Good day. The venture business of hedge fund Two Sigma Investments has spun out and now operates as Deviation Capital.

“Deviation is a new firm; it continues the strategy that was developed at Two Sigma Ventures,” said Colin Beirne, a partner at Deviation who founded the venture strategy at Two Sigma 14 years ago. Both “deviation” and “two sigma” are statistical concepts.

Deviation, which manages more than $2 billion in assets that were previously under Two Sigma Ventures, is raising its next venture fund with a target of $300 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. The target is lower than the $326 million the team raised for its prior pool in 2022.

The firm makes early-stage investments in startups across software, hardware, consumer and healthcare sectors that use data science and advanced computing. It has a portfolio of 79 startups, including fitness wearable Whoop, predictions-markets operator Kalshi and drone startup Swarm Aero.

New York-based Deviation is led by four founding partners: Beirne, Dusan Perovic, Sidney Costabile and Jonathan Golden. Golden, a former partner at New Enterprise Associates, is the only one who wasn’t previously a partner at Two Sigma Ventures. He is tasked with building out Deviation’s presence in San Francisco, as the new firm will have team members based there and in New York.

“The partners of the business are the owners of the business,” said Beirne about Deviation. Previously, Two Sigma Ventures’ partners were employees of the hedge fund and reported to its leaders.

Two of Two Sigma Ventures’ partners, Dan Abelon and Frances Schwiep, will continue managing their existing boards but won’t be making new investments.

The $70 billion Two Sigma Investments hedge fund has been going through an acrimonious leadership change over the past few years. Beirne said that the spinout isn’t connected to that.

“This is the natural evolution, no matter what’s happening at the parent company,” he said.

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And now on to the news...

Unsolicited offer. GameStop Chief Executive Ryan Cohen made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for about $56 billion and said he saw a path to make the e-commerce company a much bigger competitor to Amazon.com. Cohen told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that GameStop built a roughly 5% stake in eBay and was offering $125 a share in cash and stock, a roughly 20% premium to its closing price on Friday.

• GameStop delivered an offer letter to eBay on Sunday and released a copy of it following the Journal’s report on the details of the bid.
   
• If eBay isn’t receptive to the proposal, Cohen said he was prepared to run a proxy fight and take the offer directly to its shareholders.

Meta Platforms acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup trying to build humanoid robots. The company declined to disclose the terms of the deal. “We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson said. The startup’s team will join Meta to focus on optimizing its models for robotics applications.

Anthropic is finalizing a deal to create a new joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and a handful of other Wall Street firms that aims to sell artificial-intelligence tools to private-equity backed companies, according to people familiar with the matter. An announcement is expected as soon as Monday, the people said. All told, about $1.5 billion is expected to be committed, the people said.

Funds

Growth-stage firm 137 Ventures closed on over $700 million across two new funds.

People

Nudge Security, a SaaS and AI security governance provider, appointed Patrick Dillon as chief revenue officer. He most recently served as CRO at Airlock Digital.

Fun, a New York-based global payments infrastructure startup, scored $72 million in Series A funding co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire.

JuliaHub, a Cambridge, Mass.-based developer of an agentic AI platform for hardware engineering, landed $65 million in Series B funding. Dorilton Capital led the round, which included additional support from General Catalyst and others.

DISA Technologies, a Casper, Wyo.-based startup developing technology for mineral-processing, domestic uranium remediation and resource recovery, closed a $33 million investment. Galvanize led the funding, which included participation from BHP Ventures.

StudentCrowd, a U.K.-based student housing platform, raised $9 million in Series A funding led by YFM Equity Partners.

Shapes.inc, a San Francisco-headquartered app that facilitates conversations through AI agents in group chats, emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the investment, which saw contributions from AI Capital Partners and others.

Chord, an AI platform powering commerce operations, picked up a $7 million investment. Equal Ventures led the funding, which included contributions from M13 and Chingona Ventures.

Blomma, a San Francisco-based AI career-coaching platform, launched with more than $5 million in seed funding led by Felicis.

Mosaic SoC, a Switzerland-based semiconductor startup building perception chips that help devices see and understand their environment, nabbed $3.8 million in pre-seed funding. Founderful led the round, which saw participation from Kick Foundation.

Dreambase, an Austin-based AI-native analytics platform built for Supabase, was seeded with a $3.7 million investment led by Felicis.

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This newsletter was compiled by Matthew Strozier and Zachary Cole.

Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, and Brian Gormley.

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