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Greg Abel to address shareholders at first gathering since he succeeded Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway continued to sell stocks in its first quarter under the command of new chief executive Greg Abel, pushing its cash pile above $380bn as it held off on using its war chest to dive into a volatile market.

The sprawling insurance to industrials conglomerate said its cash and short-term Treasury bills climbed by $7bn from the end of 2025, excluding the value of US government debt it has bought but must still pay for.

That cash has been a focus for investors, given the company has been shedding stocks for more than three years.

Some of it must be held to meet regulatory limits designed to safeguard insurance policyholders, but analysts and investors believe the company still has considerable dry powder that it could use to clinch a mammoth acquisition or buy minority stakes in publicly traded stocks.

Berkshire disclosed that it had sold $24bn worth of stocks, with purchases of $15.9bn, stretching its net sales streak to 14 consecutive quarters.

It marked Berkshire’s largest quarter of stock sales from its $288bn equity portfolio since 2024, when it dumped a large portion of its stake in Apple.

Net income more than doubled from a year earlier to $10.1bn. Berkshire’s preferred measure of profitability, the operating earnings of its hundreds of subsidiaries, rose 18 per cent year-on-year to $11.3bn.

Those figures strip out the price movements in Berkshire’s stock portfolio, which US accounting rules dictate the company must report in its net profit figure.

The results come hours before Abel takes the stage at the company’s annual meeting, an event sometimes referred to as the “Woodstock for capitalists”.

Abel replaced longtime Berkshire chief executive Warren Buffett at the helm of the company earlier this year.

In classic Berkshire style, at this weekend’s gathering the company was selling novelty cards adorned with Abel’s and Buffett’s faces and the phrase “Card Carrying Capitalist”. They cost: $2, with the proceeds going to the non-profit organisation Girls Inc.

The event, which takes over an arena and exhibition hall in downtown Omaha, has attracted tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders.

On Friday afternoon Abel walked through the convention area, where dozens of Berkshire subsidiaries including chocolatier See’s Candies and the BNSF railroad had stands to sell products and meet shareholders.

The company’s rodent control business, Bell Laboratories, was selling limited-edition rat traps branded with the Berkshire Hathaway name.

Security guards flanked Abel as he stopped to take pictures and hear from shareholders.

Dan Sheridan, the chief executive of Berkshire subsidiary Brooks Running, said the question for most of those gathered in Omaha was how the transition from Buffett to Abel was progressing and whether the new chief executive was deviating from his predecessor.

“It’s the question of the weekend: How’s the transition going?” he said. “Greg is his own man. He’s going to make changes. I don’t know what those are, but I can tell you initially it’s been very consistent with how he led in his other roles.”

The Iran war has disrupted the global fertilizer market. Barron’s sizes up where these agricultural stocks could be headed next.

The Iran war has triggered a sharp disruption in global fertilizer markets. Tensions in the Middle East have effectively choked off transportation through the Strait of Hormuz—a route that handles roughly one-third of the fertilizer trade. With shipping curtailed and regional gas infrastructure damaged, both production and transport of key nutrients have been constrained, creating a supply shock in already tight markets.

Nitrogen fertilizers have been hit the hardest as costs of natural gas—a key input—have soared. Prices have risen 30% to 50% since the conflict began. Phosphate prices have also moved higher, though less dramatically, as exports from the Persian Gulf and the supply of sulfur—critical for phosphate production—have been disrupted. Potash, by contrast, has been largely insulated since it’s mostly produced outside the Middle East.

The shock has rippled through the farm supply chain. Fertilizer producers such as CF Industries Holdings, Nutrien, and Mosaic are the clearest beneficiaries, but the impact isn’t uniform. Each company’s exposure depends on the nutrients it produces and how much input costs eat into margins. That helps explain why the three stocks have diverged noticeably over the past two months.

For other agricultural companies, the picture is more mixed. When fertilizer gets expensive, farmers tend to focus on getting more out of every acre, which can drive demand for higher-yield seeds, chemical use, and precision technologies—benefiting companies like Corteva and. But if rising costs start to squeeze farm income too much, that support can fade, as farmers pull back on other spending to conserve cash.

What’s more, meatpackers like Tyson Foods could face headwinds if higher fertilizer prices lead to more expensive animal feed and increase the costs of raising chickens and hogs. This would come when meat processors are already struggling with losses in the beef business due to record high cattle prices.

Barron’s took a look at six agricultural stocks that could be affected by higher fertilizer prices, and asked Wall Street analysts where they might head to next. Investors should choose with caution.

CF Industries Holdings mainly produces nitrogen fertilizers such as ammonia and urea, whose prices have risen sharply since early March. Compared with producers overseas, lower natural-gas costs in the U.S. have helped the company expand its margins significantly.

But much of the upside may already be reflected in the stock. Shares are up 61% year to date and near record highs. Near-term trading is likely to track Iran-related headlines and energy prices and investors should expect volatility, says Morgan Stanley analyst Vincent Andrews.

Mizuho analyst Edlain Rodriguez believes nitrogen prices likely won’t go up much more from here since farmers won’t be able to afford them. “While it’s thrilling to be on the roller coaster, knowing when to get off is also part of the adventure,” he says.

