Volantis Semiconductor raised an $88M Series A, bringing total funding to $97M, to attack AI’s memory bottleneck with photonics. Backers include: OpenAI's Sam Altman SemiAnalysis'S Dylan Patel Jeff Dean John Doerr and others The company is building an optical “fabric” designed to connect AI processors to much larger pools of memory while dramatically increasing bandwidth. Volantis says its architecture can boost both memory capacity and bandwidth by more than 10x, targeting inference for models larger than 10 trillion parameters at speeds of up to 10,000 tokens per second per user. The core problem it is trying to solve is the “memory wall.” Volantis argues today’s architectures force a tradeoff: on-chip SRAM offers very high bandwidth but limited capacity, while HBM-based GPUs and TPUs offer far more memory but eventually run into bandwidth constraints as models scale. Its approach replaces more of the electrical data movement with optics, using custom integrated micro-VCSEL lasers and eliminating traditional optical fiber to push much more data across short distances inside AI systems. The company says it has already transmitted data more than 10x farther than similarly tiny electrical wires inside a chip package, and its next-generation design has already taped out. The near-term use case is much faster inference. Volantis says a coding agent that currently takes around 30 minutes could potentially complete the same task in roughly 30 seconds, while also lowering cost per token through higher throughput and cheaper pooled memory. If the technology scales as planned, the bigger idea is enabling much larger context windows, entire code repositories in context, and AI systems that are currently limited more by memory movement than raw compute.

BREAKING: Michael Jordan’s game-worn 1998 NBA Finals Game 3 jersey just sold for $12.26 million, the all-time record. (Sold on @joopiteronline) Michael Jordan continues to be the king of basketball collectibles, and it’s not close. This is insane.

Everything announced today by OpenAI: Dots ChatGPT Space GPT-6.1 Sol $500 Ultrafast Plan Private Intelligence Codex in the cloud Refreshed Codex CLI Code Review Codex Security Cloud Decisions API Agents API with Computer use Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI Plugin extensions Improved plugin creation, submission and discovery Sites can now host plugins MCP events for plugin automations Pages Collaborative slides Create teams and share tasks ChatGPT in Slack and Microsoft Teams Meetings plugin Shareable profiles Sign in with ChatGPT Pro 500 OpenAI Marketplace

JUST IN: Costco announces “most” of its $184 million in tariff refunds will be passed back to shoppers through lower prices on everyday items.

OPENAI ARR NEARS $70B AS ENTERPRISE SALES MORE THAN DOUBLE - AXIOS OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate is approaching $70 billion, up more than 70% since the start of Q3, according to Axios. The biggest acceleration is coming from enterprise. Its B2B revenue has grown more than 100% since July, as OpenAI closes the gap with Anthropic in enterprise AI adoption. Consumer growth has also remained strong, with OpenAI adding more revenue in Q3 alone than it added during all of 2025.

Is anyone else excited for OURA IPO tomorrow? Not many exciting POs as of late.