Friday Founders: Issue #4 | Highlights from 27 June – 3 July 2025

Hi Founders,

It’s Friday, 4 July 2025, and your feed probably exploded with AI mega-rounds, strategic tuck-ins, and fresh EU wrangling. Grab a quick skim—these are the 10 stories you’ll want on your radar before the weekend.

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1. 💰 Elon Musk’s xAI hauls $10 B (debt + equity)

TL; DR: Morgan Stanley stitched together a $5 B secured-notes package and a parallel $5 B strategic equity round to scale Grok and build a Memphis “Colossus” super-computer.

Why you should care: Capital this cheap and this large signal that GPU-first infra is still a land-grab; smaller LLM vendors will feel pricing pressure as xAI chases an $80 B valuation.

Read more → Reuters

2. 🤝 Genesis AI emerges from stealth with $105 M seed

TL; DR: Eclipse and Khosla co-led a nine-digit seed to fund a universal robotics foundation model—one engine to power lab bots, warehouse arms, and domestic helpers.

Why you should care: The race is on to own the physical AI stack; founders building simulation, sensor fusion, or edge-compute tooling just found a whale customer.

Read more → TechCrunch

3. 📈 Figma files for a $1.5 B IPO

TL; DR: The S-1 shows $749 M 2024 revenue (+48 % YoY) and targets a $15–20 B valuation with dual-class shares keeping control in Dylan Field’s hands.

Why you should care: A successful listing resets late-stage multiples for design-collaboration SaaS—handy comps if you sell into the product-dev tool chain.

Read more → Tech Startups

4. 🌿 Climeworks raises $162 M to scale carbon capture

TL; DR: BigPoint Holding and Partners Group led the round, pushing the Swiss DAC pioneer past $1 B total funding and closer to its 1-billion-tons-by-2050 vision.

Why you should care: Corporate carbon-credit budgets keep expanding; B2B marketplaces and MRV (measurement-reporting-verification) startups can draft behind this growth.

Read more → Tech Startups

5. ⚖️ EU’s AI Code of Practice slips to late 2025

TL; DR: Brussels confirmed guidance for general-purpose AI will land “by end-2025,” six months behind schedule, despite industry pleas to pause the AI Act clock.

Why you should care: The delay buys time but not amnesty. Use the extra runway to lock down model-card provenance and red-team logs—auditors will still ask.

Read more → Reuters

6. 🏛️ Google warns DMA is stifling innovation

TL; DR: In a speech leaked ahead of an EU workshop, Google claims Digital Markets Act tweaks have already raised travel-ticket prices and cut direct bookings by 30 %.

Why you should care: Expect DMA guidance to tighten, not relax. If you rely on Google’s referral traffic, diversify funnels while A/B testing EU-specific flows.

Read more → Reuters 

7. 🔥 Honeywell buys Li-ion Tamer for battery-safety edge

TL; DR: The July 1 tuck-in adds off-gas detection for thermal-runaway events to Honeywell’s building-automation line.

 
Why you should care: As EV and storage mandates spread, safety-sensor IP is becoming a premium M&A target—signal for founders tackling battery analytics or fire-mitigation tech.

Read more → Honeywell

8. 🚄 Wabtec snaps up Evident’s Inspection-Tech division

TL; DR: The July 1 acquisition doubles Wabtec’s Digital Intelligence TAM to $16 B by folding in non-destructive-testing hardware and analytics.

Why you should care: Rail and heavy-industry giants are hungry for predictive-maintenance data. Plug-and-play industrial-AI startups should prep integration pitches now.

Read more → Web Corporation

9. 💻 Lenovo launches Chromebook Plus 14 with built-in on-device AI

TL; DR: Google and Lenovo teamed up on a $499 laptop that ships smart-tab grouping, live image-editing, and generative Jupiter wallpapers—no cloud round-trip required.

Why you should care: Low-cost edge devices will normalize offline AI expectations; SaaS features that lag >100 ms may feel dated overnight.

Read more → Google Blog

10. 🖼️ Alibaba debuts Qwen VLo and pledges ¥380 B ($53 B) for AI infra

TL; DR: The new multimodal model generates and edits images with “progressive rendering,” while Alibaba earmarks a record war-chest for data centers and silicon.

Why you should care: Chinese hyperscalers aren’t sitting still; global infra prices may keep falling, but competition for GPUs and talent will stay fierce.

Read more → TS2 Tech