Nutrien runs a more diversified business, with nitrogen fertilizers and potash each contributing roughly a third of its profits. Its potash supply—largely produced in Canada—has been insulated from the Iran conflict, positioning the company as a relative safe haven.

“Investors are holding Nutrien to avoid exposure to the volatility,” says Oppenheimer analyst Kristen Owen.

The stock has been largely flat since tensions escalated as some investors worry that higher nitrogen costs could crowd out spending on other inputs. Rodriguez believes concerns are overdone, noting that potash demand should remain resilient given its lower cost compared with nitrogen and phosphate.

Mosaic’s core business is phosphate and potash fertilizers, and the stock has lost 16% since the Iran conflict. Although phosphate prices have risen, costs of inputs like sulfur and ammonia have increased as well.

Supply of sulfur—a byproduct of oil and gas production—is particularly tight due to shipping disruptions and reduced production in the Persian Gulf, which came as exports from Russia and Ukraine were already constrained.

“This is something that doesn’t change overnight even if there’s a cease-fire,” Owen says.

Higher ammonia and sulfur costs will weigh on phosphate margins, Andrews says, noting that Mosaic has already shut a phosphate facility in Brazil.

Corteva sells seeds under brands like Pioneer and crop-protection chemicals such as herbicides and insecticides. While there is potential pressure on crop-protection sales due to farmers’ tight budgets, the seed business likely won’t be impacted.

“We tend not to see farmers skimp on seeds,” Andrews says. “If you buy low-quality seeds, you’re putting a ceiling on how productive your land can be.”

Some investors worry that a shift from corn to soybeans—where seed margins are lower—could hurt Corteva. Owen thinks the risk is limited, as many farmers locked in fertilizer purchases last fall and are unlikely to alter planting plans significantly.

Rodriguez believes Corteva is the best-positioned agricultural name due to its seed portfolio. The company’s planned split later this year will carve out its seed and crop-protection units, a move that could unlock additional value of the higher-quality seed business.

Agricultural machinery makers tend to see big-ticket purchases such as tractors and combines shrink as high fertilizer costs eat into farm income. Despite substantial government aid in recent years, surveys suggest farmers are more likely to spend those money on crop inputs and debt repayment than on machinery.

Nevertheless, Owen noted that expensive fertilizers could encourage the adoption of precision technologies that improve efficiency and boost yields, especially those bought separately as a retrofit that costs less than new equipment. AGCO is better positioned, she says, given its focus on retrofit technologies and exposure to the European market, which has seen more stable farm income than the North American counterparts.

Some farmers might reduce fertilizer application due to high costs, which could threaten yields in the fall, driving up crop and animal feed prices. That means meatpackers like Tyson Foods would face rising costs for chickens and hogs, which are primarily fed with corn and soybeans. This could squeeze Tyson’s margins if it can’t pass those costs onto consumers.

The company’s beef segment has already been losing money in recent quarters. Tight cattle supply—driven by years of drought and herd reduction—has pushed up cattle costs sharply, squeezing meatpackers’ beef margins. Chicken has been Tyson’s profit engine; now that might also face margin pressure at an already difficult time.

Apple Boosts Starting Price for Mac Mini After AI Demand Surge

Chief Executive Tim Cook has said desktop computers likely to face supply-demand imbalance for several months

Apple AAPL 3.24%increase; green up pointing triangle raised the starting price of its Mac Mini computer a day after Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company is struggling to meet demand.

The entry level desktop computer now starts at $799, and comes with 512 gigabytes of storage. Previously Apple AAPL 3.24%increase; green up pointing triangle sold a version for $599 that came with 256 gigabytes.

Mac Minis have been flying off Apple’s shelves in recent months thanks in part to demand from AI power users for whom it is the must-have computer for private, “always-on” artificial-intelligence agents, such as OpenClaw. Apple’s website says orders placed today will be delivered in early-to-mid June.

Cook told investors Thursday that Apple has been unable to get as many chips as it needs to make as many devices as customers want to buy. In the March quarter, that was mostly related to iPhone models, he said, but in the current quarter it is having a bigger impact on Mac sales.

“We think, looking forward, that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance,” Cook said.

While AI demand is helping power Mac Mini sales, it is also cutting into supplies: Rival companies are getting a bigger share of the fastest chips being made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, limiting Apple’s supply and its ability to make iPhones as fast as people want to buy them. Cook said on the earnings call that continues to be a problem after he cited it last quarter.

Removing entry level storage tiers for its devices is a tactic Apple has used to, in effect, raise prices for its products. The iPhone 17 Pro model cost $100 more than the prior year’s Pro model, but came with more storage.

The Mac Mini and more expensive Mac Studio are square desktop computers that have no monitor or attached keyboard.

Besides lack of chip supply, Apple is also contending with skyrocketing prices for memory and storage, which are key components inside its smartphones, computers, and tablets. Tech companies building out massive data centers need both memory and storage to power their AI infrastructure.

Apple said in February that it was working with Foxconn to open a new assembly line in Houston for Mac Mini computers in order to meet local demand.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the removal of the lower storage tier Mac Mini, and pointed to Cook’s comments from yesterday’s earnings call.

Potential presidential candidates are already looking to build a donor network ahead of formally entering the race next year

The 2028 Democratic presidential primary race won’t begin in earnest until after November’s midterm elections. But speed dating is already well under way among prospective candidates and major donors on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are among those who have met with wealthy investors and financiers in recent months.

