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AI NewsHow Data Centres Are Fighting Back Against a New Wave of Cyber Threats
11:13 AM IST · June 1, 2026
As cybercriminals abandon brute-force tactics in favour of AI-powered identity-based attacks, the industry faces a stark choice: either evolve its defences or risk becoming the weakest link in the nation's digital backbone.
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This week at TechCrunch’sStrictlyVC eventin Athens — part of thePanathēneafestival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the full discussion at page bottom. With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI and Anthropic potentially not far behind, what will the impacts be on the broader market? Andreas Stavropoulos:I remember how exciting the Google IPO was and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, the scale changes by orders of magnitude, and that’s to be expected. What business today in the information age is not a technology business? Ben Blume:These are phenomenal companies, and with each one of these scale liquidity events, they generate wealth and returns that go back into the next generation of companies. Niko Bonatsos:Myco-founderat Verdict was the first-ever investor in what is now known as Cursor. So if Elon feels like he’s [having] a good moment, maybe Cursor [which Musk revealed recently that he has theoption to acquirefor $60 billion] will have some good news too. But more broadly, for the next next generation of companies, as Andreas mentioned, they could be going after much larger markets, and immigrant founders, as we know, they’re the ones who dream really big, they have nothing to lose, and they can go the distance, and Elon Musk is an immigrant founder himself. So, for those of us who come from Greece or other smaller markets, wow, you know, that’s a great example. Some have suggested SpaceX at that valuation could soak up so much public market capital that it hurts companies going out in its wake. Is that a real concern? AS:You can choose to see most things as optimistic or pessimistic and make very good arguments for both. Something like a SpaceX, macro-wise, is going to end up bringing more people into the market than the short-term impact of soaking up some liquidity. Consumer involvement in markets in the last 30 years has gone from something that wasn’t really a thing to something people trade on their phones every day. Those numbers add up. BB:SpaceX is such a one-of-one company. For a long time, space has been a government and public sector domain. To give investors real financial access to it — I think that’s going to capture a widespread imagination. It may mentally draw from longer-tail allocations that might otherwise have gone into the next 20 or 30 software businesses, but I think the interest it generates more than compensates. Is the current flood of capital into AI justified by future earnings, or is this a case of extreme FOMO? NB:If you’re an AI-native founder or a company in the American dynamism space right now, you can live life in the fast lane. If you’re not in one of those two buckets, it’s really tough. In 17 years in Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen more groupthink. Three-quarters of all venture capital raised over the last year went into five companies. Today, if you’re a 40-year-old tenured professor at Stanford not building something in AI, no one wants to meet you. That said, something real is changing. Two founders with today’s AI tools can make more progress in two months with one round of funding than they could a year ago with 10 people, two rounds, and a full year of work. This is changing how companies get started and how they’ll capitalize themselves — potentially going straight from pre-seed to Series B. AS:There will be a correction that pushes some capital back out of the market. The promise and the optimism is still significantly ahead of the short- to medium-term ability to show results. But on a long-term, macro scale, I don’t think we’re being over-optimistic. The problem is that shouldn’t be mistaken for thinking every 19-year-old with an idea is the next big thing. How do you actually price deals when things are moving this fast? BB:The best founders have no shortage of capital options. You have to think about what’s a meaningful ownership stake for your fund and walk away when you can’t get there. The interesting dynamic is that we’re a$500 millionfund looking at the same opportunities as people investing from a $10 [billion] or $15 billion fund. The incremental value of a dollar to us versus them is very different. That distorts round sizes and makes it difficult for offers to stack up like-for-like. NB:We do first-money investing — basically instead of friends and family, instead of angels. We invest in what I’d call “freaks” — individuals where, like in professional sports, a few people break all the records. One day goes by and they learn and mature and make the progress that takes the average smart founder a whole week. Most of the founders we’ve backed so far are working on markets that don’t have a name yet — which is exactly why the valuations are low. Larger asset managers can’t tell their teams to go find companies in a market that doesn’t exist yet. There’s a lot of talk about very young founders getting term sheets almost on arrival. Is age really a proxy for anything meaningful right now? AS:At times of disruption, when the world seems to be changing in some fundamental way, it especially favors lack of experience. Experience can actually steer you the wrong way. That doesn’t mean it’s changed forever — we’re going through a phase where things haven’t settled down yet, and that creates fertile ground for new ideas, and typically younger entrepreneurs. But I don’t want to over-generalize. NB:The exact same thing was happening when I arrived as a grad student at Stanford in 2009. The iPhone was two years old, the App Store was one year old, and there were days when there were more VCs on campus