# A $2B Space Grid, fomo's $75M, and the Seed Round That Ate the Series B - The Raise - Week of June 27 - July 3, 2026

> The Raise for the week of June 27 - July 3, 2026. A Robinhood co-founder put a $2B price tag on data centers in orbit, a 17-person crypto app talked Fred Wilson and Index into a nine-figure check, and round after round came in bigger than the founder asked for.

## The Raise

### Week of June 27 - July 3, 2026: A $2B Space Grid, fomo's $75M, and the Seed Round That Ate the Series B

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**The tape was loud this week.** A Robinhood co-founder put a $2B price tag on data centers in orbit, a 17-person crypto app talked Fred Wilson and Index into a nine-figure check, and, a recurring theme, founder after founder got talked into raising *more* than they asked for. If you needed proof the seed market is running hot, this was the week.

## This Week's Rounds

- **fomo, $75M Series B at a $550M post-money valuation.** Led by Index, with Fred Wilson at USV. (The episode is titled around the ~$94M cumulatively invested by Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index across the company's life.) A mobile *social* trading app for on-chain assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, attention tokens, with global equities and perps coming next. The kicker: they've done it with **17 employees**, no internal hierarchy, and no one-on-one meetings. More below.
  *20VC, "How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M... with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo" (June 27, 2026)*

- **Cowboy Space Corporation, $365M Series A at a $2B valuation.** The week's headline number. Founded by **Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt**, building an orbital energy grid: solar collected in low-Earth orbit to power AI data centers *in space*, with data beamed back to Earth by laser. First satellite launches in October. Sixty employees, $2B valuation.
  *Second in Command with Cameron Herold, "Ep. 593, Cowboy Space Corporation COO & CLO Joe Yaffe" (July 2, 2026)*

- **Venice AI, $65M at a $1B valuation.** First outside round, led by Dragonfly Capital and Coinbase Ventures. A private/uncensored AI model provider already running at **~$70M annualized revenue with 3M users**, a rare "raise into real revenue" story in AI.
  *FOMO HOUR, "'Robinhood Chain' Debuts... Venice AI $1B Valuation" (July 2, 2026)*

- **DeepSeek, reportedly ~$7.4B.** Led by Tencent, CATL, and China's state-backed National AI Investment Fund. China consolidating capital behind its answer to the US frontier labs, alongside Alibaba's Qwen.
  *The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway, "China Decode: Apple's China Chip Play, DeepSeek Seeking Billions" (June 30, 2026)*

- **8090 Labs, $135M Series A.** Led by Salesforce Ventures.
  *Tech Brew Ride Home, "Comcast Spins Out" (June 30, 2026)*

- **SpeedLabs, $6.5M seed.** Led by Parlay Capital (the lead of PrizePicks' seed), with Bullpen Capital (early FanDuel backer), a former PrizePicks board member, and Betting Startups Capital. Building real-time "momentum markets" that turn live game narratives into tradable in-game betting products. Notably, the founder went out for $3 to $4M, and the lead pushed him to take $6.5M.
  *The Betting Startups Podcast, "Ep. 217: Turning sports narratives into 'momentum markets' w/ Nick Meader from SpeedLabs" (June 30, 2026)*

- **Daily Wire, $100M at a $750M valuation.** Led by Highmount Capital (minority stake). The conservative media company is fielding buyout offers above $1B and weighing an IPO that bankers peg near $2B within 18 months; it did $48M of EBITDA last year against a 16% subscriber decline.
  *Valuetainment, "'They Need a Real CEO', Daily Wire Raises $100m to Consider IPO" (June 27, 2026)*

## Founder Story of the Week: fomo

Paul Erlanger's raise reads like a case study in *not* looking desperate. His social trading app, fomo, just closed a **$75M Series B at a $550M post-money valuation** led by Index and USV's Fred Wilson, and Erlanger's whole framing is that he wasn't trying to raise at all.

The mechanics are worth stealing. On price, he let the investors ask first, then anchored:

> "There was an early conversation far before the term sheet where we discussed what price range would make sense for us… we weren't looking to do a round. So they were like, what price would be interesting to you? We set a number and I think that kind of helped anchor the conversation."

His most quotable line is a piece of process advice for anyone stacking rounds:

> "One thing that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round. Everything is about momentum."

On secondary, he took a sliver, citing Evan Spiegel's logic that a little liquidity is what lets a founder say no later, but "very little amount, nothing that would really change our lifestyle." The most contrarian detail is the org itself: **17 people, no hierarchy, no 1-1s**, and for the first eight months of building, nobody on the core team drew a salary. Erlanger's philosophy: give away real ownership, verticalize the product in-house, and use a fat balance sheet to build through crypto's brutal down-cycles, "we know no matter what, we can build through it." A tight team, an anchored price, and a raise done from a position of *not needing it*. That's the playbook this week.

## Also Heard

- **The bootstrap that refused to die.** On the other end of the spectrum from fomo's easy round: Danny Jenkins walked through building ThreatLocker from **$150K of credit-card debt to $200M**. His first sale was a $5,500 endpoint-security contract closed while he was, in his words, "literally shaking," followed by a $200K angel check, then a $500K raise in December 2019 at $300K ARR while adding $40K of ARR a month. His verdict on the accelerator he did along the way: "one of the bigger mistakes we made… I just don't take advice from stupid people." *The SaaS Podcast, "How Danny Jenkins Bootstrapped ThreatLocker From $150K Debt to $200M" (July 2, 2026)*

- **"It's 2016 all over again", for deep tech.** Humble Robotics came out of stealth with **$24M led by Eclipse**, building a cabless autonomous electric freight hauler. Founder Eyal Cohen's read on the hype cycle is the useful part: hard-tech arcs run 15 to 25 years, not the 3 to 7 software investors expect, and the winners are the founders who "just keep working on the problem" long after the crowd rotates to the next shiny thing. *Equity, "Humble Robotics' CEO says the tech finally caught up to the vision for autonomous vehicles" (July 1, 2026)*

- **The seed round ate the Series A.** A recurring nerve on the This Week in Startups roundtable: seed and "Series A" lines are blurring into $100M+ mega-rounds, and the panel rattled off StarCloud ($170M Series A), General Intuition ($320M), and Scale of Cognition and Scout AI at ~$100M each. SpeedLabs getting *pushed* from a $3 to $4M target to $6.5M is the same current at the small end. When leads are begging you to take more, the cycle is telling you something. *This Week in Startups, "Why the VC Hype Cycle Always Gets It Wrong | VC Roundtable | E2307" (July 1, 2026)*

*The Raise is compiled weekly from the trailing seven days of podcast coverage. Numbers are as stated by founders and hosts on-air; where a round was discussed rather than formally disclosed, we've flagged it.*