The flirtations are risky. Wall Street and wealth are viewed with great suspicion among many of the progressives likely to play a significant role in picking the party’s nominee, and taxing the rich and bashing capitalism have become a rallying cry for many of them. Wall Street has nonetheless long been a significant source of money for the party, and that will continue to be the case in this year’s midterm election and in 2028.

With no clear standard-bearer, many Democrats anticipate a crowded primary field that could grow as large as, if not larger, than the 2019-20 lineup of more than two dozen candidates—and potential 2028 contenders are looking for early advantages. The early meetings with donors are happening quietly, including over meals near Wall Street and in Midtown conference rooms. They are also playing out in Silicon Valley and other U.S. wealth centers.

Some power players in the finance and business world are putting together a new Wall Street-heavy donor group to hold private listening sessions with potential candidates, according to people familiar with the matter.

Centerview Partners co-founder Blair Effron; Joshua Steiner, a partner at investment firm SSW Partners; former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who is now chairman of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus; Blackstone Vice Chairman Tom Nides; and former Oracle President Charles Phillips are among the executives that are part of the group, the people said. One of the goals for some of the organizers is for a younger generation of financiers to have the chance to meet with candidates and for them to potentially help raise campaign cash. The group has been meeting since late last year to discuss the 2028 Democratic field.

Effron, a longtime bridge between Wall Street and Democrats, has played a central fundraising role in multiple presidential elections.

Emanuel, who has had his own stints working for Wall Street, including becoming a senior adviser at Centerview after returning to the U.S. in 2025 from his Japan ambassadorship, has been among the potential presidential contenders already engaging with longtime business community acquaintances about a bid.

During the first half of April, Emanuel huddled with four veteran investors to make his case for a potential presidential run. Over boxed lunches in a Midtown office, he noted that Trump and Republicans’ favorability ratings have tumbled in recent polling. That discontent, he said, could provide an opening for a more moderate voice like his to unite Democrats and defeat the Republican nominee.

Among those at the lunch: hedge-fund manager John Petry and Boykin Curry, a former managing director at investment firm Eagle Capital. Petry, whom Emanuel said he first met about three months ago, is a major Democratic donor who has backed former Vice President Kamala Harris and numerous House and Senate candidates and allied committees.

“John Petry reached out to me and said, ‘I love what you are saying about education. Would you meet?’” Emanuel, a longtime party fundraiser, recounted. He said of the donors he met with for lunch, “I’m the only person they haven’t contributed to.” Petry and Curry confirmed the meeting.

The former White House chief of staff and congressman has also spoken with Avenue Capital CEO Marc Lasry, someone he has been close to for more than two decades, about possibly running for president, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Emanuel, who is flooding his party with proposals as he seeks to influence the Democratic policy debate, has called for, among other things, a mandatory retirement age of 75 for presidents, cabinet officials, members of Congress and federal judges.

Kelly, a former astronaut, sat down recently for a dinner in New York with a party fundraiser and attorney who specializes in corporate bankruptcies, according to a person familiar with the matter. His message was clear: He is seriously considering running for president in a field that is likely to be sizable. A Kelly spokesman pointed to his past remarks about contemplating a presidential bid and declined to comment further.

The dinner, on the sidelines of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention, is the sort of meeting most of the prospective candidates will need to have in the coming months to build early support for presidential bids likely to be announced during the first half of 2027.

Beshear said in a meeting with a Chicago-based Democratic fundraiser that he believes the 2028 election needs to feature Democrats who better appeal to middle-class voters, adding that candidates need to have concrete policies that can improve people’s lives, according to the person who met with him. The fundraiser, a securities lawyer, said Beshear didn’t rule out running for president.

Beshear has political cover for ramping up his donor meetings. He is this year’s Democratic Governors Association chairman and one of that job’s primary roles is to raise money for his party’s 2026 races for governor. A Beshear aide declined to comment.

Shapiro also met with Lasry last year, according to a person familiar with the matter. An aide to Shapiro, who recently published a new memoir ahead of a possible presidential bid, declined to comment.

Like Beshear, Shapiro has potential reasons besides 2028 to increase his meetings with donors. He is up for re-election this year in a large and costly state and is also working to help other Pennsylvania Democrats running for office.

One potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who might not have to as aggressively court big-donor money is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. The billionaire, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, is running for a third term this year and spent more than $300 million to self-fund his first two gubernatorial campaigns. Aides didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The consternation over Trump’s rise and lingering frustration over Harris’s loss has triggered extensive early planning among wealthy donors ahead of the presidential election.

The talks among wealthy Democratic donors about the state of the 2028 race were top of mind earlier this year during Democratic National Committee’s spring donor retreat in Park City, Utah, according to an attendee.

At the meeting, wealthy donors started putting together a list of potential candidates based on private conversations and public comments. With no incumbent or obvious front-runner, the future field could include as many as two dozen contenders, ranging from governors to former cabinet secretaries and members of the House and Senate.

Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate.

At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell?

We also talked about Replit’s net revenue retention — a measure of how much existing customers expand their spending — which Masad says is reaching as high as 300%, his willingness to take Apple to court over what he called outright lies in its App Store battle with Replit, and the possibility of the company beginning to invest in its own customers.

