🕶️ Nvidia, Trump, and the $17B chip question

From geopolitics to superintelligent agents — founders are watching closely.

Author

Paula Echeverria
July 17, 2025

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Big players are threading needles, small startups are cutting corners (and costs), and even WeWork’s old legal chief is back; but this time with AI doing the billable hours.

From Nvidia’s geopolitical dance to AI reading your Slack threads and a ship that literally makes limestone while sailing, today’s edition is all about business models getting... weirder, faster, and more automated.

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Ten bullets of updates

  1. ⚖️ WeWork’s ex-legal chief launches Covenant, an AI-native firm cutting billable hours by automating legal reviews for institutional investors.

  2. 🌶️ Haitian founder grows pikliz brand fast on Amazon, balancing cash flow stress and family strains.

  3. ⚡ Joby Aviation doubles its pilot eVTOL facility to 435,500 sq ft in Marina, CA; ramping up to 24 air taxis per year as it races to launch services in Dubai and U.S. cities by 2026.

  4. 🙋 AI agents are democratizing agentic commerce; small businesses are now using smart tools for personalized services, automated inventory and global reach, traditionally reserved for big retailers.

  5. 🚪 Nextdoor adds AI picks, emergency alerts, and local news partnerships to boost engagement and support journalism.

  6. đź“Ś Reddit’s new business guide helps brands navigate advertising best practices, community engagement, and platform-specific content strategies.

  7. 🌀 xAI is hiring a “Fullstack Engineer – Waifus” with pay up to $440K to build anime-style AI companions like Grok’s “Ani” and “Bad Rudi” avatars.

  8. ⚓ Seabound’s cargo ship captures 95% of its CO₂ and converts it into limestone for cement production while sailing.

  9. 🇨🇳 China ramps up AI ambition; leveraging state-led investment across chips, compute, and applications as it races to close the gap with U.S. leadership by 2030.

  10. 🤝 Hiring for skills alone can backfire; companies should focus on cultural fit and real-world problem-solving to build stronger teams.

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🧨 Nvidia’s China Comeback

First Washington cracked down. Then Nvidia lobbied hard. Now Trump’s administration has quietly lifted key restrictions, giving Nvidia a green light to resume AI chip sales to China, a market worth $17B annually to the company. CEO Jensen Huang won’t take credit for the reversal, calling it his “job to inform” rather than persuade, but his whirlwind meetings in D.C. and Beijing show just how central Nvidia is to the global AI arms race.

This is a case study in the uneasy dance between two rival superpowers and the companies caught in the middle. As Beijing pushes for self-reliance and Washington doubles down on export controls, Huang is threading a diplomatic needle: keeping Nvidia competitive in a country that accounts for half the world’s AI researchers while sidestepping the next round of trade war flashpoints.

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Startup Budgeting (And What Most Founders Get Wrong)

In this video, we walk through the framework we use to budget how much funding your startup needs — using Slidebean’s Financial Modeling tool. Learn how to plan expenses, track runway, and map out realistic growth milestones. Part of our Financial Modeling Bootcamp.

🕶️ Subscribe for more videos đź•¶ď¸Ź 

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See How Much You're Pre-Approved At 0% Interest

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These companies just raised money

  1. 🎶 Mantis Ventures, led by The Chainsmokers, closes a $100M third fund, bringing total assets to $225M with a focus on B2B and cybersecurity startups.

  2. 🧠 Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab raises $2B at a $12B valuation; pursuing human-like multimodal AI with no public product yet.

  3. 🔥 Amogy raises $80 M to scale its ammonia-to-power tech for ships and data centers, cutting emissions by converting ammonia into electricity via fuel cells—decarbonizing maritime and industrial sectors.

  4. 💰️ India commits to quantum supremacy. QpiAI raises $32M Series A, co-led by India’s $750M National Quantum Mission, targeting full-stack quantum computers and AI integration for enterprise use globally.

  5. 💸 Rex Salisbury’s Cambrian Ventures raises a $20M second fund, doubling down on pre-seed fintech bets despite the sector slowdown.

  6. 🌱 Velveteen Ventures, one of few Native American–led VC firms, launches a $20M fund to back early-stage healthcare, climate, and consumer startups.

  7. đź“Ť Felt AI raises $15M to simplify GIS with natural-language maps, empowering users to monitor wildfire, flood, deforestation, and more via AI-driven geospatial tools.

  8. đź“Š Rwazi raises $12M Series A led by Bonfire Ventures to power its AI-driven consumer insights platform, offering real-time market intelligence across 190 countries.

  9. ⚙️ Laka raises $10.4M to expand its collective insurance for e-bike riders, with fees tied to monthly community claims.

  10. 🚀 Auriga Space nets $6M seed funding to build an electromagnetic launch track that speeds rockets to hypersonic velocities, cutting propellant use and enabling reusable, ground-based orbital launches

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Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 1,000,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.

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SaaS Growth Calculator

A growth calculator that lets you forecast the impact of your ARPU (average revenue per user) and Churn Rate on the long-term potential of your subscription business.

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🧠 A Smarter AI Learns to Read the Codebase

While Big Tech rushes to build AI agents that browse the web or mimic human workflows, Brooklyn-based startup Reflection is taking a different bet: teaching AI to master the art of building software itself. Their new agent, Asimov, doesn’t just generate code; it reads it, studies your Slack threads and emails, and learns how your team actually works so it can become a genuine collaborator, not just an autocomplete tool.

Reflection’s founders, DeepMind alumni with expertise in reinforcement learning, think this could be a stepping stone toward true superintelligence; an AI that eventually designs products, writes code, and even invents new algorithms autonomously. Investors like Sequoia are buying into the vision, but Reflection will face heavy competition as Meta, OpenAI, and others race toward the same goal: an AI smart enough to understand not just language, but organizations themselves.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

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