Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Having a bad day? Can’t be as bad as Anthropic’s, who accidentally leaked 512,000 lines of proprietary code through a single debug file. Or Oracle’s, who told somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 employees via a 6AM email that their jobs no longer exist. AI and data centers need the budget now. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Finnish Oura interviews banks for IPO as soon as this year
The health ring maker is exploring a public listing at an $11bn valuation after raising $875m in its Series E last year. Revenue doubled from $500m in 2024 to over $1bn in 2025, with $1.5bn expected this year. They have sold over 5.5m rings sold worldwide.
Revolut fined €11.5m in Italy over misleading fee claims
Italy's antitrust authority hit Revolut with an €11.5m fine for misleading "0% commission" investment ads that obscured the risks and limitations of fractional shares. The regulator also flagged aggressive practices in managing account suspensions, preventing users from accessing their funds. Revolut disputes the findings and plans to appeal.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
AI startups are growing faster than ever. At lower cost?
AI-native applications are hitting record growth with fewer and fewer employees. But this isn't lean efficiency. Operational costs are simply shifting from payroll to compute. If everyone's buying the same tokens, differentiation comes from distribution, data loops, or workflow lock-in, not from having a better team.
We talked to Max Buckley of Exa (Youtube / Spotify / Apple) for an exclusive look inside an AI-first company seeking to beat Google, and to Andreas Goeldi of b2venture (Youtube / Spotify / Apple) about his take on how the service-as-software shift connects directly to this payroll-to-token swap.