On the question of independence, Masad was firm. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, he argued Replit has the economics to make that path viable — even if he stopped short of ruling out a sale entirely.

The following has been edited for length and clarity:

TC: Cursor’s reported SpaceX deal was the talk of the industry last week. What did you make of it?

AM: It’s kind of hard being an independent, smaller AI company that’s building on foundation models, especially if you’re burning a ton of cash. Part of the reporting suggested Cursor has negative 23% margins, and if you’re also wanting to invest in training models, that makes it incredibly hard to stay independent.

For us at Replit, partly because we target a different customer set, we’ve been able to run the business more rationally. We’ve been gross margin positive for over a year. We’re slightly more expensive, but we provide a lot more. Our audience tends to be mostly non-technical users who previously haven’t been able to create any software. We provide an end-to-end platform — from the prompt all the way to a deployed application that can scale. We handle security, databases, database migration. And we’ve been doing this long enough that we’ve built a lot of those primitives into the platform.

Is Replit for sale? I would assume you are talking with potential acquirers all the time; it’s your fiduciary responsibility.

Yeah. We have amazing partners, and they sometimes bring up these topics. But we’re going to try to stay independent. I would love for us to remain an independent company. We’ve been around for 10 years, before it was even accepted that you could make apps just from ideas. We were talking about creating a billion software creators back in 2018 at YC, and people sometimes actually laughed at that dream. Now that dream is possible, and we kicked off this revolution with our agentic coding experience in September 2024. It just feels like we can take it much further.

You work closely with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. If you had to rank them — who’s doing it best?

Anthropic is still undefeated on the core agentic loop. They have the best tool calling; the agent can stay coherent much longer. GPT-5 is catching up quickly. Google’s Flash family of models is just amazing on price-performance. If you want something fast and cheap, they’re actually beating open source right now. We use all three, and honestly I wouldn’t discount the newer labs either. Reflection AI is coming out with open-source models we’re hearing great things about. And the Chinese models are impressive — Kimi is as good as an Anthropic-generation model from January, so it’s only about three months behind.

When you’re in a bake-off for an enterprise deal, what wins it for you?

Most of our sales are inbound or organic — very product-led. We’ve acquired customers like Zillow and Meta purely through people adopting the product and then raising their hand to buy an enterprise plan. When it does go top-down and there’s a formal bake-off, we usually win on product. But even in cases where we might be missing a feature, once it hits the C-suite and the IT group, Replit wins on security. A lot of vibe-coding tools will generate a website and connect it to an external database — great products, but it makes security much harder, because the database is open to the public and you need to configure row-level security, which is especially difficult for non-technical builders. Replit being full stack, with the database built into the project and not open to the public — that makes the app inherently more secure.

We also spent 10 years battling crypto scammers and hackers, so our cybersecurity function is as good as a dedicated cybersecurity startup. Every time you deploy an app on Replit, we create an entirely new isolated project on Google Cloud. We inherit Google’s security model.

Can we talk about churn? How long do you hold onto customers if the best prototypes eventually get rebuilt into a company’s existing stack?

Churn is very, very low, and net retention is incredibly high — 300% in some cases. What we actually hear from customers is that when engineers get nervous and try to rebuild an app into their own stack, they often make it worse. Once enterprises get comfortable with the full Replit stack — especially when we set up a single-tenant environment for them — they keep the apps on Replit. Bain & Company, for example, replaced Tableau and Power BI with Replit and Databricks.

There’s a growing concern about AI bloat — non-technical users generate far more code and burn through far more tokens. That’s good for you [given your usage-based fees]. What about your customers?

We don’t have a lot of regrettable spend. Enterprises are very ROI conscious, and they tell us about the returns they’re getting. For the most part they feel the investment is totally worth it — often one, two, three orders of magnitude. If they spend $100,000 a month with Replit, they’re usually generating $2 million, $3 million, $10 million in some kind of return.

Let’s talk about Apple. Another rival, Lovable, just got an app-building app approved by the App Store this week. Replit has been in App Store purgatory, with Apple blocking your updates for months. How much does that hurt you?

It’s not life or death — we could lose the app and it wouldn’t do anything meaningful to our business. But it’s an app people genuinely love. We’ve been on the App Store for four years. Kids in underprivileged communities learn to code on Replit on their Android devices. Executives use it in meetings.

The reason Replit got blocked when others weren’t, we believe, is that Replit makes iOS apps. When we launched that capability in December, there were charts going around showing how many apps were getting into the App Store through us. We think Apple feels threatened by that.

Apple’s stated reason is that you’re downloading new code to the device [after the approval process], which violates their guidelines.

That’s a lie. And we can prove it in court if we have to.

Is that going to happen?

I hope not. I’m a fan of Apple, and I’d love to collaborate and build something great together. We’re happy to send customers to Xcode [Apple’s own development environment]. But you can’t run a marketplace that a billion people have access to and make decisions that are discriminatory or based on whims.

Just wondering if, like Nvidia, OpenAI and others, you’re thinking about investing in your own customers in exchange for equity.

