Good morning. Here's everything happening in startup land today, in under 2 minutes.
⚡ THE ONE NUMBER
29
That's the average age of an AI unicorn founder in 2024, down from 40 just three years earlier. A 2026 Antler study of 1,629 unicorns and 3,512 founders found AI is the only sector where founder age is dropping. In every other industry, the average unicorn founder is older than a decade ago.
💸 BIGGEST ROUND
The Costa Mesa defense tech company doubled its valuation from June 2025, when it was last marked at $30.5B and revenue more than doubled to $2.2B in 2025 with workforce nearly doubling alongside it. Thrive Capital led the Series H with Andreessen Horowitz, and CEO Brian Schimpf said the capital will fund "aggressive" expansion into manufacturing, R&D, and infrastructure and most notably Arsenal-1, the high-rate autonomous weapons factory targeting tens of thousands of units in annual output. Anduril is positioning itself as the prime beneficiary of the U.S. military reindustrialization push, including Trump's $185B Golden Dome missile defense program and a recent 10-year Army contract with a $20B ceiling. Defense is now a venture category.
📰 HEADLINES, NO FLUFF
→ Anthropic just passed OpenAI in business customers for the first time Per Ramp's April AI Index, 34.4% of Ramp's 50,000+ business customers now pay for Anthropic vs. 32.3% for OpenAI. Twelve months ago, Anthropic was at 9%.
→ Vapi raises $50M Series B at a $500M valuation after winning Amazon Ring Peak XV led, with M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer participating, bringing total funding to $72M. Vapi has now powered over a billion calls, and Amazon Ring routes 100% of its inbound support through them.
→ Sam Blond's Monaco closes $50M Series B led by Benchmark, term sheet came in 2 hours after the pitch Jack Altman is joining the board. Founders Fund and Human Capital tripled down. Monaco's now at $85M+ raised and pitching itself as "the Cursor of sales."
→ Forus raises $160M to rebuild how medicine reaches patients The NY-based AI healthcare network (formerly known as Tandem) is connecting doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma into a single agentic layer. Backed by Thrive, General Catalyst, Accel, BCV, Redpoint, BoxGroup, and Pear VC.
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