Kalshi's trading volume from distribution partner Robinhood dropped from 50% to under 20% in about a year. This is because Robinhood began directing orders to its own backed exchange, Rosera. This highlights the significant platform risk of relying on large partners who can quickly become competitors.
Beyond facing lawsuits over their legality, prediction markets like Kalshi face a new financial threat: direct state-level taxation. North Carolina's new 6% tax on fee revenue signals a future where operating legally requires sacrificing significant profit margins to individual states, creating a costly path to compliance.
The race for AI performance has shifted from optimizing compute on a single chip to solving system-level connectivity. According to chip infrastructure startup Eliyan, efficiently linking chiplets, chips, and racks is now the primary bottleneck for building next-generation AI systems and maximizing compute utilization.
David Sacks's new $1B fund for Kraft Ventures merges its previously separate early-stage and growth vehicles into one. It will also focus on Series A onward, abandoning seed investments. This mirrors a wider venture capital trend of consolidating fund structures and moving to later stages as round sizes grow.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is replacing Salesforce with a more expensive C3.ai solution for a specific correspondence tracking task. The decision was based on superior, specialized AI capabilities, not cost. This shows large enterprises will pay a premium for best-in-class AI, threatening the pricing power of incumbent software platforms.
Chip interconnect startup Eliyan's investor list—including top memory suppliers, fabs, and data center firms—is revealing. Hyperscalers are making strategic investments in enabling tech companies not for financial returns, but to build their own custom silicon ecosystems and reduce dependency on NVIDIA.