A small Orlando startup just proved how much money is chasing the unglamorous plumbing underneath AI, not just the models themselves. Relativity Networks announced today that it raised a $22 million SAFE round, more than double what it was targeting, and landed a $40 million follow-on order from a hyperscaler after the customer tested its fiber technology linking two data centers.

The pitch: as AI campuses run out of power in one place, hyperscalers need to connect data centers across much greater distances than normal fiber allows, and Relativity's hollow-core cable is built for exactly that stretch.

Meanwhile, AI chip startup Etched just posted one of the fastest valuation jumps anyone's seen this year: from $10.3 billion to $21 billion in under a month, after Jane Street became its first customer and liked what it saw enough to lead the new round itself.

• A fiber startup landed a $22M raise and a $40M hyperscaler contract, both announced today.

• AI chip startup Etched doubled its valuation to $21 billion in under a month.

• A short, separate update on where the Claude watermark backlash stands.

…and a whole lot more that you can read about below.

Relativity Networks announced today that it closed a $22 million SAFE round, more than double its target, from new investors including Rhapsody Venture Partners, Bell Ventures, and Faster Than Glass. In the same announcement, the company revealed a $40 million follow-on order from an unnamed hyperscaler that tested its ChronoCore hollow-core fiber technology linking two data centers. The pitch is built around what the company calls the "AI Geography Era": as hyperscalers run out of power at any single site, they need to connect data centers across much greater distances, and every extra mile of distance adds latency that ordinary glass fiber can't avoid. Relativity says its technology cuts that penalty enough to make distributed AI campuses practical.

Jane Street-backed AI chip startup Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, up from $10.3 billion just weeks earlier, after Jane Street tested Etched's inference hardware, bought it, and then led the new round itself. Etched builds chips specifically designed for inference, the process of actually running a trained model to generate answers, rather than training new ones, competing directly with Nvidia's dominance in that market. The company says it has secured more than $1 billion in customer contracts and has raised $1.9 billion in total since its founding by three Harvard dropouts.

A quick, separate note since a few of you have asked where things stand: the backlash to Claude's new text watermark, which we've covered over the past week, hasn't produced any new developments as of today. Anthropic's position remains the same as when it last explained the mechanism: a detected watermark proves Claude processed the text, not that Claude wrote the ideas in it, and the company still hasn't shipped a public detection tool. If anything changes, we'll cover it here.

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Yuno Raises $45M to Scale Its AI-Native Payments Platform

Yuno, which calls itself the AI-native operating system for global payments, closed a $45 million Series B led by Global PayTech Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and QuantumLight Capital also joining. The company says it recovered over $5 billion in otherwise-failed transaction volume for merchants over the past year and is on track to process $100 billion in annual transaction volume within the next 12 months.

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