Trending Thursday #9

Meta's $72B superintelligence bet + The internet gets toll booths for AI

Dev Chandra
July 31, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 17 minutes

This week, tech's biggest players proved that having infinite money doesn't guarantee infinite wisdom. Just ask Meta, who's spending $72B to build superintelligence while their only profitable hardware is $299 sunglasses.

From Cloudflare inventing internet toll booths to Amazon's hypocritical AI blockade, Silicon Valley continues its impressive streak of solving problems nobody asked them to solve while creating entirely new ones.

As we continue to build atContext Ventures, we 've launched Startup Introswith a simple mission: to help early-stage founders find the right investors, faster and smarter.

🎯 BLUF: Bottom Line Upfront

Meta 's $72B Superintelligence Gamble: Zuck dropped a manifesto about "personal superintelligence" while burning GDP-sized cash on AI infrastructure
Smart Glasses Are the New AirPods: Meta's Ray-Ban specs tripled sales to 2M+ units while everyone mocked the metaverse
The Internet Gets a Toll Booth: Cloudflare launched "Pay Per Crawl" letting websites charge AI bots micropayments for scrapping
Unicorn Rounds Hit $490M Average: Funding isn't dead, it's just feudal as the top 3% of startups are raising nearly double from 2021 while everyone else starves
Amazon Blocks AI Agents (But Pays NYT $25M): Bezos's empire said no to AI shopping agents touching their $56B ad business while licensing content for AI training

🤖 Zuck's Superintelligence Manifesto (And Why Wall Street's Actually Buying It)

Mark Zuckerberg at Stripe Sessions Wearing His Meta Ray-Bans

🧠 When Your CEO Writes Philosophy Instead of Earnings Reports

Mark Zuckerberg just dropped his “personal superintelligence” manifesto that reads like Silicon Valley fanfiction, and investors are eating it up as Meta's stock jumped 11% after earnings.

The Vision : Zuck's positioning Meta as the champion of democratized AI, where everyone gets their own personal superintelligence assistant. Let’s dive in:

Meta 's Pitch: "Personal superintelligence" that empowers people to achieve their goals
The Shade : Other companies (looking at you, OpenAI) want to "automate all valuable work" and put humanity "on a dole"
The Hardware Play : Smart glasses will be our "primary computing devices" because who needs phones when AI can whisper in your ear all day?
The Timeline : "The rest of this decade" determines whether AI empowers or replaces us

Reality Check : This is the same company that lost $4.5B on Reality Labs last quarter, but at least the metaverse avatars will have superintelligent legs now.

💰 The $72B Bet That's Actually Working (For Now)

While Zuck philosophizes about humanity's future, Meta and Microsoft just proved that burning cash on AI infrastructure might be a solid business strategy.

The Numbers Making Wall Street Forgo Fiscal Responsibility :

Meta : $47.5B quarterly revenue (up 22%), $18.3B profit, stock up 11% after hours
Microsoft : Azure grew 39%, crossed $4T market cap, stock jumped 8%
Spending Race : Meta holding at $72B capex for 2025, Microsoft hitting $30B+ per quarter

Meta 's Magic Trick: The ad business is so ridiculously profitable that it's single-handedly funding Zuck's sci-fi dreams:

Dropped $14B on a Scale AI stake
Poaching top talent with nine-figure packages (yes, that's $100M+ compensation)
Building "multiple data centers the size of Manhattan" (actual quote)
Still losing billions on VR while promising smart glasses are the future

Microsoft 's Flex: They finally revealed Azure's annual $75B revenue, which puts them as the #2 in cloud behind Amazon. Their customer list reads like an AI hall of fame: OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and basically anyone building foundation models.

Meanwhile : OpenAI hit $12B in annualized revenue, as its ChatGPT now has 700M+ weekly active users but is expected to burn $8B in 2025.

Bottom Line : Zuck's betting that personal AI assistants will be as transformative as smartphones, and he's willing to spend a small country's GDP to prove it.

