🕶️ Big Tech’s Get-Out-of-Jail Card

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Ten bullets of updates

1. 🧬 CoFertility offers free egg freezing for women who join its donor-matching program, turning fertility preservation into a startup-powered, pay-it-forward model.

2. 🔓 Sex chatbot apps are leaking explicit user messages at alarming rates, exposing fantasies, fetishes, and personal data through shoddy security and unvetted AI platforms.

3.  👾 “Vibe” over code? Some VCs admit they can’t assess technical skills—so they invest based on founder charisma, fueling criticism of hype-driven funding in tech.

4. 🎙️ Hackers reprogrammed Silicon Valley crosswalks to mimic Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s voices, turning tech bros into literal traffic guides—until the city shut it down.

5. 🚚 Amazon expands driver training to include emergency response skills—meaning your next package delivery could come with CPR, defibrillators, or life-saving aid.

6. 📵 Zuckerberg says Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp may block news in the U.S. if forced to pay publishers—echoing his fight against similar laws abroad.

7. 🛒 Startup Zeen pivots from social shopping to newsletters, aiming to be a Substack for creators who want community without the algorithm drag.

8. 🚛 Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics plans to go public via SPAC, betting big on self-driving freight despite a cooling market for AVs.

9. 🤖 Hugging Face acquires humanoid robotics startup Ubika, signaling a push beyond AI models into real-world, human-shaped hardware and embodied intelligence. (We’re cooking up a video on humanoid robots—stay tuned right here 👀)

10. 📍 Chipolo’s new tracker beats AirTag at its own game—working with both Apple and Google’s finding networks for cross-platform lost item recovery.

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🧨 Trump’s Revenge Tour: Big Tech Edition

Trump’s allies are quietly working to dismantle the most aggressive antitrust cases the U.S. has ever brought against tech. If they succeed, the DOJ’s lawsuits against Apple, Google, and Amazon—years in the making—could vanish almost overnight.

These cases weren’t just legal battles; they were a reset button on how the U.S. handles tech power. But under Trump, the narrative has flipped: from “Big Tech is too powerful and biased” to “Big Tech should be left alone.”

If these lawsuits fall apart, it won’t just be a legal loss—it could kill a decade’s worth of momentum around reining in Silicon Valley.

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AI Has a Fatal Flaw—And Nobody Can Fix It

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Is Your Business AI-Ready?

AI is everywhere, but understanding how it can drive real value for your business is difficult to unpack. That's why Brewster Consulting Group offers an AI Maturity Audit to help organizations understand immediate AI use cases and develop a long-term roadmap for more advanced AI integration.

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These companies just raised money

1. 🧠 OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup, Safe Superintelligence, is reportedly valued at $32B—without a product, pitch deck, or public prototype.

2. ⚡ Conifer raises $20M to scale its plug-and-play electric hub motor, aiming to simplify EV conversions with a sleek, drop-in solution for any car.

3. 🌳 Brazil’s Mombak secures $17M in debt funding to scale its Amazon reforestation projects, turning carbon removal into a high-growth climate finance play.

4.  🪞 Autograph raises $2.6M pre-seed to preserve memories through AI-powered interviews, offering users a way to capture life stories in their own voice.

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🥶 The Funding Freeze Returns

After a short-lived AI sugar high, venture capital is cooling off—again. According to PitchBook, U.S. startup funding fell by 26% last quarter, the worst Q1 since 2018. Late-stage deals were especially hard hit, with many startups sitting in fundraising limbo and exits at their lowest point in years.

Even early-stage funding—usually more resilient—is showing signs of strain. The IPO window is barely cracked open, and acquisitions aren’t helping much either. For many VCs, it’s back to “wait and see,” while founders are being told to stretch their runways and scale back ambitions.

Some are still betting on AI to reignite the fire, but the overall mood? Survival mode.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

1. Founders Basketball | April 16 | NYC

2. Startup Open Mic by EvolveX & CEDAT | April 16  | Bengaluru

3. Crash Course in Startup Fundraising  | April 23 | Online

4. Crash Course in Financial Modeling | April 24 | Online

5. Startup Grind Conference 2025 | April 19-30 | USA

6. Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator | Deadline: April 28 | USA

7. Startup Battlefield 200 | Deadline: June 9 | Global

8. Entrepreneur First London - Summer | Deadline: July 1 | UK 

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