Good morning. Here's everything happening in startup land today, in under 2 minutes.
⚡ THE ONE NUMBER
5 days. That's how long founders have left to apply for a16z's Speedrun SR007 cohort.
The deadline is May 17 at 11:59pm PT. Up to $1M in funding and $5M+ in credits per company. https://speedrun.a16z.com/apply
💸 BIGGEST ROUND
Helsing — $1.2B raise at $18B valuation - Helsing is the Munich-based defense AI company often called Europe's answer to Anduril. Their software runs on military hardware in real time. They build the HX-2, a 12-kilogram kamikaze drone with a 100km range that uses onboard AI for targeting and has been approved for frontline use in Ukraine. They also make autonomous underwater vehicles and ground-based inspection robots after acquiring Spanish robot dog company Keybotic in January.
The new round is led by Dragoneer with existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners co-leading. The round is reportedly oversubscribed multiple times. Helsing has an active €269M drone contract with the German military, with a framework that can grow to €1.46 billion over seven years. Defense tech was uninvestable to most Silicon Valley funds 5 years ago. Now it's where the biggest checks are getting written.
📰 HEADLINES, NO FLUFF
→ YC's Summer 2026 batch on-time deadline just passed, but late apps are still open. The on-time deadline was May 4 at 8pm PT. YC is still accepting late applications, but you won't get the June 5 decision guarantee. The batch runs July through September in San Francisco. If you've been on the fence about applying, this is your last shot for summer.
→ Kevin Rose just relaunched Digg as an AI news aggregator. The original Digg founder previewed a complete redesign on Friday after the Reddit-clone version shut down in March. The new version ranks news by tracking the "most influential voices" in a space, starting with AI before expanding to other topics.
→ Robinhood's founder is building data centers in space. Baiju Bhatt's Cowboy Space (formerly Aetherflux) raised $275M Series B at a $2B valuation, led by Index Ventures. The pitch: there aren't enough rockets to put data centers in orbit, so they're building both. Each satellite delivers 1 megawatt of power to nearly 800 onboard GPUs.
→ Ciridae raised $20M seed from Accel, a16z, and General Catalyst. The AI startup helps "real economy" businesses (home services, industrials) digitize and automate. Founded by former a16z and Apple executives. A $20M seed from three top-tier funds isn't a seed, it's a Series A with a different name.
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