👓 Plot Twist: While Zuck Philosophizes, His Glasses Are Actually Winning

While everyone's debating whether Meta's superintelligence dreams are genius or delusional, those Ray-Ban smart glasses everyone mocked are becoming Meta's sleeper hit.

The Overnight Success :

The glasses sales tripled in H1 2025 vs last year
EssilorLuxottica ramping to 10M units annually by 2026
Already moved 2M pairs since September 2023
Oakley line dropping this summer (Zuck's really going for the "tech bro at Burning Man" demographic)

The Competition Scramble : Meta's success has triggered a full-on wearables gold rush:

Alibaba just unveiled Quark AI glasses with real-time translation and meeting transcription
ByteDance reportedly building their own glasses because TikTok on your face is inevitable
Oura quietly crossed $500M revenue, proving fingers might beat faces (120% YoY growth!)

The Irony : Remember when Zuck burned $13.7B on VR headsets nobody wanted? Now, their $299 glasses are validating the whole "superintelligence companion" thesis.

While Meta's betting $72B on AGI infrastructure, Zuck's manifesto promises glasses will become our primary computing devices once superintelligence arrives.

💸 The VC Hunger Games: Where Only Giants and Gamblers Survive

Jackie DiMonte: Unicorn funding is back. Bigger than ever!?

🦄 Unicorns Are Back, Baby (And They're Absolutely Gorging)

Forget everything you thought you knew about "market corrections." Jackie DiMonte from Grid Capital just dropped data showing that unicorn funding isn't just back, it's bigger than ever.

The Absolutely Bonkers Numbers :

Average unicorn round in 2021 : $260M (cute!)
Average unicorn round in 2025 : $490M (nearly doubled)
Last 3 quarters : Have exceeded 2021's "peak bubble" funding levels
190 unicorns raised $500M+ rounds in 6 months (and only 12 funds even HAVE that much money)

The Concentration Game : While everyone's been crying about a "funding winter," the reality is more like funding feudalism:

2021 : 3.0% of rounds were unicorns
2025 : 2.8% of rounds are unicorns (basically unchanged)
Translation : The rich are getting absolutely loaded while everyone else fights for scraps

The Beautiful Irony : We spent two years hearing VCs lecture about "discipline" and "sustainable growth" while they quietly doubled down on the biggest bets in history. So much for that "return to fundamentals" everyone promised.

📊 Series A: Where Dreams Go to Get a Reality Check

While unicorns feast, Peter Walker from Carta just served up some sobering data about what happens after that celebrated Series A round:

The Brutal Series A Survival Stats (tracking 4,514 startups from 2019-2021):

2019 Cohort : Only 52% made it to Series B and these had 6 years!
2020 Cohort : 54% hit Series B with ZIRP magic briefly worked
2021 Cohort : Just 35% reached Series B (end-of-party hangover)

The Startup Zombie Apocalypse :

26% of 2019 Series A companies are still stuck at Series A
50% of 2021 Series A companies haven't raised since (that's 1,000+ startups in limbo)
Only 6% of the 2019 cohort made it to Series D

The Existential Question : What happens to all these pre-AI era startups that raised big before ChatGPT changed everything?

Peter Walker is worried, and he should be. These companies are like Blockbuster stores in 2010, which are technically still operating but are becoming irrelevant in an AI-first world.

🌱 RIP Small Seed Rounds: Killed by Multi-Stage FOMO

Here's the VC world's dirty little secret: sub-$5M rounds are going extinct due to multi-stage funds who've decided seed investing is their new hobby.

The Death of Small Rounds :

A Decade Ago : 70%+ of VC deals were under $5M
Today : Less than half that percentage
Cause of Death : Tiger Global syndrome has infected everyone

The Suspects :

Multi-Stage Funds Playing Tourist : Big firms are writing $10M+ "seed" checks because why not? As Otherwise Fund's Terrence Rohan puts it: "The multi-stage funds are offensive as ever."
Founders Getting Greedy : Startups are demanding higher valuations and bigger rounds because, well, they can. One partner at M13 had a founder take a competitor's term sheet over a weekend between meetings.

