OpenAI wants to spend $600B on compute by 2030

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Welcome back to Why Join.

So uh I read this piece from Jason Lemkin on SaaStr a few weeks back and it really stuck with me. For like a decade there was this almost mechanical formula in SaaS right. Hit $20M ARR, show 110%+ NRR, don’t burn too much, grow at least 20%. Do those four things and PE shows up with a term sheet. That was the safety net. You didn’t need to be a rocket ship, you just needed to be like good enough. That whole floor? Gone. PE is buying AI-accelerated growth stories and hot sectors now. Plain vanilla SaaS with okay growth and no AI angle? Crickets. Nobody’s coming to save you. Build accordingly.

Alright let’s get into it.

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💵 Raised - $14.5M Series A. Investors include Norwest (lead), Storm Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

One-liner: AI platform that automates the grunt work of financial reporting.

Why it’s a fave: Anyone who’s been near a 10-K knows the process is brutal. Financial statements get patched together across spreadsheets, moved into Word docs, emailed back and forth. Even just making sure dollar signs and commas are consistent eats up 20% of an accountant’s time. Legacy tools like Workiva exist but accountants still hate them.

InScope automates the manual stuff, verifying math, formatting, all the tedious checks that slow everything down. They’re not fully auto-generating income statements and balance sheets yet (accountants are risk-averse, shocker) but that’s the end goal. Founded by two former Flexport accountants who kept running into the same problems no matter where they worked. Customer base grew 5x in the last 12 months, with top-15 firms like CohnReznick already on board.

Hiring: Full-stack Engineer, Full-stack AI Engineer, Founding Marketing Manager, Customer Success Lead, Founding Account Executive, Founding Product Designer - San Francisco

💵 Raised: $50M Series C. Investors include Lead Edge Capital (lead), ICONIQ, Index Ventures, Greylock, Harmony Partners, and Interplay.

One-liner: End-to-end tech platform for independent food distributors.

Why it’s a fave: Independent distributors handle over two-thirds of food distribution in North America. That’s a $1.4 trillion market. And most of it still runs on phone calls, faxes, and duct-taped legacy systems. The big guys (Sysco, US Foods) have the tech budgets to modernize. The independents don’t, so they’re stuck.

Pepper gives them a unified platform covering ordering, sales, accounts receivable, payments, the whole stack. They’ve built 70+ ERP integrations so distributors can plug in without ripping out what they already have. 500+ distributors on the platform now, roughly $30B in gross merchandise volume flowing through it. They’re rolling out AI agents for ordering and growth, and building an ad platform where food manufacturers can market directly to distributors.

Hiring: FP&A Manager, Finance Operations Analyst - Remote (US)

💵 Raised - $67M Series B. Investors include Apandion, AE Ventures, Founders Fund, Linse Capital, Nvidia’s NVentures, Threshold Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures.

One-liner: AI-native 3D metal printing for mass manufacturing.

Why it’s a fave: Industrial metal 3D printing has been around for a while but the machines are expensive, slow (require extensive calibration), and not built for scale. CEO Erik Palitsch figured this out firsthand building rocket engines at SpaceX. Freeform's current system (called GoldenEye) uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precision parts. The next version (Skyfall) will use hundreds of lasers to pump out thousands of kilograms of parts per day.

The wild part is they’re running H200 GPU clusters on-site doing real-time physics simulations of the printing process. They claim to have more data on metal-printing physics than anyone in the world, and they’re using it to improve quality and speed constantly. The category is heating up (Hadrian just hit a $1.6B valuation, VulcanForms and Divergent have raised hundreds of millions) but Freeform’s bet is that software-first, AI-native manufacturing wins over traditional automation.

Hiring: Manufacturing Engineer (New Grad Summer 2026), Software Engineer, C++ (New Grad Summer 2026), Electrical Engineer (New Grad Summer 2026), Mechanical Engineer (New Grad Summer 2026), Process Engineering Internship/Co-Op (Summer/Fall 2026) - Los Angeles

• New 15% global tariff replaces struck-down emergency duties: SCOTUS ruled Trump's emergency tariffs (up to 50%) were illegal under IEEPA. Hours later, he invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a provision no president has ever used, to slap a 15% blanket tariff on most imports. It caps at 15%, expires in 150 days unless Congress extends it, and exempts goods under the US-Mexico-Canada deal. Sector-specific tariffs on steel (50%), aluminum (50%), autos (25%) stay in place. Deals struck with 42 countries including the EU and Japan are now in legal limbo. China remains at 30% from an earlier truce. Trump says more tariffs are coming via Section 301.

