Julian Lim

Julian Lim · Jul 14, 2026 · 6:30 PM

Keyper raises $11 million to kill the postdated rent cheque in the Gulf

Dubai proptech Keyper raised an $11 million Series A led by Speedinvest, with Mashreq's NeoVentures, Property Finder and Arab National Bank among the backers. The startup fronts landlords their rent upfront while letting tenants pay monthly, replacing the UAE's postdated cheque system, and has now financed over $44 million in rent value since 2022.

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Julian Lim · Jul 14, 2026 · 2:34 PM

China's June exports surge past forecasts as the AI hardware boom accelerates

China's customs agency reported a record $412 billion in June exports, up 27% year over year and the fastest pace since 2021, driven by a near 57% surge in computing hardware trade tied to the global AI buildout. The same week, Nvidia cut more than half its Asian chip buyers over export control concerns, while TSMC posted record revenue on AI demand.

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Julian Lim · Jul 14, 2026 · 10:07 AM

Nvidia halves its list of approved Asian chip buyers to cut off China

Nvidia has more than halved the number of Asian companies cleared to buy its advanced AI chips, tightening due diligence in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan after Southeast Asian resale hubs were used to route hardware to China. The move follows the Megaspeed case, a $2 billion diversion scheme, and comes just as Beijing prepares to let Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek buy Nvidia H200 chips through legal channels.

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Julian Lim · Jul 14, 2026 · 3:48 AM

Fusion Investment Hit a Record $4.48 Billion, and Four Startups Took Most of It

Global fusion investment hit a record $4.48 billion over the past year, up 69%, with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion, Proxima Fusion and Inertia Enterprises taking more than half of it. The surge is tied directly to AI data center power deals, even as suppliers warn the rest of the industry is starved for large orders.

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Julian Lim · Jul 14, 2026 · 1:15 AM

Delaware Weighs a New Legal Entity Built for Companies Run by AI Agents

A Delaware committee has drafted legislation creating the Artificial Intelligence Company, a new entity that would let AI agents sign contracts and even file lawsuits while shielding human owners from liability. The proposal leans on Norm Ai, a legal AI startup that just hit a $1.2 billion valuation, as the compliance layer such businesses would need, though corporate law professors doubt the liability shield will survive a real courtroom.

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Julian Lim · Jul 13, 2026 · 9:27 PM

Monzo Cofounder Tom Blomfield Leaves Y Combinator to Join Anthropic's Compute Team

Monzo cofounder Tom Blomfield is taking a leave of absence from Y Combinator to join Anthropic's compute team under cofounder Tom Brown. The hire fits a broader pattern of frontier AI labs recruiting operators, not just researchers, as compute becomes the binding constraint on scaling.

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Julian Lim · Jul 13, 2026 · 4:25 PM

America's AI Boom Is Starving the Chip Factories It Depends On

A new SEMI, McKinsey, and National Science Foundation report warns the US semiconductor industry could be short up to 157,000 workers by 2030, threatening TSMC's Arizona buildout and other CHIPS Act-funded fabs, because most engineering graduates are choosing AI jobs instead.

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Julian Lim · Jul 13, 2026 · 11:50 AM

TSMC's June Sales Jump 68 Percent as AI Chip Demand Keeps Climbing

TSMC's June revenue surged 68% from a year earlier, capping a second quarter that hit NT$1.27 trillion and matched analyst estimates. The chipmaker heads into its July 16 earnings call as Morgan Stanley warns semiconductor stocks look overbought, even as capacity for AI packaging remains the real constraint on the industry.

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Julian Lim · Jul 13, 2026 · 7:20 AM

A $250 Deposit Just Drained $9 Million From Hedera's Biggest Lending Protocol

An attacker turned a 250-token deposit worth a few dollars into a $9 million haul by exploiting a broken signature check in Supra's price oracle on Hedera's largest lending protocol, Bonzo Lend. The hack is the third major DeFi exploit this month, pushing July's industry-wide losses past $35 million.

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Julian Lim · Jul 13, 2026 · 2:46 AM

Communities Are Turning Against AI Data Centers and Washington Is Starting to Notice

A federal bill from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to pause AI data center construction is unlikely to pass, but it's riding a wave of real local backlash, from a bacteria-contaminated water system in Wyoming to soaring power bills at Ohio manufacturers. More than 100 communities have already enacted their own moratoriums.

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Julian Lim · Jul 12, 2026 · 3:01 PM

How to Evaluate AI Agents Before You Ship Them to Real Users

How to evaluate AI agents before launch comes down to building a real testing framework, not trusting a clean demo. This piece walks through the metrics, the eval set, and the failures at Chevrolet and McDonald's that show what happens when founders skip it.

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Julian Lim · Jul 12, 2026 · 1:17 PM

Coinbase Says the CLARITY Act Is on the One Yard Line and Stuck There

Coinbase says the CLARITY Act is 'on the one yard line' in the Senate, but three unresolved disputes over ethics, criminal investigations, and stablecoin yield have kept it stalled since May. Circle's new OCC trust bank charter shows regulators aren't waiting for Congress to catch up.

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Julian Lim · Jul 12, 2026 · 12:17 AM

Sam Altman Calls Elon Musk Homeboy in Their Latest Fight Over AI Infrastructure

Sam Altman fired back at Elon Musk on X, accusing him of selling public market investors on short-term space data centers, the latest flare-up in a feud that has moved from courtrooms to comment sections. The jab lands as Musk pushes orbital AI compute while Altman keeps betting on terrestrial infrastructure.

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Julian Lim · Jul 11, 2026 · 10:15 AM

OpenAI's safety chief exits as the company folds oversight into research

OpenAI's head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, is leaving as Chief Research Officer Mark Chen folds safety teams into a research and alignment unit under VP Mia Glaese. The exit follows chief futurist Joshua Achiam's departure days earlier, and lands the same week OpenAI took a $520 million Bank of America credit line and was sued by Apple over trade secrets.

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Julian Lim · Jul 11, 2026 · 3:22 AM

Founders now have to win over an AI chatbot before they ever win over Google

AI chatbots like ChatGPT are replacing Google as the first stop for buyers, and Gartner projects a 25 percent drop in search volume by 2026. New research shows the machines trust Reddit, Wikipedia and earned press coverage far more than a brand's own website, forcing founders to rethink content strategy entirely.

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Julian Lim · Jul 10, 2026 · 7:00 PM

OpenAI and Google Sold AI Access to Blacklisted Chinese Firms via Singapore

OpenAI and Google have been giving advanced AI model access to Singapore-registered subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, despite their Chinese parents sitting on the Pentagon's 1260H blacklist. The arrangement is legal, and it's reopening the fight over whether AI export controls should work like chip export controls.

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