Mistral AI secured $830 million in debt financing from seven European banks to build a data center near Paris packed with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 chips, bringing its total capacity to 44 megawatts. The facility is expected to be online by Q2 2026, and the company is also building a $1.3 billion data center in Sweden. Basically, Europe's best-funded AI lab is betting that owning your own infrastructure is the only way to compete. (CNBC)

Starcloud raised a $170 million Series A at a $1.1 billion valuation, becoming the fastest Y Combinator startup to reach unicorn status (17 months from demo day). The Redmond-based company is building data centers in low Earth orbit, powered by continuous solar energy, to solve terrestrial power grid constraints for AI compute. Its first satellite launched in November with an Nvidia H100, and the next version with Blackwell chips and an AWS server blade is coming later this year. (TechCrunch)

Meta started testing Instagram Plus, a premium subscription that lets you view Stories without the poster knowing, see rewatch counts on your own Stories, create unlimited audience lists, and extend a Story's shelf life by 24 hours. It's being tested in Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines at roughly $2/month, separate from Meta Verified. For founders and marketers: the message is clear. Meta is monetizing the features people actually want, not badges. (Engadget)

Sycamore, founded by Sri Viswanath (former CTO of Atlassian), raised a massive $65 million seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed. The company is building a trusted operating system for enterprise AI agents, giving companies security, governance, and human oversight as they deploy autonomous workflows. Angel investors include former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. (Yahoo Finance)

Uber is acquiring Blacklane, a Berlin-based premium chauffeur service operating in 500+ cities across 60 countries, to supercharge its new Uber Elite luxury tier. Blacklane has raised over $100 million from Sixt, Mercedes-Benz, and ALFAHIM. Pre-booked Uber Reserve trips are already one of the fastest-growing parts of Uber's mobility business, and this deal locks in the infrastructure to own the corporate travel segment. (Bloomberg)

Starting today, Reddit is rolling out [APP] labels on automated accounts, human verification challenges for suspicious behavior, and expanded bot reporting tools. Verification uses passkeys, Face ID, and potentially World ID. If you're a human who uses AI to draft posts, you're fine. If you're running unattended scripts, you'll need to prove someone's behind the wheel. For any founder doing Reddit marketing with automation: time to audit your setup. (TechSpot)

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