We’ve thought a lot about it, and it is a consideration. I’ve personally invested in a few startups that started on Replit before they made any money. Some of them, like Magic School — a teacher decided to take his time during COVID to learn a little bit of vibe coding and built an AI app for other teachers. He found this problem that in America, we burn out a lot of teachers. He wanted to use AI to reduce the workload. He did that, and he made $20 million in the first year. Other companies that started on Replit, I think, are valued at half a billion dollars. The entrepreneurship happening on Replit right now is genuinely exciting. We integrated with Stripe a few months ago, and the transactions flowing through Replit are growing triple digits month over month. Pretty soon, our customers will be making more revenue than we are.

Meta has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, the social media giant said.

“We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.

ARI’s team, including its co-founders, will join Meta’s AI unit, the Superintelligence Labs research division. ARI had raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed firm AIX Ventures.

The startup was building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform all types of physical labor such as household chores. Co-founder Xiaolong Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia, and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a list of prestigious awards to his name. Co-founder Lerrel Pinto, who previously taught at NYU and co-founded the kid-size humanoid startup Fauna Robotics before Amazon snapped it up last month, has also won a string of prestigious awards.

ARI will help Meta with its humanoid ambitions. “This team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control.”

Meta researchers have been working on humanoid robotics tech for years. A leaked memo from a year ago discussed Meta’s ambitions to build such a robot, including AI models and hardware, aimed at consumers.

Even if Meta never releases a consumer humanoid product, many AI experts these days believe that the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the theoretical point at which AI reaches or surpasses human-level intelligence across all domains — will require training AI models in the physical world, where robots learn through direct interaction rather than data alone.

The ARI and Fauna deals reflect a broader industry sprint — one where forecasts vary wildly, from Goldman Sachs’ projection of $38 billion by 2035 to Morgan Stanley’s estimate of $5 trillion by 2050 — a spread that reflects both the enormous potential and the uncertainty around tech that’s still finding its footing.

Although the U.S. already has 3,000 data centers, more than 1,500 new ones are in various stages of being built, according to Pew Research, most of them in rural areas. The frenzy is enticing land speculation and data center financing projects from lots of players, ranging from Blackstone to Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank.”

Large U.S. venture deals this week were led by a massive defense tech raise for space security startup True Anomaly. That theme continued with another two aerospace- and defense-related companies also getting major investor backing. We also saw sizable deals for startups applying AI to fintech, marketing, customer service, healthcare and developer tools. Let’s take a closer look.

1. True Anomaly, $600M, aerospace and defense: Centennial, Colorado-based True Anomaly raised a massive $600 million Series D led by Eclipse and Riot Ventures, with participation from a long list of other backers including Accel, 645 Ventures, G Squared, Acme Capital, Menlo Ventures and Paradigm. True Anomaly develops space security and in-orbit defense systems, an area drawing increasing venture investor attention amid rising geopolitical tensions. The new round brings its total funding up to $1.1 billion, per Crunchbase.

2. Rogo, $160M, AI and fintech: New York-based Rogo secured $160 million in Series D funding led by Kleiner Perkins and joined by other investors including Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, BoxGroup, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners and Jack Altman. Rogo builds AI-powered tools to automate financial research and workflows. The latest financing brings its total funding raised to date to $314 million, per Crunchbase. The deal is also the latest example of investor enthusiasm for startups targeting high-value knowledge work such as law and accounting.

3. Hightouch, $150M, AI and marketing: San Francisco-based Hightouch raised $150 million in a Series D co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and Goldman Sachs Alternatives. Iconiq Capital, Amplify Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Y Combinator and other investors joined. The company focuses on agentic AI-driven marketing and customer data activation. The round brings Hightouch’s total funding to date to more than $332 million and comes amid rising demand for AI tools embedded directly into enterprise marketing stacks.

4. Avoca, $125M, AI and customer service: New York-based Avoca brought in $125 million in a Series B led by General Catalyst and Meritech Capital Partners, with participation from other investors including Kleiner Perkins, BoxGroup, Alt Capital and Amplify Partners. Avoca develops AI agents for customer communication workflows. The new raise brings its total funding to $125.5 million, per Crunchbase.

5. Netomi, $110M, AI and customer service: San Mateo, California-based Netomi raised $110 million in a Series C led by Accenture Ventures, with participation from Adobe Ventures and others, including individual investors Justin Wexler, Henry Kravis, Greg Brockman, Nikesh Arora and Mustafa Suleyman. The company offers AI-powered customer experience automation across channels. The new funding brings its total raised to date to $217 million, per Crunchbase.

6. (tied) Parallel, $100M, developer tools: Palo Alto, California-based Parallel secured $100 million in a Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with additional backing from other big-name investors Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. The startup is building a suite of AI agents and developer tools to automate workflows. It has raised $260 million to date, per Crunchbase.

6. (tied) Scout AI, $100M, aerospace and defense: Sunnyvale, California-based Scout AI raised a sizable $100 million Series A led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates. A long list of other investors joined, including Booz Allen Ventures, Vaughn Capital Partners and FJ Labs. The startup develops AI systems for aerospace and defense applications. Its large early-stage round underscores continued investor appetite for dual-use and defense-focused startups, which globally raised a record $7.7 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data.

