and Germany each retain 40 percent stakes under a ten-year lockup. The float relied entirely on institutional buyers, with no new capital raised for the company itself.

Google Android antitrust probe Switzerland's competition authority opened a preliminary investigation after Google dropped the Android 'choice screen' for default search engines there while keeping it in the EU. It is another data point in the steady drip of European regulatory actions targeting Big Tech distribution defaults, distinct from the larger US antitrust fights.

PRESENTED BY AutoSEO

That SEO task that keeps getting pushed? AutoSEO handles it permanently. Articles, mentions, backlinks — running after setup without you touching it again. Over 2,500 small business owners went from "I'll get to it" to "it's already done."

Get my free plan

MONEY IN MOTION
The largest deals that you should know about

A humanoid rocket engine startup and an AI chip maker both landed nine figure checks the same week that a video generation company topped a two billion dollar valuation, showing investors are just as hungry for hard tech as they are for software AI.

SambaNova  AI infrastructure and chips | Series F, $1 billion (first close) | Lead: General Atlantic | July 8, 2026  Link

Prime Intellect  AI agents and training platform | Series A, $130 million | Lead: Radical Ventures | July 8, 2026  Link

Venus Aerospace  Aerospace and defense | Series B, $91 million | Lead: Mercury | July 8, 2026  Link

PixVerse  AI video generation | Series C extension, $439 million total | Lead: Alibaba-led extension tranche | July 13, 2026  Link

Chai Discovery  AI drug discovery | Series C, $400 million | Lead: Index Ventures | July 14, 2026  Link

VENTURE BITE: One Concept in One Minute
TAG-ALONG Rights

Tag-along rights aren't a favor to small investors, they're the only thing stopping a majority holder from selling control and leaving everyone else stuck.

CONCEPT

A tag-along right, also called a co-sale right, gives minority shareholders the option, not the obligation, to join a sale when a majority shareholder sells their stake to a third party. It is the mirror image of a drag-along right: drag-along forces the minority to sell, tag-along lets the minority choose to sell alongside the majority on the same price and terms. Without it, a majority holder could cash out or hand control to a new, unknown buyer while minority holders are left stuck in a company they no longer have a say in.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Show how to calculate the proportional number of shares a minority holder can sell under a standard tag-along right, and what they receive at the deal price.

WORKED EXAMPLE

Investor X is the majority shareholder, holding 600,000 shares out of 1,000,000 fully diluted shares (60% of the company). A buyer offers to purchase 300,000 of Investor X's shares at $8.00 per share. Angel Y, a minority holder with tag-along rights, owns 100,000 shares (10% of the company).

Step 1: calculate the percentage of their own holdings Investor X is selling. 300,000 / 600,000 = 50%.

Step 2: under a standard proportional tag-along right, Angel Y may sell that same 50% share of their own holdings. 50% x 100,000 = 50,000 shares.

Step 3: Angel Y sells those 50,000 shares to the same buyer at the same $8.00 per share price. 50,000 x $8.00 = $400,000.

Step 4: without the tag-along right, Angel Y would have no ability to join this sale and would remain a minority holder in a company now partly owned by a new, unvetted buyer.

Quiz (Difficulty: Medium)

AI TOOLKIT FOR VCs
Our curated stack for the modern investor

Skip the sales call. Walk through Gladly's interface yourself — the AI suggestions, the unified customer view, the full conversation thread. 15 minutes, no installation, no commitment.

See it yourself

THIS WEEK’S STANDOUT

🕵️‍♂️ Harmonic

Harmonic is a startup intelligence platform that continuously indexes the web to surface new company formations, hiring signals, and product launches, often weeks before targets show up in Crunchbase or PitchBook. It layers a firm's own network, LinkedIn, email, calendar, CRM, onto its database of more than 35 million venture-backable companies to flag warm intro paths automatically. With deal sourcing competition intensifying in 2026, this kind of earlier and more complete signal matters directly to sourcing velocity for VCs.

🧘🏾 Affinity  -  Relationship intelligence CRM that auto-builds contact and company profiles from Gmail and calendar data and scores relationship strength to surface intro paths across a fund's network.

📊 Standard Metrics  -  Portfolio monitoring platform where portfolio companies connect financial systems directly so investors get normalized KPIs and AI-flagged anomalies like burn rate spikes or revenue drops.

🔍 SaaStr.ai Pitch Deck Analyzer  -  Free AI tool that scores uploaded pitch decks on traction and deck quality, giving VCs a fast first-pass benchmark against thousands of decks already graded.

🤑 Evalyze  -  Combines AI pitch deck analysis with investor matching, useful for VCs who want a quick readiness score and comparable scoring across inbound deal flow.

FROM X
Our favorite post from this week

PRESENTED BY WISPR FLOW

Speak your prompts into ChatGPT or Claude and get detailed, paste-ready input that actually gives you useful output. Wispr Flow captures what you'd cut when typing. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

Try Wispr Flow free

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