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This Week's Tech Stories That Actually Matter

OpenAI's $1 Trillion IPO Plans (While Getting Sued Over Training Data)

OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a late 2026 IPO that could raise over $60 billion at a $1 trillion valuation. Polymarket traders are already betting on timing.

Meanwhile, Judge Sidney Stein denied OpenAI's dismissal motions in the New York Times copyright lawsuit, citing "numerous and well-publicized" instances of ChatGPT generating NYT-derived content without permission.

Going public at $1T valuation while fighting publishers over training data? Bold strategy. Let's see how it plays out.

Grammarly Just Rebranded to "Superhuman"

Grammarly officially rebranded as Superhuman after acquiring the email platform earlier this year, unifying Grammarly, Coda, and Superhuman Mail under one identity. CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced Superhuman Go, a new AI assistant designed to close the "AI productivity gap."

From a Ukrainian startup founded in Kyiv to a multi-billion dollar productivity empire.

When your writing assistant absorbs an elite email client and a docs platform, apparently you become superhuman. The branding team earned their bonus this year.

Nvidia Betting Up to $1B on Poolside's AI Coding Platform

Nvidia plans to invest up to $1 billion in Poolside as part of a $2 billion raise at a $12 billion valuation—quadrupling last year's $3 billion valuation.

Founded by former GitHub exec Jason Warner, Poolside focuses on code automation for government and defense sectors while chasing AGI ambitions. The investment starts at $500 million and scales to $1 billion if fundraising targets hit.

The kicker? Poolside will use part of the cash to buy Nvidia's GB300 chips and partner with CoreWeave to build a 2-gigawatt data center in West Texas. When your investor is also your chip vendor, that's called vertical integration. Or just really good sales.

Neo Robot Available for Pre-Order: Your $20K Household Assistant

1X Technologies launched Neo, the first consumer-ready humanoid robot for household tasks. Standing 5'6" and weighing 66 pounds, Neo features a soft polymer body, 22 degrees of freedom per hand, and can lift 154 pounds.

Priced at $20,000 or $499/month, Neo cooks, cleans, carries groceries, and learns tasks over time using its Redwood AI model with 160 million parameters. Deliveries start in 2026 in the U.S.

When robots cost less than a car and do your laundry, the future just got real.

Enterprise AI Funding Across Five Mega-Rounds

October saw massive capital flood into AI enterprise solutions:

Mercor raised $350M at a $10B valuation (5x jump from February) for its AI talent marketplace connecting 30,000+ engineers. When hiring engineers is your biggest bottleneck, AI-powered recruiting becomes infrastructure.

AppZen secured $180M led by Riverwood Capital for its autonomous finance platform serving Fortune 500 companies with AI agents handling AP, expenses, and card workflows. Finance teams drowning in manual work finally got a lifeline.

Legora became Europe's newest unicorn with $150M at $1.8B valuation—the continent's most valuable legal-tech company serving 400+ law firms. When lawyers trust AI to draft contracts, the tech actually works.

Synthesia raised $200M at $4B valuation (nearly doubling from $2.1B in January) led by Google Ventures. Serving 90% of Fortune 100 companies, Synthesia generates professional videos without cameras, studios, or production crews. Video production just became a software problem.

Mem0 announced $24M to build persistent memory layers for AI agents, solving the "memory gap" in current AI tools. AI agents that actually remember context? That's the unlock everyone's been waiting for.

TL;DR: That's your week. OpenAI's going public at $1T (lawsuit pending). Grammarly became Superhuman. Nvidia dropped $1B on code. A robot will do your dishes. And enterprise AI ate nearly a billion in funding. The future's not coming -- it's billing monthly

Cheers,
Oleg👊

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