The Boutique Seed Fund Lament (via First Round's Liz Wessel): "Founders raising from multi-stage firms call me crying because their $50M fund 'seed' investor won't return their calls. Turns out being a rounding error in someone's portfolio isn't fun."

The New Reality : Seed rounds now are now the old Series As, Series As look like old Series Bs, and actual small rounds for actual early companies? Those are as dead as founder-friendly terms in a down market.

Bottom Line : The venture ecosystem has split into two games: Go big or go home. There's no middle ground anymore: you're either raising $50M+ as a unicorn or fighting over table scraps with 200 other startups. The "capital efficient startup" is extinct, replaced by the "raise until you die" model that's somehow working again.

🕷️ The Great AI Scraping Wars: Everyone Wants Their Cut of the Crawl

Cloudflare: Announcing Cloudflare pay per crawl beta

💰 Cloudflare Just Invented the Internet's Toll Booth (And Everyone's Invited)

Cloudflare dropped a bombshell Tuesday that could reshape how the entire internet works: a marketplace where websites can literally charge AI bots per crawl.

The "Pay Per Crawl" Revolution:

Publishers set their own rates for AI scraping: micropayments for every crawl
Blocking is the default : New Cloudflare sites now block all AI crawlers by default
Major publishers already onboard : Conde Nast, TIME, The Atlantic, Fortune
No crypto involved yet , though CEO Matthew Prince is eyeing stablecoins

The Brutal Math That Started This War :

Google 's crawler: Scrapes 14 times for every 1 referral
OpenAI 's crawler: Scrapes 1,700 times for every 1 referral
Anthropic 's crawler: Scrapes 73,000 times for every 1 referral (that's not a typo)

Translation : AI companies are strip-mining the web for training data while sending back breadcrumbs of traffic. Cloudflare just said, "pay up or GTFO."

📊 PageRank is Dead, Long Live the Content Auction House

Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz dropped some mind-blowing stats that should terrify every SEO consultant.

The AI Search Takeover:

OpenAI gets 1 query per American per day (that's 330M+ daily queries)
Google gets 4 queries per American per day
50% of Google searches now have AI Overviews
Bottom line: 60% of US searches are now AI-powered

The Future Content Stack : But here's where it gets spicy. Tunguz predicts the internet will soon work like programmatic advertising, but for content:

Publishers compete in real-time auctions to answer AI queries
Quality metrics (not money) determine winners
Everything happens in under 200 milliseconds
No more SEO games - just pure content merit

Imagine asking ChatGPT about the new Pixel phone, and tech sites literally racing to provide the best review in milliseconds. It's PageRank on steroids, running at the speed of thought.

🛒 Amazon Says "Hell No" to AI Shopping Agents (While Everyone Else Says "Maybe")

Just when you thought the AI scraping wars couldn't get messier, Amazon updated its robots.txt to block every major AI agent from touching its $56B ad business.

The E-commerce AI Standoff :

Amazon : Doing a full lockdown by blocking Google's Project Mariner, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity
Shopify : "Sure, but use our checkout" as it partners with Perplexity, talking to OpenAI
Walmart : "Come on in!" as they build their own AI while staying open to others

The Amazon-NYT Deal : Meanwhile, it seems that Amazon cares more about protecting its marketplace monopoly with its NYT deal than letting AI agents find a better price on toilet paper:

The Deal : Just dropped $20-25M/year to license New York Times content
That's about 1% of NYT's total revenue for AI training rights
The Context : OpenAI's paying News Corp $250M over 5 years

The Bottom Line : If AI agents become how we shop online, whoever controls the agent controls commerce. Amazon's betting they can force everyone to keep using their cluttered search interface, while others are betting the future belongs to whoever plays nice with AI.

