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SSI's $32B No-Revenue Bet, Lilly's 13th Acquisition & the Nvidia Venture Turn
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Startup funding news hits record highs as Ilya Sutskever's SSI reaches a $32B valuation with zero revenue and Nvidia emerges as a de facto venture partner. Eli Lilly closes its 13th acquisition of 2026, Europe logs €475M across 35+ deals, and a16z bets $1.1B on physical AI.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ilya Sutskever's company has no product, no users, and no revenue. It's valued at thirty-two billion dollars.
Here's what makes the SSI and Thinking Machines Lab rounds structurally unusual. Nvidia isn't just a chip supplier in these deals.
Eli Lilly just completed its thirteenth acquisition of twenty-twenty-six. That number deserves attention on its own.
On the funding data: US startups raised over four hundred billion dollars in the first half of twenty-twenty-six. That surpasses any prior full-year total.
Andreessen Horowitz announced a one-point-one-billion-dollar Machine Age Fund on August twenty-eighth. The thesis is physical AI, robotics, hardware inference, embodied models.
The two signals that matter most going into next week: first, whether any product timelines emerge from SSI or Thinking Machines Lab that would begin to close the gap between valuation and verifiable execution. Second, whether the pace of Lilly's M&A slows or accelerates into the second half of twenty-twenty-six.
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