8. Firestorm, $82M, aerospace and defense: San Diego-based Firestorm closed an $82 million Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners. Booz Allen Ventures also participated in this round, as did IQT, Lockheed Martin, New Enterprise Associates, Motley Fool Ventures and others. Firestone builds modular, mission-adaptable drone systems. It has raised nearly $150 million total, per Crunchbase.

9. Iterative Health, $77M, health diagnostics: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Iterative Health raised $77 million in a Series C led by Google Ventures and Intrepid Growth Partners, with additional backing from Obvious Ventures, Insight Partners and EDBI. The company develops AI-powered diagnostic and clinical workflow tools, particularly in gastroenterology. It has raised more than $268 million since inception, according to Crunchbase.

10. Standard Intelligence, $75M, foundational AI: Investors continue to back next-generation foundation model startups. One of the latest is San Francisco-based AI research startup Standard Intelligence, which raised a $75 million Series A led by Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital. The raise comes at a $425 million pre-money valuation. Other investors in the deal include Stanley Druckenmiller, Milan Kovac and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy. Standard AI is developing “computer-use” models designed to interact directly with software. Its approach — training on large-scale video data rather than manually annotated screenshots — aims to significantly reduce costs and improve performance.

ZaiNar says it has developed innovative, ultraprecise tracking tech that will teach robots to see and help power the physical AI era. It will also freak out everyone who worries about digital privacy.

A couple of weeks ago, Daniel Jacker, CEO and co-founder of ZaiNar, made me an alluring offer: Would I like to see the first-ever public demonstration of the technology his startup had spent nine years laboriously developing in anonymity? He described it as the most accurate location-tracking tech on the planet, capable of pinpointing an object’s whereabouts within inches—indoors and outdoors—from a great distance away. Sure, Google Maps and Apple’s Find My feature are pretty terrific, but even in the best cases, they typically can only determine someone’s location to within dozens of feet and sometimes can’t find a device’s location at all if it’s inside or underground.

I knew Jacker had lined up a cadre of major investors, including Steve Jurvetson and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and had revealed the startup’s existence in February by announcing they’d valued the company at $1 billion.

I couldn’t possibly turn him down.

So Jacker, 37, and I met at a 20,000-square-foot warehouse in Belmont, Calif., previously occupied by GoPro. When we entered a ground-floor room divided by thick walls and cluttered with metal racks, Jacker handed a smartphone to one of his engineers, whom he’d enlisted to help with the demo. The device was connected to a 5G network through four antennas installed on the walls. It should’ve been very difficult to pinpoint its exact location without adding specialized equipment to the device or the room; plus, the warehouse’s interior metal roof would’ve made traditional GPS tracking challenging. But on a laptop monitor, ZaiNar software showed it as a tiny blue dot on a map of the warehouse floor.

As the engineer began to walk around with it, I kept waiting for the blue dot to disappear—or perhaps lag behind his movements. It never did, not even when he slipped into a narrow hallway between two anechoic chambers—rooms that use special tiles and foam to block out sound, satellite connections and wireless internet.

Jacker said his technology can track any phone, car, drone or robot in almost any environment as long as it’s roughly within a mile of a 5G base station, antenna or other network receiver. The one exception: He and his four co-founders haven’t yet figured out how to make it work underwater. He framed his company’s technology in cinematic terms: “We know where everything, everywhere, all at once is.”

Jacker sees the startup’s tech as an alternative to GPS-based tracking. Every device that can connect to wireless internet, like Wi-Fi and 5G, sends out radio signals to stay on the network. Zainar’s software uses those signals to track a device’s location within 4 inches, according to Jacker. The software works indoors using private Wi-Fi and 5G and outdoors using 5G networks operated by mobile carriers.

The concept of using radio signals for more precise location tracking has been kicking around university labs and Menlo Park skunkworks for years, but no other startup has come up with software that can actually analyze and correctly, precisely interpret the signals without requiring expensive, cumbersome hardware on a device or in the surrounding environment, Jacker said. The startup has benefited by closely studying the subtle variations of radio waves, giving it a better understanding of how long it takes for a signal to travel from a device to the network. That sense of timing is then used to help assess a device’s location.

ZaiNar’s technology uses a specific signal transmitted through radio waves called a sounding reference signal, long part of wireless technology. A device can send out this signal as much as 500 times a second, and since it transmits so frequently, it’s useful for tracking a moving device, like a drone or a robot. Apple recently added a feature that allows users to limit the precision of location data shared with cellular carriers. However, device makers like Apple and Google cannot prevent their devices from emitting the radio signals ZaiNar is analyzing, Jacker said, which means its technology could constantly monitor them anytime they’re connected to a network.

The startup already has $500 million in signed contracts and nonbinding commitments, according to Jacker, and is currently negotiating another $5 billion in deals. ZaiNar has two sets of customers: First, it sells software to mobile carriers, who use it to sell location-based data. The city of Tokyo, for instance, is studying traffic patterns and congestion by buying data that multiple mobile carriers gleaned using ZaiNar’s technology. How do they obtain the data? Both the cars on the roads and the smartphones pedestrians carry emit the signals ZaiNar’s software relies on. (Jacker wouldn’t say which mobile carriers are currently working with his startup.)

Second, Zainar also sells its software to private companies that want to monitor 5G-connected hardware like phones, drones and certain construction equipment. And its investors are betting the startup will win a pile of business from all the companies currently rushing to manufacture robots, as well as the customers who want to put those robots to use.

