Good day. The latest tremors at the Food and Drug Administration claimed the person at its top: Commissioner Marty Makary, a champion of the Make America Healthy Again campaign, resigned Tuesday under pressure from President Trump after a tumultuous turn in the post.

For this week’s question, we want to know: What priorities or changes would you like to see from the next FDA commissioner? Please email responses to vcnews@wsj.com.

Last week, we asked partly about assessing the future value of AI infrastructure companies. Here are edited excerpts of responses: 

• David Byrd, general partner at BlueYard Capital: “Chip-company valuations should be assessed based on backlog or future price-to-sales ratios rather than the trailing 12-month price-to-sales ratio. Since it takes time for hardware to be manufactured, shipped and deployed, there's typically a high level of confidence in near-term revenue projections. This is a mistake many investors previously made with Nvidia.”
   
• Karl Alomar, managing partner at M13: “Investor appetite for AI infrastructure alternatives is at an all-time high. Enterprise capex budgets are allocated to AI infrastructure. Governments are investing in chip sovereignty. The tailwinds are real.”
   
• Anis Uzzaman, founder and CEO at Pegasus Tech Ventures: “The market is willing to pay a premium for differentiated AI infrastructure, not just traditional GPUs.”

And now on to the news...

Early Cerebras VCs. Chip company Cerebras Systems, which went public on Thursday, is a fund-returner several times over for its early venture backers. The company opened trading at $350 a share on Thursday, almost double its initial public offering price of $185. It closed at $311.07 and an estimated market capitalization of $66.95 billion, according to FactSet. For early investors, the IPO is the culmination of a decadelong story. Cerebras was launched when semiconductor startups were out of favor, went through a few near-death experiences, and then caught the artificial-intelligence updraft.

• Three of the company’s largest shareholders—Benchmark, Foundation Capital, and Eclipse—had first backed the company in its 2016 Series A round.

More: Cerebras Shares Soar in Hotly Anticipated Year for AI Debuts

AI models have scaled to incredible size, but still face limits on the amount of data they can process at once. As a result, companies are sitting on massive amounts of data that their AI can’t fully understand, according to Arbaaz Khan, a founder and CEO of Graphon AI. Khan says he has created a new way to address that problem. Graphon is designed to make large language models more capable by creating a so-called intelligence layer that sits between data and the LLM.

• Graphon emerged from stealth with $8.3 million in seed funding to build its class of AI infrastructure.
   
• The round was led by Arvind Gupta of Novera Ventures, with participation from Perplexity Fund, Samsung Next, GS Futures, Hitachi Ventures, Gaia Ventures, B37 Ventures and Aurum Partners.

Anthropic is emerging as the presumptive front-runner in the race for artificial-intelligence supremacy, with faster growth and fundraising that could soon yield a higher valuation than rival OpenAI. Once a scrappy underdog in a race that OpenAI appeared to have already won, the gap between the two companies has narrowed significantly this year, with new data suggesting Anthropic’s growth continues to accelerate rapidly. OpenAI’s, by some indications, has begun to plateau.

Funds

SkyBeam Venture Partners launched its inaugural $250 million early-stage fund. The firm invests across AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, quantum computing and other deep technology sectors, with a focus on Israel.

Hallstone Ventures exceeded the initial $10 million target of its debut fund. The Los Angeles-based firm invests in startups building AI-driven infrastructure across media, entertainment and advertising sectors.

People

Innovation Endeavors, an investor focused on AI, computing infrastructure and other frontier technologies, appointed Kenneth Auchenberg as partner. He previously led Stripe's developer platform.

IVP promoted Shravan Narayen to general partner. Before joining the firm in 2022, he was a product manager at Snowflake.

Mother Ventures said Sara Garson joined the firm as chief operating officer. She was previously managing director at 25madison.

Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup making autonomous vehicles for naval, ground and aeronautical uses, scored $5 billion in Series H funding led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The latest investment brings the company’s valuation to $61 billion.

Recursive Superintelligence, a San Francisco-based startup creating AI that conducts experiments on how to safely improve itself, emerged from stealth with $650 million in funding led by GV and Greycroft at a $4.65 billion valuation.

Mind Robotics, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup developing industrial robots for vehicle production and beyond founded by Rivian Chief Executive RJ Scaringe, collected $400 million in new funding led by Kleiner Perkins. This latest investment comes about two months after the company’s $500 million Series A round in March.

Fractile, a London-based startup building specialized chips, systems and software to improve the speed and cost of running frontier AI inference, raised $220 million in Series B funding led by Factorial Funds, Accel and Founders Fund.

Create Medicines, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology startup advancing a pipeline of in vivo CAR therapies across autoimmune diseases and cancer, closed a $122 million Series B round co-led by existing investors Newpath Partners, ARCH Venture Partners and Hatteras Venture Partners. Brian Cuneo of ARCH and Tom Thomas of Newpath will join Create’s board.

GridCARE, a Redwood City, Calif.-based platform that accelerates power delivery to large-scale AI infrastructure, completed a $64 million Series A round led by Sutter Hill Ventures.

Degron Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based startup developing a new class of molecular glue degrader drugs, added $40 million in Series A extension funding led by Lapam Capital. 

Gaiia, a Montreal-headquartered AI-native operating system for communications service providers, landed $40 million in Series B funding. JMI Equity led the round, which included participation from Inovia Capital.

Equipifi, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based platform enabling banks and credit unions to offer flexible payment solutions natively within their digital banking experience, closed a $34 million Series B round. Left Lane Capital led the funding, which saw participation from Curql and PHX Ventures.

Nectar Social, an agentic social operating system for marketing, secured $30 million in Series A financing. Menlo Ventures led the investment, which included additional support from True Ventures, GV and Kinship Ventures.

GovWell, a New York-based AI operating system for government, snagged $25 million in Series A funding. Led by Insight Partners, the round included participation from Work-Bench and Bienville Capital.

Stitch, a Riyadh-based AI-native operating system built for financial institutions, grabbed $25 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

CREW Carbon, a provider of technology to wastewater treatment facilities, picked up a $25 million Series A investment, including $19 million in equity, led by Burnt Island Ventures.

Optura, a Nashville, Tenn.-based startup that transforms real-time operational data into executable intelligence for healthcare organizations, nabbed $17.5 million in Series A funding. Salesforce Ventures led the investment, which included contributions from Echo Health Ventures, Susa Ventures, Matrix Partners and HC9 Ventures.

• Peter Thiel-Backed Startup Bets Its AI Can Boost Hiring

• Lawyers Trade Barbs on Credibility of Elon Musk, Sam Altman in OpenAI Trial

• Apple’s Security Has Been Tough to Crack. Mythos Helped Find a Way In.

• Hedge Funds Are Making a Killing in the ‘Golden Age’ of AI Hardware

• Cloud Company Akamai Hits Asia Revenue Milestone as It Ramps Up Investment, M&A

• What happens when AI starts building itself? (TechCrunch)
   
• Pope Leo sets Catholics on collision course with AI (Axios)

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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