Proximal, a year-old startup that provides coding data to the labs, has raised at a $300m valuation from General Catalyst. In the last 10 months, it's surpassed $200m in annualized revenue, highlighting the labs' neverending appetite for data: theinformation.com/newslette…

Today, Stoke announced a $1 billion Series E, bringing our total capital raised to $2.3 billion. This funding will help us bring Nova Pathfinder to flight, accelerate development of our larger 15-ton-class Nova Block 2 vehicle, and build the production capacity required to fly at scale. This milestone reflects years of extraordinary work by the Stoke team and the conviction of customers and investors who share our belief that fully reusable space transportation is both possible and necessary. We are deeply grateful for their trust, and more energized than ever by the work ahead. Read the full announcement: stokespace.com/news/stoke-sp…

Success in venture has a strange side effect. It can make you worse at your job. @elizabeth, Founder and Managing Partner of @ScribbleVC, has spent a lot of time thinking about why. After growing Scribble to $280M AUM, returning 75% of her first fund to LPs, and raising an oversubscribed fund in this market, she has deliberately resisted the instinct to keep scaling the strategy. Her argument is that every new constraint changes how you invest. Larger funds need larger ownership. Larger ownership means fewer companies fit the model. Before long, you're optimizing around check size instead of finding the best founders. She told me something I hadn't really considered. A venture firm doesn't wake up one day and decide to become an asset manager. It happens gradually. More LP expectations. More ownership targets. More pressure to deploy capital. Eventually, the strategy that made the firm successful becomes the thing limiting it. That's why Scribble doesn't have a hard ownership target. Elizabeth would rather own a smaller piece of an exceptional company than pass because the spreadsheet says the stake isn't big enough. As she put it, she'd rather own a sliver of OpenAI than a big stake in an average company. She said it more plainly than I could have. Our fund size is our strategy. The best investors don't just protect their capital. They protect the incentives that made them good investors in the first place. We’d like to thank @AlphaSenseInc for sponsoring this episode! Full episode below 👇 youtube.com/watch?v=sTXqOWlT…

Today, we announced that @useOrb has entered into a definitive agreement to join @Adyen. @kshithappens and I have spent the past five years building Orb alongside some of the fastest growing companies in the world. The clearest thing we've learned: how companies price is changing faster than how they bill. AI has accelerated the shift toward consumption and outcome-based models, and the infrastructure underneath hasn't kept up. That gap is why we founded Orb, and joining Adyen is how we close it at global scale. Today's announcement doesn't change our commitment to our customers. Orb will continue operating as a stand-alone product, there will be no interruption in service, and our customers can continue to choose to work with their preferred payment processing partner. We're here for the long run, ensuring that our service continues to uphold "billing must be correct" as our customers pursue their most audacious revenue design goals. So why Adyen? Over the past several years supporting our customers' global growth, we've learned that billing at serious scale is only half the equation. The other half is moving money across markets, currencies, and enterprise requirements. Adyen has already built the foundational financial infrastructure that makes this possible. Joining them lets us build offerings that bring to life the vision of self-driving infrastructure for revenue optimization. We’re incredibly excited for Orb to only get better from here. To our team: thank you for all the hard work that you do every day for our customers. It has been, and continues to be, the pleasure of my professional life to work with all of you. To our customers: thank you for trusting us to support your growth and letting us partner with you. Thank you to our investors and supporters who’ve been with us on the journey. And thank you to my family for putting up with me talking about so, so many billing edge cases!