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Particle bets on cheaper intelligence per task
Suhail launched a new company, Particle. Its first model, particle-1, is the start of a developer-focused series. The company says it matches performance while using about 45% fewer tokens . It is post-trained on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017. The stated long-term goal is "continuous post-training," meaning model improvements that ship as fast as software . OpenRouter relays Particle's claim of 28–52% fewer output tokens than the DeepSeek base across four coding benchmarks . Garry Tan says Particle will be at the frontier for the lowest dollar per unit of intelligence .
The underlying problem is cost per task, not price per token. Two Minute Papers says the new DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 builds much better working software and costs just over $1 per million output tokens. In the host's own tests, though, it took two to three times as many tokens as Claude Opus to finish the same task . Particle's pitch targets exactly that gap: open weights with better token efficiency.
Other model signals from the period:
- Gemini 4 Carbon. Demis Hassabis calls it "SOTA across key benchmarks" but published no figures .
- ViBench 2.0. Replit's new benchmark has agents build a whole product from an empty project, one feature at a time. Even GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Astra and Opus 5.5 passed every check in only 49–65% of builds . Long-horizon autonomous building still has a lot of room to improve.
- OpenAI and Google TPUs. Reuters, citing The Information, reports that OpenAI plans to buy Google TPUs. No terms were disclosed and neither company commented .
- Cartesia H-Nets. Albert Gu reports that a new version of these byte-level models shows up to 3–5x efficiency gains in controlled scaling-law experiments. At larger scale it matches an open-source model trained on 11T tokens using about 10x less data and compute .
AI security: budgets are rising, but incumbents get the first call
a16z surveyed 100 CISOs at companies with 1,000+ employees. 87% expect security spending to rise, driven mainly by AI-enabled threats and by their own AI deployments . All seven of the most-selected 2027 initiatives involve AI . Production use is still low: 18% run AI SOC tools in production, and 13% run AI offensive security or AI vulnerability remediation. Within 12 months, 45% plan to buy or upgrade internal AI-agent security, 42% offensive security, and 38% AI governance .
The go-to-market picture is less favorable for startups:
- 44% would first look for AI security features from their existing platform; 21% would start with an AI-native vendor. 47% say a capability gap their incumbent can't fill would lead them to pick a startup .
- Some categories have as many as 43 vendors .
- a16z discloses that it led Armadin's Series B. Armadin uses autonomous agents to find exploitable paths through enterprise systems .
Attack capability is the reason for the urgency. In a simulated 32-step network attack, GPT-4o stalled at step 2. Today's top models got about three-quarters of the way through on average, and the best runs completed all 32 steps . Wiz's CTO said the company's Atlas harness, which combines DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic models, made its PHP remote-code-execution finding possible. He described the flaw as affecting 12 years of PHP deployments in default configurations . He said most monitored workloads were still unpatched . He told startups to plan for critical vulnerabilities arriving monthly or even weekly, and to build automated patching and infrastructure-as-code while they are still small .
Rounds and launches
- Foundry Robotics raised a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike, with Khosla continuing. It is building a 130,000 sq ft factory in Emeryville and says it already ships to paying customers in energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles and defense .
- Broccoli (YC W22) raised $52M across its Series A and B for AI phone agents that serve plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors. It has 1,500+ businesses on the platform and has booked 2.5M appointments. The founders knocked on 140 contractor doors, and the plumbing owner who first gave them time is now COO .
- Fragment launched with $56M: a Series A led by 8VC, plus a seed co-led by General Catalyst and A* . It resolves supply-chain exceptions, starting with direct procurement .
- Formation Bio launched a $600M fund to acquire drugs and move them through the clinic, pairing the capital with its AI platform .
- Diode, a PCB design-and-manufacturing company whose Series A a16z led, hired an a16z investor as president .
- Bunkerhill, which builds agents for health systems, says it has grown 12x annualized since January and closed eight figures of ARR in one week .
- FluxCap (YC P26), founded by former DOJ antitrust chiefs, came out of stealth building "Deep Legal Tech" .
Operating data from scaled vertical and defense companies
Hippocratic AI has about 300 employees, has raised about $450M, and launched its product only about 21 months ago. It reports 290M patient interactions and counts five of the top seven payers among its customers . The CEO says it charges about $9–10/hour. Running the same 31-model stack on closed models would cost about $105/hour in compute alone, which is why it uses open weights . Most of its traction comes from "infinite pilot" work, meaning care nobody offered before. In one example, calls to 1,700 patients lost to follow-up led 180 to complete CT scans, which found three cancers .
Stark, a European defense company backed by Sequoia, won billions in contracts within 18 months . It grew from zero to 700 people in two years and plans to invest about €600M in R&D and production capacity over 12–36 months . The founders say European procurement has gone from years to months, and they expect that change to last .
Pressure on incumbent software
SaaStr, citing the WSJ, says about $300B in risky PE-backed loans come due in 2028–29, and roughly a third of that is software . Software loans fell from about 95 to about 85 cents on the dollar after new Anthropic and OpenAI models came out, while other loans held near 96 . Elizabeth Yin argues customers will no longer pay $25,000 for a CRM they can rebuild themselves . She says Hustle Fund runs about 90% of its operations on agents . In her view the lasting value moves to support: maintenance, security and uptime .
Orbital compute
Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt and backed by Index, unveiled a rocket built to carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit. Its stated aim is space compute that costs the same as compute on the ground . Starcloud, a competitor backed by Benchmark, is valued at $2.3B .