Good morning. Reporter Lily Mae Lazarus pinch hitting here today for Andrew.
Apparently, the PTA has a better portfolio than you.
Silicon Valley private schools are trading silent auctions for cap tables with a handful of Bay Area campuses now running miniature venture funds steered by parent-investors from Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Battery. The programs have become somewhat of Silicon Valley lore, Fortune’s Amanda Gerut writes. Saint Francis High School’s parent-run growth fund turned a $15,000 bet on Snap into roughly $34 million at IPO.
With SpaceX just pulling off the biggest IPO in history and Anthropic and OpenAI widely expected to follow, these school funds could be sitting on the next windfall.
Here’s what else moved tech and money today.
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Nvidia wants your pension fund in the AI trade
Nvidia announced partnerships this week with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms aiming to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure—with the cash coming largely from “third-party investors” rather than Nvidia’s own balance sheet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed it as treating AI compute like “productive infrastructure,” even offering residual-value support of up to 25% on some deals to sweeten the pitch.
Wall Street mostly likes it—Morgan Stanley and Bank of America both called Nvidia’s chips unusually financeable. But Stratechery’s Ben Thompson isn’t fully sold, warning it’s “a completely new nerve-racking thing to bring safety-seeking assets to bear” on a pile of GPUs. —Eva Roytburg
Apple taps an airline lobbyist to run its D.C. relationship
Apple hired Nate Gatten (American Airlines’ head of government affairs since 2017, and a Republican with prior stints at JPMorgan and Fannie Mae) as its new vice president of government affairs, starting Aug. 31. He’ll report directly to Tim Cook.
The hire may be Apple angling for a lobbyist who can align with the Trump administration. And it lands just weeks before Cook hands the CEO title to hardware chief John Ternus in September while staying on as executive chairman—a role in which he’s expected to also mingle with the D.C. crowd. —Lily Mae Lazarus
Sergey Brin’s fingerprints on Google’s AI shakeup
Sergey Brin has reportedly spent months personally pushing Google DeepMind staff to move faster on Gemini, as Anthropic pulled ahead with its Claude Mythos preview, according to Reuters. Google allegedly delayed its next flagship, Gemini, by two months after internal testing showed its coding still lagged rivals. And last week’s shakeup handed day-to-day authority from DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis to his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now has final say on major DeepMind decisions and reports to CEO Sundar Pichai.
The move marks a further erosion of DeepMind’s independence since Google bought the London lab in 2014, with some teams shifting into corporate Google. But other top talent—including Gemini’s original co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals—have headed out the door. —Lily Mae Lazarus
More tech
—Vibe-coding startup Lovable raises $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, more than double its December price tag.
—DeepSeek is quietly staffing up to challenge Anthropic’s Claude Code, posting job listings for a new AI-agent team.
—Google’s newest wearables will track insulin resistance, a category first using AI and sensor data instead of continuous glucose monitoring.
—Uber is quietly building a “tween” rides option for kids 10 to 12, based on code spotted in its latest iOS app.
—New York City is probing Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, and Titan over their ad practices, the latest legal headache for the booming prediction-markets industry.
—Grubhub’s $23.8 million FTC settlement is finally reaching diners and drivers, with checks and PayPal payouts going to more than 640,000 people over misleading earnings claims and phantom restaurant listings.
—Uber Freight is investigating a data breach claimed by hacking group Helix, which says it stole dispatch records and accounts payable files.
—Trump Media is charging up to $100K a month for a head start on Truth Social posts, and nearly a dozen trading firms are already paying up—at least one economist is calling it insider trading.
—Sam Altman says a Goldman Sachs internship “sounds unbelievably terrible now,” recalling the offer he turned down before founding OpenAI, which has since hired more than 100 ex-bankers itself.