• Hegseth summons Anthropic CEO to Pentagon over AI safeguards: Hegseth called Amodei to the Pentagon for a meeting officials say isn't friendly. Claude is the only AI in military classified systems. The Pentagon wants unrestricted access; Anthropic says no to mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Pentagon is threatening to declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," which would void contracts and block vendors from using Claude. Feud escalated after Claude was used in the Maduro raid in January.

• OpenAI planning $600B compute spend through 2030, IPO could hit $1T: 2025 revenue came in at $13B, beating its $10B target, while spending $8B (under its $9B budget). Now raising $100B+ at an ~$830B valuation, with Nvidia alone putting in $30B. Expects $280B+ cumulative revenue by 2030, split evenly between consumer and enterprise. The catch: inference costs quadrupled in 2025, dragging adjusted gross margin from 40% to 33%. Altman previously committed to $1.4T to build 30 gigawatts of compute capacity.

  

  

• Peak XV raises $1.3B: The former Sequoia India arm raised $1.3B across new India and APAC funds, with most earmarked for India over the next 2-3 years. The firm now manages $10B+ and has 450+ portfolio companies. AI, fintech, and consumer are the primary targets, with 80+ AI investments already made. This drops as India’s AI moment accelerates: General Catalyst just committed $5B to the country over five years, and OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all showed up at New Delhi’s AI Impact Summit. The firm has returned $7B+ to LPs since inception with 35 portfolio IPOs.

• China’s BCI industry is moving from lab to market: While Neuralink grabs headlines, China has quietly completed 50+ clinical trials for implantable BCIs and just finished the world’s second fully implanted wireless BCI trial. Seven government agencies released a national BCI roadmap targeting a full supply chain by 2030, backed by an 11.6B yuan ($165M) brain science fund. Provinces are already setting medical pricing for BCI, fast-tracking insurance coverage. The market hit ~$530M in 2025 with projections of $16B+ by 2040. Key startups: NeuroXess, BrainCo (quietly filing for HK IPO after raising $287M), StairMed ($48M Series B), and ultrasound BCI startup Gestala launching its first product Q3 this year.

• Anthropic launches Claude Code Security: New Claude Code feature that scans full codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests patches. Goes beyond pattern-matching by reasoning about code like a human researcher. Found 500+ bugs in production open-source repos that went undetected for decades. Available in research preview for Enterprise/Team customers, free for open-source maintainers.

• Clarion: Software Engineer (Full-stack), Marketing Lead, Founding Product Designer, Growth Associate - NYC

• Conveo: Social Media Manager, Enterprise Account Executive, Customer Marketing Lead - New York, Antwerp, London

• Playground: Growth Marketing Intern (Intern-to-Hire Track), BizOps Lead, Sales Development Representative, Senior Software Engineer, Frontend - NYC, Denver

• Hadrius: BDR, Founding Operator - New York

• Fractional AI: AI Engineer, Software Engineer, Marketing and Developer Relations - San Francisco, New York; Founding Engineer - Dubai

• Bessemer Venture Partners: Associate or Senior Associate - AI - San Francisco

• SoftBank: Investment Associate - Menlo Park

• Harmonic: Growth Lead, Solutions Engineer, New Grad (Class of 2026), Growth Analyst, New Grad (Class of 2026), Full Stack Product Engineer (AI), Search - NYC

• Numeric: Content Marketing Manager, Founding Business Operations and Strategy, Software Engineer, Frontend, Software Engineer, Product - New York, San Francisco, Vancouver; Business Development Representative - London

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See you Wednesday, Ryan

Sponsorships: We are now accepting sponsors for Q1 ‘26. If you are interested in reaching my audience of founders, investors, and tech executives, send me an email at chief@whyjoin.xyz.