Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Agility Robotics IPO: What it means for Pittsburgh
The robotics firm, which has a local office on Lawrenceville’s Robotics Row, announced this week it’s merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special-purpose acquisition company built specifically to take startups like Agility public. The transaction, which values Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, is expected to close later this year. Once the paperwork clears, the new joint company will go by Agility and trade under the ticker “AGLT.”
The AI Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation – WSJ
President Trump’s trade wars have waned. The price of gas is finally falling. But inflation has a new catalyst: America’s massive artificial-intelligence build-out is beginning to push up prices on everything from smartphones to electricity.
Kotek’s prosperity council pushes for lower taxes, fewer regulations • Oregon Capital Chronicle
The numbers Kotek’s prosperity council put forth in its 33-page report and shared in a council meeting Thursday afternoon paint a negative picture of Oregon’s economy: The state is second-to-last in the nation when it comes to increases in employment, 41% of Oregonians live either below the federal poverty level or are unable to afford basic needs, and the state’s unemployment rate is at 5.2%, a figure that has remained above the national average for months. The report comes as U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data identified Oregon as the only West Coast state to lose jobs overall since last year.
🔮 The state of the AI economy
Over the past 12 months, the AI ecosystem generated $110 billion in revenue when you remove double-counting. The growth rate is healthy. Annualizing the most recent month’s revenues indicates a $175 billion revenue run rate.
Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data
We introduce Autodata, a general method that enables AI agents to act as data scientists who build high quality training and evaluation data. We show how to train (meta-optimize) such a data scientist agent, so that it learns to create even stronger data. We describe the overall formulation, and a specific practical implementation, Agentic Self-Instruct. We conduct experiments on computer science research tasks, legal reasoning tasks and reasoning with mathematical objects, where we obtain improved results compared to classical synthetic dataset creation methods. Further, meta-optimizing the data scientist agent itself delivers an even larger performance uplift. Agentic data creation provides a way to convert increased inference compute into higher quality model training. Overall, we believe this direction has the potential to change the way we build AI data.
6 Startup Investors On What It Will Take To Fund More Black Founders
The venture model is built around risk-taking, he noted, but there’s a double standard for white and non-white entrepreneurs: “A Black founder’s first failure gets treated as confirmation,” he said. “A white founder’s first failure gets treated as experience.”
The age of the solopreneur
In 2023, roughly four million Americans earned their primary income as solopreneurs, generating over $100,000 in annual revenue. That figure has risen substantially from the mid two-million range of the early 2010s, a period when the infrastructure enabling solo business at scale—Stripe, Substack, Kajabi, and other platforms—was still small in scale and more limited in capabilities.
Fundraising Friction is Killing Your Round – Here’s How to Remove It – Tremendous
Make it as easy as possible for investors to learn about your company, get excited, and book a meeting. Those meetings turn into checks.
What being “inspiring” actually means
In other words, your argument has to actually make sense. If you passionately talk about an idea that doesn’t make sense, it won’t matter. No amount of great delivery can save you.
Prosperity Council’s Report Challenges Kotek to Signal That Oregon Is Open for Business — Oregon Journalism Project
The 15-member panel of business and labor leaders proposed four modest tax code changes, replacing the Climate Protection Program, and some less controversial reforms.
Om Malik, 1966-2026 – On my Om
We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn.
Gov. Kotek’s prosperity council urges Oregon leaders to cut taxes, regulations to spur growth – oregonlive.com
The release of the council’s report now focuses the pressure on Kotek to decide which of the recommendations she will champion as she seeks reelection this fall. It also raises questions about whether she and top Democratic lawmakers are willing to support tax changes that will almost certainly be controversial.
From Great Individual Judgement to a Great Decision-Making Organization — Oregon Venture Fund
We recently had the opportunity to work with one of our portfolio companies, Source, on implementing a lightweight decision-making framework with their leadership team. The experience reinforced something we’ve observed across many of our investments: effective organizational decision-making is a distinct skill from personal judgment, and it requires intentional structure to develop.
We Almost Built the Wrong Tool for Our Sales Team
Five minutes before a meeting I’ll figure out what the person across the table actually cares about, what I should be careful not to bring up, and what I should lead with, and then I weave all of that into how I talk to them. Everyone who’s genuinely good at this does some private version of it in their head.
Start Your Startup | Upstart Collective
Serial entrepreneur Josh Carter helps founders cut through the noise by breaking down the startup journey into clear, actionable stages. Drawing from his experience building companies and working alongside hundreds of founders, he helps entrepreneurs understand the proper order of operations, from validating an idea and finding customers to building traction and preparing to scale.
