Venture

Venture

Anthropic, the maker of Claude and last publicly valued at a now-quaint $380 billion, is raising a new round of funding-the company's reportedly looking to rake in as much as $50 billion at a valuation in the $900 billion ballpark. And talking to brokers, investors, and founders about it, they all had the same, clear message: This is not normal.

We have been generally positive about Oura and its various smart rings. We called the Ring 4 a "technological marvel" that's "out ahead of its rivals." The company manages to pack a lot of tech into its rings, despite the inherent limitations of the form factor.

The setup is simple. The S&P 500 trades near historic valuation highs while developed-markets value stocks in Europe, Japan, and Canada still trade at single-digit multiples in some sectors. FIVA is the anti-hype ETF. It screens developed markets outside the U.S. for the cheapest large- and mid-cap names. Boring, yes. Mispriced, possibly.

Imperagen is using three core technologies as it seeks to redefine enzyme engineering. Specifically, it uses a quantum physics-based simulation instead of trial-and-error enzyme mutations in a lab. Imperagen predicts the behavior of enzyme variants on a computer using advanced quantum physics modeling that can explore millions of mutations, the company said. Then it translates this information into its custom AI models, trained on the enzyme problems Imperagen seeks to explore.

Slapping "AI" on your startup's pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood's ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started - especially when ARK had already been burned by a company operating in the same space.

War is a racket, he couldn't have imagined that a sitting US president would time announcements about major military operations in order to manipulate the stock market. But as the US economy has been increasingly financialized, so too has the nature of war profiteering, increasingly driven by insider trading, oil speculators, and the portfolio earnings of venture capital (VC) investors, tech billionaires, and private-equity fund managers.

Both track the S&P 500. Both charge 0.03% in expenses. Yet over the past year, IVV returned 32.22% while VOO returned 32.12%. Over ten years, the gap flipped the other way: VOO at 318.99% versus IVV at 318.56%. Tiny gaps, but real, and they come from fund plumbing rather than index composition.