The week in San Francisco technology, read and picked by hand. No algorithm, nothing in here because someone paid for it.
Tuesday · · 4 minute read
OpenAI seeks new funding round at $1.5 trillion valuation
According to The New York Times, OpenAI is seeking a new funding round at a $1.5 trillion valuation. This figure is approximately double its most recent $730 billion mark. It is also considerably higher than the $1.2 trillion valuation previously reported by the Financial Times.
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-17
Arcee AI raises $150 million Series B at $1 billion valuation
Arcee AI has raised at least $150 million in Series B funding, valuing the company at $1 billion pre-money. Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Emergence Capital led the round. Microsoft’s M12, AI10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, P7, and Wipro also participated.
Arcee AI, founded in 2023
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-17
Angle Health raises $600M Series C at $2.7B valuation
Angle Health announced Friday it raised a $200 million Series C. This was alongside a $400 million tender offer. The company’s valuation reached $2.7 billion. Vitruvian Partners led the round. Town Hall Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Portage Ventures, PruVen Capital, and Y Combinator also participated. The company expects the round to close later this month.
Angle Health, a startup founded in 2019, provides level-funded health plans for small businesses. These plans sit between fully insured and self-funded options. Businesses make predictable payments and are insured against higher-than-expected costs. They can also receive a share of the surplus if expenses remain low. Angle Health states its AI-powered platform serves over 5,000 businesses and is profitable. The tender offer allows employees to cash out some of their shares.
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-19
TypeSafe AI releases Jev, a non-LLM model for calibrated decisions
TypeSafe AI recently released Jev, a new transformer-based model that produces probabilities instead of text. Diogo Almeida, a former OpenAI researcher who helped build ChatGPT, developed Jev to address the limitations of large language models for automation. He left OpenAI two years ago to found TypeSafe AI.
Jev offers calibrated decisions, making it cheap, fast, and unable to hallucinate because users define its outputs. Vercel, for instance, reported Jev was five to 18 times quicker and more accurate than OpenAI’s ChatGPT Luna 5.6 for safety classification. Bryo AI CTO Nikhil Mudholkar noted Jev’s confidence scores and lower cost compared to Gemini for email classification. Almeida stated, "We have lightning in a bottle, and yet it is not useful." The model is expected to augment LLMs by monitoring agent behaviour and enabling model routing. Competitors are anticipated to emerge.
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-19
AWS customer data lost due to drone attacks in Middle East
AWS acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data following drone attacks on its facilities in Bahrain and the UAE. These incidents took place at the outset of the war, and the affected facilities have largely remained offline since.
Reported by Newcomer, 2026-09-18
Anthropic opens biology wet lab in San Francisco Bay Area
Anthropic has established a biology wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. This facility will conduct physical lab work to test AI’s contribution to biology and drug discovery. Claude is responsible for directing and carrying out the research, alongside human involvement.
Reported by MTS, 2026-09-19
AI error nearly prompted US military action against Chinese vessel
A chatbot error nearly led the US military to board a Chinese vessel in the Middle East this past spring. The AI falsely identified the ship’s cargo as nuclear-weapons components. Aircraft were airborne before officials corrected the mistake, as the Pentagon increases its AI use for intelligence and battlefield decisions.
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-19
Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic’s R&D
Anthropic’s LLM Claude now leads 26% of the company’s research and development, a rise from zero in February. Humans primarily offer high-level direction. Internally, Anthropic also employs around 30,000 AI agents for research and engineering tasks.
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-18
Mayor Lurie’s 90-day strategy to clean up Mission BART plazas continues indefinitely
Mayor Daniel Lurie announced that his summer’s ’90-day strategy’ will continue indefinitely. The initiative, focused on cleaning up Mission BART plazas, addresses open drug consumption, drug dealing, and fencing of stolen goods at 16th and Mission.
Reported by Mission Local, 2026-09-16
Bruno’s nightclub reopens after six-year closure
Bruno’s, the nightclub at 2389 Mission St, reopened its doors last weekend. It had been closed for over six years following the pandemic. The return of Bruno’s brings back a venue for dancing, cocktails, and live DJs.
Reported by Mission Local, 2026-09-16
Palantir, Nvidia, Booz Allen curb use of Anthropic and OpenAI models
Palantir, Nvidia, and Booz Allen are curbing their use of models from Anthropic and OpenAI. This action is due to concerns about proprietary data. Palantir is seeking zero-data-retention guarantees, and Nvidia is steering sensitive work to its own Nemotron models.
Reported by StrictlyVC, 2026-09-15
AI-powered system helps founders build investor lists
A "Claude Code engine" and a new scoring system have been introduced to improve fundraising outreach. The system scores investors on "Fit," "Recency," and "Reach." It employs a four-layer process, including curated lists, scraping, enrichment, and verification, to generate more effective investor targets.
Reported by The VC Corner, 2026-09-20
Editor’s note
The messaging hype around AI has changed but the fundamentals remain, compute power alone will not add the intelligence in AI. It doesn’t change the power of the tech and impact it can have, but it does bring in to question the viability of the big players financial model over the long term.