For the robotics boom to fully take off, robots need to have an acute sense of their whereabouts. But right now, most robots are pretty dumb when it comes to moving around. ZaiNar’s technology could improve how they see and move, said Ajay Ramachandran, an investor in ZaiNar through his San Francisco–based firm, ifMagic Ventures. “From robots to various kinds of drones to Waymos, they’re all going to benefit from this very precise location signal,” he said.

The startup has already struck deals with AI companies building world models, which simulate real-world environments to train autonomous systems like robots and self-driving cars before they’re let loose in the physical world. Those AI businesses see the location data ZaiNar has accumulated through its mobile carrier partnerships as valuable in training their models. In the past two weeks alone, ZaiNar signed more than $30 million in contracts to supply such data to companies developing world models, Jacker said.

“If you believe that physical AI is going to be a $50 trillion or $100 trillion [opportunity],” said Ramachandran, “this becomes a major opportunity from ZaiNar’s vantage point.”

But not everyone is so enthusiastic. Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, a London-based watchdog focused on digital surveillance and data abuses, argued that ZaiNar’s technology is ripe for misuse. “Tech like this moves surveillance decisions to the network,” he said, adding that network providers like cell carriers have a bad track record with user privacy.

“Governments and ad tech firms alike relish that opportunity for exploitation,” he said. “People do not.”

ZaiNar’s story began as many Silicon Valley tales do: with a chance meeting on the palm tree–lined campus of Stanford University. Jacker, a Chicago-area native, arrived there in 2016 for an MBA after trying to build a 3D-printing startup and spending time as an Accenture consultant.

During Jacker’s first semester, he met Philip Kratz, an applied physics doctoral student who ran Stanford’s student radio engineering club. The pair were both in Design Garage, a popular design school class that drew people from many different disciplines. They began talking about Kratz’s theory that advancements in radio technology offered a new way to analyze radio signals and accurately determine the precise location of devices like phones and cars. Together, they hatched a plan: Kratz would handle the science behind the technology; Jacker would work on commercializing it.

In an initial test of the idea, they placed a 4G antenna on a concrete wall bordering Campus Drive, the road that loops through campus. As each car drove by, they found they could detect it through the wall using the radio signal emitted by the car’s tire pressure sensor. It was an early validation of their theory. In another test, they tried to locate devices using wireless signals in the Stanford Business School garage and found their technique worked in that environment as well.

These experiments soon caught the attention of two of Jacker’s MBA classmates, Jack Levy and Eric Roselli, who joined up with him and Kratz. (Today Kratz is ZaiNar’s chief technology officer, and Levy is chief operating officer. Roselli is head of defense—exploring how the technology could be used for national security and potentially in war.) Next, Jacker recruited Alexander Hooshmand as a fifth co-founder. A Stanford guest lecturer, Hooshmand had recently sold data company BlueKai, which he co-founded, to Oracle for $400 million. Jacker made the overture amid a crowd of people who had stayed to speak to Hooshman after a class.

“There was a line of people waiting, but Danny was the only one I followed up with,” Hooshmand recalled. “It immediately occurred to me that if what they were describing worked, it would be incredibly powerful.”

The idea was good, but the founders still had to actually make the technology work. Over the decades, there have been many attempts to crack the challenging problem of tracking the location of objects inside buildings where satellite signals struggle to penetrate, said Fadel Adib, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab and a co-founder of Cartesian Systems, which has developed its own wireless tracking technology for retail stores to monitor inventory but isn’t a direct ZaiNar competitor.

Many of those efforts have failed for one key reason: Researchers in labs have claimed to have made breakthroughs, but “when you take them into the real world, something changes,” said Adib, blaming real-world obstacles that distort radio waves, like metal, doors and walls. Adib remains skeptical that ZaiNar’s technology can perform exactly as Jacker describes it—particularly when it comes to tracking things indoors—though he noted that he hasn’t tried the tech himself.

Jeff Depew, board president of Sand Hill Angels, a Bay Area–based firm that invested in ZaiNar in 2017, said other entrepreneurs interested in the technology lacked the patience to spend years perfecting it. Depew said he had previously mentored the founders of a similar startup also started by Stanford graduates, WiFiSlam. Even though they were in talks to do a big deal with Procter & Gamble, they still sold their business to Apple after just two years—for about $20 million.

Depew sees how the young founders, who wanted to cash out quickly, saw it as a “great outcome,” he said. “But they walked away from something that was really going to be transformational.”

ZaiNar, on the other hand, has taken a longer-term approach, he argued. “They were focused on doing it—from my perspective—the right way rather than the fast way.”

After ZaiNar’s founders graduated from Stanford, they quietly raised $5 million from investors including Yang, who became an early adviser, while deliberately trying to avoid any media attention. Jacker said none of the five founders had ever taken any money out of the business through secondary share sales. “We’re so bullish on what we’re doing,” he said.

After graduating, the ZaiNar founders worked out of Kratz’s three-bedroom home in Redwood City, Calif., and kept testing their technology in as many places as possible, including in Kratz’s living room and at a nearby indoor volleyball gym. To use the gym, they offered engineering classes to the high school students who played there. “Literally imagine us setting up different tripods and radios as there’s the high school volley teams trying to spike balls at us and knock things over,” Jacker said.