than students. Today is one of those singular moments again. If you’re 22 years old in San Francisco and building something in AI, there may be a seed term sheet in your inbox — but if you’re 19, oh my God, this means you’re really good [laughs]; you might already have a Series A [offer]. And look, age is all relative at this point — I was talking to a founder here in Athens this week who’s 24, and when I said he wasn’t that young, I meant it: I met the Mercor kids when they were 19, andlook where they are now. BB:If you try to generalize just from age, I think you miss what you’re actually looking for: an extremely high level of intensity, the ability to move ahead of the pace the market is moving, and the mental dexterity to adapt in a landscape that’s changing constantly. If you have those things, it’s more important than the age on the passport. What do you make of shady behavior happening around metrics — particularly how companies are reporting ARR [annualized recurring revenue]? BB:People are being relatively liberal with how they define the A and the R and the R. New pricing models — token-based billing, free tokens being counted as revenue — create a lot of ways to express these numbers. Our job as investors is to cut through that and make decisions based on the actual truths. Is it fine from a marketing perspective? Probably. Is it fine for deciding which companies get capital? No. But sophisticated investors can generally cut through it. NB:Sometimes I’ll get an email with a very high ARR number from a portfolio company I didn’t remember doing that well, so I’ll contact the founder. The answer? It was 365 times what they made the day before because a campaign hit. I told him, can you please use a quarterly basis at least? Whenever a lot of money is chasing specific themes, some people develop a grifting mentality for short-term gain. In venture you can only lose your money once on a bad investment, but the right one can return 100x — so you write off the bad actors and move on. For the aspiring founders in the audience, where do you actually see white space right now? NB:Every VC firm used to have at least half its partners doing consumer internet investing. Today, maybe they have half a person — they’ve left the field altogether. But one of the best AI companies of the last few years, OpenAI, became massive because of ChatGPT. Consumer is coming back, which is almost a crazy statement. Those founders today have maybe five investors they can pitch for their first or second round. I think there’s also a new movement emerging that’s going to help restore the American dream through new consumer fintech ideas. BB:The opportunity of AI interacting with the physical world is orders of magnitude larger than what we’ve seen so far in workflow automation and digital process. The physical world still shapes a large part of the economy. The bet on robotics in all its forms — not just the humanoid doing a backflip — is still one of the biggest wide-open spaces over the next 10 years. If you’re interested in learning more about what the three think — including about whether Stanford University has grown too cozy with the venture capital industry — you can check out the full conversation below:
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As its traffic continues to climb, alternative search engineDuckDuckGois leaning into anti-AI sentiment with the launch of new browser extensions that allow users to set its no-AI search experience,noai.duckduckgo.com, as their default search engine. Once enabled, users will be directed to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page, where there are no AI-assisted answers, no chat prompts, and fewer AI images in the search results, the company claims. The extensions are currently available forChromeandFirefoxusers. Meanwhile, people who have switched to the DuckDuckGo web browser already have their AI settings preserved, even if they clear their browser history. The company says the extensions are meant to help people have a consistent AI-free search experience — something that’s harder to come by these days, especially after Googleannouncedits AI-first revamp of its search engine at its developer conference earlier in May. Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGohas been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth. Those trends followed news that Google wasoverhaulingits search box in the biggest change to its search engine in more than 25 years. Now, instead of returning links at the top of the page, Google will favor sending users into AI-generated search overviews, which are becoming more interactive experiences capable of creating visualizations, charts, graphs, or even mini apps, as needed. Follow-up questions from AI Overviews will push users into an AI Mode chat experience. The traditional “10 blue links” that defined Google in its earlier days are more of an afterthought, appearing below all this AI-fueled productivity. But not everyone is on board with having AI made the default, which is why some are making the move toalternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and others. DuckDuckGo says traffic to itsno-AI search pagewas up threefold on Thursday, May 28, 2026 — a new high-water mark since Google’s search announcement — and the numbers are still climbing. The growth is not coming in spurts either, the company points out. Instead, visits are averaging roughly 84% above the baseline, suggesting a more sustained shift. In addition to the new “no AI” search Chrome and Firefox extensions, DuckDuckGo will soon update its original DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera to offer controls for AI search settings, as well. It’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo isn’t an anti-AI company. The company still offers its own AI chatbot with access to many popular models,and a subscription planthat provides access to the latest models and other tools, like a VPN service, identity theft restoration, and personal information removal services.
