Thursday, July 3, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! As a quick housekeeping note, this newsletter will be off in honor of the Fourth of July holiday tomorrow. We will return to your inboxes on Monday.

But first, today we get confirmation of a leadership change at Safe Superintelligence; we dive into photo-sharing app Flashes; and we learn about an interesting new gadget for kids. Have a great long weekend!

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Image Credits: JACK GUEZ/AFP / Getty Images

🪑 AI musical chairs continues: Ilya Sutskever will become CEO of Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup Sutskever co-founded in 2024 after leaving OpenAI. Sutskever also confirmed that Daniel Gross, a company co-founder who had been serving as CEO, is departing the startup.

⚡ Instagram alternative: Flashes is a photo-sharing app that launched earlier this year. The app, which is built on top of the Bluesky social network, is a non-Meta alternative to Instagram. Curious? We've got everything you need to know about it.

🧑‍⚖️ Not so fast: An early Donald Trump executive order required the Health and Human Services department to remove websites that spoke about "gender ideology." Now a U.S. district judge ruled that this requirement did not comply with all the necessary laws.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Hunters International (screenshot)

🗑️ Good riddance: Ransomware gang Hunters International announced on its dark web page that it will be shutting down. Why exactly is unclear. The post said the shutdown was "in light of recent developments" but didn't provide details on what exactly that referred to.

🎙️ Pay up: On this week's episode of Equity, which dropped a day early due to tomorrow's holiday, the hosts talked about Cloudflare's interesting new ploy to get AI to pay for scraping publishers' content. They also talked about Figma's S-1, the acquisition of Superhuman, and more.

⌚ KidGPT: Kid tech company Pinwheel launched the Pinwheel Watch, a smart watch that includes GPS tracking, a camera, and a kid-friendly AI chatbot. I'm curious how big the market is for parents who don't want their kid to have a smartphone but are fine with them having access to AI.

🤑 Cash for Castelion: Castelion is a startup building hypersonic weapons. The company has allegedly raised a sizable $350 million Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Altimeter Capital that values it in the billions. The company just raised a $100 million Series A in January.

🏦 Honey, I bought a bank: Darragh Buckley, the founder of fintech startup Increase, has apparently always wanted to buy a bank. Now it sounds like Buckley has succeeded in that mission — kinda. Owning a bank would sure help his banking API startup.

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Around the web

🕵️ Oh, good: U.S. Customs and Border Protection is looking for new surveillance tech. The organization put out the call for digital forensic tools that can help the organization process and analyze electronic devices seized at the U.S. border.

☁️ Head in the clouds: Apple allegedly considered launching its own cloud service business multiple times over the last few years. This would have really shaken up the enterprise cloud market and further pitted the company against Microsoft, Google, and AWS.