In 2019, ZaiNar ran its first test at a live construction site, the type of busy environment the founders hoped their tech would eventually get used in. In the years since, they’ve deployed their technology in a range of challenging locales, including a large California hospital system, a rail station in Japan and a million-square-foot fulfillment center in Michigan owned by a large online retailer, whose identity Jacker wouldn’t reveal.

ZaiNar was close to finally coming out of stealth mode in 2024 with a product focused just on tracking via Wi-Fi. But Jacker and his co-founders decided to wait a little longer and make a product that could also track via 5G. Moreover, they wanted to wait for enthusiasm about physical AI—robots, drones and autonomous vehicles—to intensify, figuring the companies making those products would be very eager to use its location-tracking technology.

“We wanted to create as big a moat as possible, so we could go in and really own the market,” Jacker said. “It was deliberate—but at times frustrating—not being able to tell the world what we were doing.”

Steve Jurvetson, a longtime VC fixture who has backed everything from SpaceX to Hotmail, is a ZaiNar investor and a major cheerleader for its technology, which he has described nothing less than “extraordinary.” (Getty Images)

Today Jacker and his co-founders hope their portfolio of 96 patents gives them a sturdy defense against any rivals. Still, they do have some giant competitors. In January, Ericsson, the massive Swedish telecom, unveiled a new 5G location-tracking technology, which the company says can track objects indoors within about 3 feet and outdoors within 4 inches. Huawei, Nokia and Qualcomm also all have their own offerings.

One way ZaiNar is bringing its technology to market is through a partnership with a large European consulting firm that helps large enterprises like infrastructure company Siemens and oil producer Saudi Aramco build private 5G networks. A senior data and AI executive at the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss the relationship with ZaiNar more freely, said it now offers ZaiNar’s location-tracking system as an add-on when deploying 5G infrastructure.

The executive described the relationship as a “win-win,” as the technology helps the consulting firm differentiate itself from competitors. They said its internal testing of ZaiNar’s technology in November produced strong results. The firm is now working on a pilot deployment at a site owned by an industrial conglomerate. If successful, the firm could expand the technology to hundreds of the conglomerate’s other sites.

At ZaiNar’s Belmont warehouse, I couldn’t help but feel a little disturbed as I watched the blue dot weave across that laptop screen. Sure, the technology was impressive, but the little dot represented a person. And we, as people, already exist in a world where our digital privacy has been steadily eroded for decades. ZaiNar’s technology could undermine it even further, leading to more intrusive forms of marketing, government surveillance and other possible abuses.

Since ZaiNar’s technology can granularly track a device’s movement using the signals a device broadcasts to stay online, it makes permissionless tracking very easy. (A user can’t turn off this type of location tracking the way they can other location services on a smartphone, though they could evade detection by putting their devices in airplane mode.) ZaiNar sees this as a major corporate selling point, and while I was reporting this story, a spokesperson for the startup described tracking items like phones and cars “without cooperation from those devices” as a large part of the company’s “key IP moat.”

When I pressed Jacker about the dystopian elements of his technology, he argued that the U.S. government already very tightly regulates the activities of mobile carriers, making them safer than some “random app” that isn’t watched as closely. He also emphasized that the location data is anonymized, though Hosein with Privacy International argued that one could identify it by, for example, cross-referencing it with CCTV footage.

And the telecoms don’t have squeaky-clean records when it comes to privacy. AT&T and Verizon, for instance, are still battling a more than $100 million combined fine dating back to a 2020 investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, which accused them of mishandling customer data in a previous effort to track and sell cellphone users’ locations to third parties.

One of the buzziest recent debuts in robotics came last year when 1X, a then little-known Palo Alto startup, said its Neo humanoid would be available in homes by 2026. (Getty Images)

Jacker said he has firm boundaries for his technology’s use. The company does not do deals in Russia and China and does not integrate with Chinese firms such as Huawei or ZTE, both of which the U.S. has identified as national security threats because of their connections to the Chinese military. But what about an organization like the U.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Jacker said he wouldn’t ever allow the federal agency to, for instance, use ZaiNar’s tracking for immigration raids.

“That’s crossing a line for us,” said Jacker, saying it would be “too Holocausty” to consider. But he could see ICE using ZaiNar technology for other operations.

“But border security? Totally fine,” he said.

As ZaiNar’s technology more fully enters the public spotlight, Depew, the ZaiNar investor, predicts questions around privacy will become more front of mind for people in the U.S. Depew said he would ideally like there to be an opt-in feature for users (though because of how the location tracking works, this doesn’t seem possible). Depew, an iPhone owner, brought up Apple as an example.

“It knows where I am, but I also know that they’re keeping it within the walled garden and not sharing it with everybody and so advertisers aren’t able to come after me without my inviting them in,” he said, adding that ZaiNar’s technology “allows you to do that on steroids.”

Jacker casts the dilemma I pointed out to him as just an example of an age-old problem. The internet, for example, has been transformative, but it also enables harm. “On the web, do terrorists communicate? Of course. And can you build a bomb online? Yes.”

Any powerful technology has good and bad uses,” he continued. “The question is, can you do your best to protect it so it’s used in a way that is a net positive?”