💸 What Other Startups are Popping Off

Here's a roundup of this week's trending startup activity:

🤖 AI Agents & Systems

ChatGPT study mode: Turn ChatGPT into your personal tutor that never judges your dumb questions
Lovable Agent Mode: AI that thinks, plans, and codes on its own - basically a junior developer minus the coffee addiction
HuHu AI Agent for E-Commerce: Converts 5x more sales from just a URL - your store's tireless sales rep that never sleeps
Hyring AI Phone Screener: Screen 1000 candidates before lunch while you're still on your first coffee
RunLLM: AI that doesn't just respond, it actually resolves issues like a senior engineer
Droidrun: Give AI native control of physical & virtual phones. Because manual testing is so 2024
Kombai: The first AI agent built for real-world frontend tasks that actually ship to production

🎬 AI Content Creation & Media

Memories.ai: ChatGPT for your video library with unlimited context. Finally, AI that remembers that one clip from 2019
Runway Aleph: Edit, transform, and generate video like you're directing the Matrix
Higgsfield Steal: Recreate ANY picture from the web. Basically, the Shazam for visual content
PodClips: Turn your 3-hour podcast rambles into viral 30-second gold
Wan 2.2: First open MoE model for AI video generation, democratizing Hollywood-grade effects
Ideogram Character: Persistent character model that works with a single image - consistency finally solved

🛠️ Developer Tools & Infrastructure

GitHub Spark: Build and deploy full-stack apps with AI, because who has time to write boilerplate anymore?
Cursor Memories: Gives Cursor agents actual memory so they stop forgetting your coding patterns every session
Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507: Qwen's most advanced reasoning model yet - when you need AI that actually thinks
Z.ai GLM-4.5: Open-source model unifying agentic capabilities; one model to rule them all
Shuffle CLI: Beautiful UIs in Shuffle and full control in Cursor, where design and code exist in perfect harmony
Magic Patterns: Design new features with AI that actually understands your design system
Tiptap Notion-style editor: Drop-in collaborative block editor. Notion vibes without the Notion price
Sparrow: The lightest, fastest API testing platform, built because Postman got too heavy

🎨 AI Productivity & Content Tools

Google Opal: Describe, create, and share AI mini-apps. Turn your ideas to working tools in minutes
Google Photos Create tab: Adds a new "Create tab" to be a hub for new AI tools
Launch: Create fully functional apps with AI and real human support when it inevitably breaks
CopyCat: Build browser automations with AI, even if you don’t code
Doco: Cursor for Microsoft Word. Writers deserve AI superpowers too
Rustic AI: Visual AI design editor that makes Canva look like MS Paint
Jotform Gmail Agent: Drafts Gmail replies that sound exactly like you (minus the typos and passive aggression)

💼 Business & Specialized Tools

Crushdata Company Dataset: Billions of data points on millions of companies updated monthly - fuel for your AI SDR army
Well Embed: AI robots that chase down invoices and receipts so you don't have to nag vendors like an angry accountant
Quicko Pro: Practice management software for accountants who are tired of Excel hell
findable: Get to #1 on ChatGPT with SEO 2.0, because Google is so last year

🌟 Editor's Note

At Startup Intros, our mission is to bring the latest founder-investor news straight to your inbox, keeping you ahead in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley. Our free weekly newsletter delivers curated insights, deals, and trends to help you navigate the startup ecosystem.

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💭 Parting Thoughts

The tech industry has entered its "philosophical billionaire" era, where CEOs write manifestos about humanity's future while accidentally succeeding with products they didn't care about (looking at you, smart glasses).

Maybe the real superintelligence was the $300 Ray-Bans we bought along the way; at least they work better than whatever's happening in the metaverse.

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Till next time!

| Dev Chandra
CEO @ Startup Intros
Associate @ Context VC
LinkedIn: /in/devchandra
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| Tim Hsia
Investor @ Context VC
Co-Founder @ Startup Intros
LinkedIn: /in/timhsia
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