Walter Schulze

Walter Schulze brings all the breaking news stories in the tech and startup world and to ensure that Startup Fortune offers a timely reporting on the trends happen in the industry. He now works on a part time basis for Startup Fortune specializing in covering tech and startup news and he also sheds light on investment opportunities and trends.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 6:54 PM

Mistral AI at €20 billion is a bet on European sovereign AI coming into its own

Mistral AI is in funding talks that would put its valuation at roughly €20 billion, up from €11.7 billion just nine months ago, as annual recurring revenue hits $400 million and European enterprises accelerate their shift toward sovereign AI. The Paris-based startup is building 200 megawatts of compute capacity across Europe while EU regulatory pressure on US labs hands it a growing structural sales advantage.

Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 3:20 PM

Kioxia surpassed Toyota as Japan's most valuable company on AI memory demand

Kioxia Holdings surpassed Toyota Motor on June 12 to become Japan's most valuable publicly traded company, with shares up more than 660% year-to-date after an 18-month run since its December 2024 IPO. The memory chipmaker is forecasting net profit of ¥869 billion for the April-June quarter, a 48-fold increase year-on-year, driven by record AI data center demand for NAND flash storage. The shift reveals where the AI buildout is concentrating its financial rewards: not in compute alone, but in the

Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 12:29 PM

The Senate Has Eight Weeks to Settle Who Governs Crypto in America

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act landed on the Senate Legislative Calendar in June 2026, setting up an eight-week sprint to a floor vote before the August recess. Two Democratic swing votes, Arizona's Ruben Gallego and Maryland's Angela Alsobrooks, hold the bill's fate as Republicans need at least seven Democrats to clear the 60-vote cloture threshold. Senator Lummis has warned that failure before August could push the next viable legislative window to 2030.

Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 10:05 AM

US insurance regulators are opening formal inquiries into the credit risks piling up inside AI data centre financing

Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 7:42 AM

Barcelona startup THEKER closes Europe's largest robotics Series A with $85 million

Barcelona's THEKER has raised $85 million in Europe's largest-ever robotics Series A, led by CRV with Samsung, LVMH, and Cathay Innovation joining existing backer Inditex. The company builds AI-native generalist factory robots that deploy in days and learn continuously in production, directly challenging the task-specific reprogramming model that has dominated industrial floors for decades.

Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 5:17 AM

MediaTek doubles its AI chip target to $2 billion and enters the data center

MediaTek has doubled its 2026 AI ASIC revenue target to $2 billion, anchored by a Google hyperscaler program and its co-designed N1X CPU inside Nvidia's RTX Spark AI PC chip. The company is targeting 10 to 15 percent of a $70 to $80 billion custom chip market by 2027, challenging Broadcom's long dominance, while investor rotation out of concentration-heavy TSMC positions has driven MediaTek shares up roughly 150% year-to-date.

Walter Schulze · Jun 12, 2026 · 2:08 AM

Software Stocks Are Posting Record Earnings While Investors Price In Their Obsolescence

The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF has shed roughly 14% year-to-date while the S&P 500 gains 6%, even as software companies post double-digit earnings growth and the strongest EPS revisions in the index. The disconnect reflects a market repricing the per-seat SaaS model ahead of actual revenue damage, with AI coding agents and workflow automation forcing institutional investors to choose between buying the dip or validating the structural re-rating.

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 11:17 PM

American traders moved billions through Polymarket's offshore exchange while the company quietly lobbied Washington to change the rules

A Rutgers study estimates American traders moved between $11 billion and $34 billion through offshore prediction markets over the past year, with Polymarket capturing most of the volume despite a 2022 CFTC ban. The company has now formally petitioned regulators to open its main exchange to US users, a test case for how the Trump-era CFTC intends to handle crypto-native financial products.

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 8:52 PM

Coram AI raises $35 million to make existing security cameras intelligent investigation tools

Coram AI has closed a $35 million Series B co-led by Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to $66 million. The San Francisco startup turns existing security cameras into an AI-powered investigation platform, letting operators query months of footage and access records in plain language. Its retrofit model, which avoids new hardware requirements, is proving to be a serious wedge in enterprise sales cycles.

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 6:29 PM

The ECB just raised rates for the first time in nearly three years and European startups need to recalculate everything

The ECB raised its deposit facility rate to 2.25% on June 11, the first hike since 2023, as Iran war-driven energy costs pushed eurozone inflation to 3.2%. With the Fed meeting next week and European VC already bifurcating toward late-stage safety, the falling-rates assumption that powered most 2025 startup fundraising models has officially expired.

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 4:05 PM

The AI spending boom has become America's newest inflation engine

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 1:42 PM

Alex Karp says every enterprise he works with is privately fed up with the frontier AI labs and warns the industry is sleepwalking toward nationalization

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC on June 10 that every enterprise he works with is privately unhappy with the frontier AI labs, accusing them of 'tokenmaxxing' and producing 'slop' that fails in production. He also issued a pointed nationalization warning, saying he has spent six months alerting AI executives to the political risk of publicly celebrating AI-driven layoffs, with most dismissing the threat.

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 11:18 AM

Microsoft cuts Claude Code from its engineers because the bill came due before the budget year did

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 8:54 AM

Citi says AI data center bonds are finally being priced as the project finance deals they actually are

Citi analysts say the credit spread on a QTS bond tied to a Microsoft facility has widened more than 30 basis points since April while Microsoft's corporate paper held flat, a divergence the bank attributes to non-amortizing debt structure. The finding signals that bond investors are now pricing project-specific risks independently of hyperscaler balance sheets, a maturation that will shape the cost of the next wave of AI infrastructure financing. With Morgan Stanley projecting AI debt issuance

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 6:29 AM

Einride's 74% Nasdaq Debut Reveals How Much the Market Is Paying for an Autonomous Future That Barely Exists Yet

Swedish autonomous freight firm Einride surged 74% on its Nasdaq debut after completing a SPAC merger at a $1.35 billion valuation, despite operating just 200 electric trucks with only a handful running fully autonomously. The oversubscribed $113M PIPE signals where logistics capital is flowing, but the gap between today's $49M run-rate revenue and the market's implied premium raises serious questions about the bet investors are making.

Walter Schulze · Jun 11, 2026 · 4:04 AM

Google releases DiffusionGemma and bets that parallel text generation can upend the economics of local AI

Google DeepMind released DiffusionGemma on June 10, a 26-billion-parameter open model that generates text through diffusion rather than token-by-token prediction, reaching over 1,000 tokens per second on a single H100. The model ships under Apache 2.0 with immediate support in vLLM, Hugging Face Transformers, and Unsloth, and runs entirely on local hardware with no cloud dependency. Google flags it as experimental, but its day-one infrastructure support and NVIDIA hardware optimizations signal a