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A new AI weather forecasting tool released today by the startupWindBorne Systemsoffers more frequent and accurate predictions on key variables than the world-leading system developed by European governments, thanks to advancements in how sensor readings are fed into deep learning models. Founded by agroup of Stanford studentsin 2019, WindBorne began by building a better weather balloon, with the idea of selling weather data. But the arrival of the weather-forecasting deep learning models in 2022, the team realized they could capture more value by building their own model as well. WindBorne says the new version of its model offers a more accurate forecast than the ECMWF’s traditional and AI systems across several variables. One simple way to understand it, WindBorne’s chief product officer Kai Marshland says, is that WeatherMesh 6 “is as accurate five days out as a traditional forecast is the day before,” particularly on surface temperature measurements. Today marks the release of the sixth version of that model, WeatherMesh, which the company says is more accurate than traditional and AI forecasts produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), the European intergovernmental organization seen by meteorologists as the leading provider of accurate weather prediction today. WeatherMesh 6 produces a forecast every hour, as opposed to every six hours, as traditional models do. Its resolution is now down to 3 km in Europe and the continental US, where the quality of data is highest. Traditional weather forecasts are generated by complex physics models that require expensive super computers to run, and take a long time to do it. AI models — being built by startups and major labs like Google DeepMind—tend to move faster than physics models, but for now don’t have as high a resolution, as many variables and or predict as accurately over longer time horizons. Still, weather AI is improving rapidly and already being used at major government agencies around the world. Researchers are working to integrate it into the systems used to aggregate weather data and produce public forecasts. WindBorne’s benefits from its unique combination of model-building and data collection. The company now has about 400 balloons in flight gathering sensor readings at any given time, launched from 15 sites around the globe. The advances in its current model come from improvements in how the data collected by the balloons is fed into the models. “I don’t understand, personally, the business model of being [an] AI based weather company without a data set advantage,” WindBorne CEO John Dean told TechCrunch. The ECMWF’s superiority is attributed to the organization’s skills at “data assimilation,” the work of turning disparate sensor readings into a comprehensive, machine-readable picture of the world. For now, AI weather models depend on data sets produced by the ECMWF and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But WindBorne and other organizations are working to feed data directly into the models, and the company’s head of AI, Joan Creus-Costa, says the direct ingestion of data from their balloons and other sources is the key reason for improvement in the new version of WeatherMesh. It’s taken a year of tuning and re-architecting the transformer-based model for the model to deliver these forecasts without losing stability. “When we started doing [data assimilation] we were still very heavily reliant on ECMWF,” Dean said. “I predict today, if we removed ECMWF’s initial conditions, we would actually still do pretty good.” The company suffered a scare last year when a United Airlines jetliner ran into one of its balloons. While the plane suffered minor damage, no one was hurt, in part because WindBorne followed US regulations about how large its sensor package could be. Now, however, the company has added transponders to its balloons that report their location through the global aviation surveillance system, ADS-B, in an effort to reduce the odds of another crash. WindBorne, which has raised $25 million venture funding with a reported valuation of $85 million in 2024, sells its balloon data to NOAA, where it is used in the American weather forecasting enterprise, and the U.S. Air Force and Navy. The company also sells its forecasts to investors and commodity traders, but Dean says the company remains focused on building out its model and data infrastructure over commercial products, in part because of the changing nature of the information environment. “I’m not trying to invest a massive team into building a SaaS product, if the way people want consumer information two years from now is through an agent, right?” Dean said.
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Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company said in ablog postMonday. The company, which is valued at close to $1 trillion, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering. Anthropic has yet to list the number of shares or set the price. Anthropic said the proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors. The filing comes less than a week after Anthropicraised $65 billionin a Series H funding round that pushed its valuation to $965 billion. The round, which was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital Partners, attracted a bevy of institutional and strategic investors in anticipation of an IPO. Anthropic’s confidential filing landed in an already white-hot IPO season that includesSpaceX’s initial public offeringthat is targeting a $2 trillion valuation. SpaceX is seeking to raise more than $75 billion. A confidential IPO filing allows a company to begin preparing for a potential public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial information, risks, or other internal business details. Anthropic will evaluate the IPO privately and without the critical eye of the public. If it follows through, Anthropic will file an S-1 registration document that will contain detailed information of the company’s financials, legal matters, risks, and a breakdown of who holds the most voting power. Anthropic’s filing also comes as its rival OpenAI continues to raise funding, notably a$122 billion roundin March at an $852 billion post-money valuation, and prepares for its own IPO. OpenAI is expected to file for an initial public offering, setting the stage for an IPO season that will pit the two largest AI labs against each other and test the market’s resolve and interest in artificial intelligence. Anthropic, now an AI powerhouse that has landed top-tier enterprise customers, was once considered an underdog in the emerging world of large language models. The startup was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees and was seen for years as a distant competitor to OpenAI and its AI chatbot, ChatGPT. The company has drawn in investors and customers with growing capabilities and a focus on enterprise services. That has translated to eye-popping revenue growth. The company said recently that its revenue run-rate had surpassed $47 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That revenue growth rate could accelerate as Anthropic makes its Mythos model more widely available. Anthropicpreviewed Mythos in Aprilbut has kept access restricted — warning software developers that the model had discovered thousands of high-severity bugs that would need to be fixed before it could be made public. The generative AI lab is poised to give the European Union’s cybersecurity agency access to Mythos,Bloomberg reportedMonday morning, citing anonymous sources.
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