Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
RAJ Sports announces lineup of speakers for Epicenter Week – Portland Business Journal
Event organizers have just announced an impressive lineup of speakers. Notable names include eight-time Olympic medal winner Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, head coach of the University of South Carolina’s women’s team Dawn Staley, LPGA superstar Michelle Wie West and Reddit co-founder (and husband of Serena Williams) Alexis Ohanian.
SBA Awards $50 Million to Technical Schools and Community Colleges in Support of Small Manufacturers | U.S. Small Business Administration
Through its College of Engineering and its community college partners, OSU has extensive experience providing hands-on, in-person technical assistance, tools, and training to small manufacturing businesses. OSU has the demonstrated capacity to deliver manufacturing-related training and technical assistance to small business concerns, supported by its advanced manufacturing faculty, laboratories, and federal grant-management infrastructure. Firms will receive training and assistance tied to real production and business-development needs. Workers will gain practical skills in machining, welding, additive manufacturing, inspection, robotics, smart manufacturing, lean manufacturing, energy efficiency, quality systems, and federal contracts.
Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems – WSJ
Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.
The Defender’s Window
The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities of a typical threat actor will evolve in upcoming months. I’ve spoken with many organizations over the past few weeks, and one theme is clear: they know they need to fundamentally uplevel their cybersecurity practices with unprecedented speed. In this post, I’ll share what we’re doing to defend OpenAI, concrete steps other organizations can take today, and why now is the time to act.
Your loading screen is a brand deck | Vibes DIY Blog
The slowest moment in Vibes DIY is the first one: you type a prompt, and an LLM spends a minute or two writing your app. We work hard to shave that wait — streaming previews, warm shards, precomputed chips — but some of it is irreducible. So the question became: what do you do with a captive minute?
State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations
In the AI world, time feels compressed. A few months after our spring report in our biannual analysis worked through the ecosystem, there are quite a few findings that we have observed until this summer. This report lays out these observations from January to August 2026 and presents the data behind each one.
AI companies look to the ocean as a place to put more data centers
Underwater data centers could help AI grow while easing some of the pressure on land, energy and water. But the real test is whether the ocean can become AI’s next computing frontier without becoming its next environmental problem.
Semiconductor Giants Are Busy Backing Startups This Year
In turn, semiconductor giants are investing record sums in startups. So far this year, the sector’s most valuable companies have participated in rounds collectively valued at over $250 billion, per Crunchbase data. That’s multiples above prior high marks.
Go inside Endurance Energy, the Seattle startup tapping underwater volcanoes for geothermal power – GeekWire
Next month, Endurance Energy will send Adélie — a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin — to an undersea volcano off the Oregon coast, tapping hydrothermal fluids that can reach 750 degrees Fahrenheit.
Weekly Review: The Open Stack Grows Up – by Sam Keen
A pattern runs through this edition: the open layer of the stack is doing serious work now. A 30B Apache 2.0 agent fits on one GPU, post-training alone lifts open weights to the top of Terminal Bench, and open routers and harnesses are becoming real infrastructure.
Beachhead Segment: The One GTM Decision You Can’t Wing
By the time most of us get involved in go-to-market, the product is already largely a given input. We can influence it at the margins, but it exists. Which means the customer decision is usually the first serious decision that is actually ours to make.
(2007) Jive Software secures $15 million
Big news coming out of Jive Software today. The company announced that it has secured a $15 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.
the task isn’t the job • Solving the decision problem
lines of code are a terrible measure of productivity etc etc, but they’re still a signal of what’s going on: tens of thousands of lines in a week, ideas tried in an afternoon that would’ve previously needed a few days of commitment, tests and docs and all the annoying little bits I would’ve solemnly promised to come back to later.
Evaluating AI Agents as Products
The Artificial Intelligence Coding Agent Index1 is a composite index of three public benchmark datasets (DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench V2, SWE-Atlas-QnA). The first two of these have agents do software engineering tasks with well defined expected behavior. The last one has the agent answer questions about a codebase.
