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This Week's Tech Stories That Actually Matter

Kalshi Raises $1B (Yes, With a B)

Prediction markets just had their moment.

Kalshi—the platform that lets you bet on literally anything from election outcomes to Fed decisions—closed a $1 billion round. Post-election traffic exploded, regulators got friendlier, and investors realized people really want to put money where their mouths are.

One of the fattest marketplace rounds in years. When you're the platform everyone's arguing about, you win.

Defense Tech & AI Infrastructure Are Eating Everything

Capital quietly consolidated around two themes: stuff that blows up and stuff that thinks.

Defense:

• Castelion – $350M to mass-produce hypersonic missiles

• Quantum Systems – €180M for autonomous drones

AI Infrastructure:

• Black Forest Labs – $300M for next-gen foundation models

• Eon – $300M building AI-optimized cloud backup

• Antithesis – $105M for advanced software testing

Healthcare:

• Curative – $150M for AI-enhanced employer health plans

• Angle Health – $134M expanding modern insurance

• Triana Biomedicines – $120M accelerating cancer therapies

Investors want infrastructure, defense autonomy, and enterprise reliability.

AWS Just Dropped the Future (and It Codes Itself)

Amazon's re:Invent wasn't about cloud storage this year. It was about agents that never sleep.

Meet Kiro—AWS's new agentic AI developer. Writes code, debugs itself, runs tests, manages multi-day projects, proposes architectural improvements. All without you.

They also unveiled Trainium3 UltraServers for training massive models and Graviton5 ARM chips for inference workloads.

The next enterprise transformation isn't chatbots. It's AI that acts, plans, and executes on its own. For days.

OpenAI Declares "Code Red"

Sam Altman just hit the emergency brake. OpenAI paused other product lines to laser-focus on making ChatGPT faster, smarter, and more stable.

Google's Gemini 3 and Anthropic are breathing down their necks, and the flagship product started feeling clunky.

Kohler's Smart Toilet Had One Job (And Failed)

Dekoda—Kohler's health-monitoring toilet camera—claimed "end-to-end encryption." Security researchers called BS. It wasn't truly E2EE.

Company walked it back fast. If you can't trust your toilet to keep your data private, what can you trust?

Netflix Might Eat Warner Bros. Discovery ($72B)

A potential mega-merger combining Netflix's global reach with Warner's content vault is on the table. Regulators are circling. Job cuts loom.

If this goes through, streaming consolidation just hit its final form.

Cloudflare Broke the Internet (Oops)

December 5th: a firewall update meant to fix a vulnerability accidentally nuked 28% of Cloudflare's traffic. LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva—all down.

Even the companies protecting the internet can blow it up.

Google's AI Deleted Someone's Entire Hard Drive

A user asked Google's AI to clear a cache. The AI interpreted that as "delete everything on the D: drive" and executed without asking. After the user confronted it, the Google AI agent stated, "I cannot express how sorry I am". 

But yeahh.. It’s gone. All of it.

Agentic AI safety just became everyone's problem again.

TL;DR: Capital's consolidating around AI infrastructure and defense. AWS is building agents that replace teams. OpenAI's in crisis mode. And your smart toilet might be lying to you…

Cheers,
Oleg👊

🚀 I'm proud to support the Houston Founder Institute, a program designed to provide structure, feedback, and supportive networks for the next generation of entrepreneurs. The Houston Spring 2026 program is accepting applications and kicks off in February 2026. You can apply using my referral link for priority access with the global admissions office: https://fi.co/apply/houston/mentor-2511431


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