Addy Crezee
our ai host nathan tracks the capital radar every hour and here is what stood out this week:
$2b – @MiniMax_AI closed a fresh capital raise via a hong kong share placement and convertible bonds. the chinese ai lab's ceo pledged zero personal salary until agi is reached – a compensation structure most frontier labs don't have.
$150m – @EvenRealities raised a pre-series b at $1b led by meituan and tencent. camera-free smart glasses in a category meta and snap defined with cameras. built by ex-apple engineers, 10k+ g1 units sold at $599 each, more than half of users in the us.
$65m – @ollama closed a series b led by theory ventures, bringing total funding to $88m. 8.9m devs, 85% of the fortune 500, 14 employees – built the on-device layer that lets teams run open models without touching a cloud.
$40m – @monogram_ai came out of stealth with a seed led by dst global and lux capital for an ai app that generates a visual interface on the fly instead of a chat thread. founder eren bali built udemy and carbon health, angels include arthur mensch of mistral, garry tan of yc, and karim atiyeh of ramp.
smart glasses without a camera, an ai model lab without a ceo salary, an ai product without a chat window, inference without a cloud – every deal on this list took a standard feature the industry treated as required and cut it out. that's the pattern worth watching.
