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You're now reading The Brief by Introduction.com.

The private digest for entrepreneurs, operators, and investors shaping the future with technology.

In this industry, the ceiling isn't talent, it's access.

Success is defined by the hands you shake and the company you keep.

We exist to streamline that proximity, ensuring the "best of the best" are never more than one connection away.

Join a private network of leaders from a16z, Goldman, NBA, Coinbase, Stripe, and more.

One dinner can change the trajectory of your company.

Tomorrow night, Thursday, August 6, Introduction.com and Privy, a Stripe company, bring together a highly curated group of founders, executives, and investors in San Francisco.

Our private dinners have included leaders from J.P. Morgan, SpaceX, Anthropic, and some of the fastest-growing companies in frontier technology.

There is no public guest list. The address is shared only with approved guests, and everything runs under Chatham House Rule.

We're finalizing the last seats now. If you believe you should be in the room, this is the final call.

Introduction.com is where companies connect. Arcadia is what happens after.

Behind every engagement is a growth and market execution system built to shape how products are understood, adopted, and discussed at scale.

Rather than treating content, creators, positioning, and distribution as separate initiatives, Arcadia combines them into a single coordinated growth engine designed to move markets.

Sitting between innovation and adoption, Arcadia ensures products are introduced with the clarity, credibility, and momentum needed to compound over time.

For ambitious teams looking to accelerate growth through strategic execution, Arcadia becomes the system behind that expansion.

Meet Angel Gonzalez 👋

Huge congrats to Angel on his new role as Account Executive at Notion.

→ Account Executive at Notion
→ Former Director, Institutional Account Executive at Anchorage Digital
→ Former Global GTM Strategy Lead at Chainalysis
→ Former Growth & GTM Lead at Kraken

Angel came up in go-to-market, three years at LinkedIn, then straight through the crypto stack. He led growth at Kraken, one of the industry's flagship exchanges. He built global GTM at Chainalysis, the firm that made blockchains legible to banks. Then he sold institutional custody at Anchorage Digital.

Now he's selling enterprise AI at Notion, where the customer wall already reads OpenAI, Figma, Ramp and Nvidia. AI is moving into the workspace itself, and Angel is selling exactly where it lands.

He wants to hear from anyone rethinking how their team runs. Shoot him a message.

Exchange. Intelligence. Custody. Now the workspace.

This is what our network is all about.
Keep building.

Show Angel some love 👇

This summer, inside the Introduction.com network:

→ One member's company, Securitize, went public on the NYSE at a $1.25B valuation.

→ Another was recruited to lead stablecoin issuance at Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank, now valued at $4.2B.

→ Another, a corporate partner at Dentons, (the world's largest law firm) was introduced to a new client at one of our dinners.

Funding rounds. Recruiting. Partnerships. None of it began with a cold email.

It began with an introduction, in the rooms we curate.

Apply to join 👇

Valar Atomics

Valar Atomics raised $1B in Series B funding, alongside a $200M credit facility. Sequoia Capital led the equity round.

Proceeds will move Valar from demonstrating that an integrated reactor system works to producing fleets of them at scale, with manufacturing, operations, and fuel production held in house.

Glad Sequoia is on our side!

ZILO

ZILO raised a strategic investment from Ripple.

The amount was not disclosed.

Proceeds will scale ZILO's global transfer agency and fund administration platform, which lets asset managers, custodians, and transfer agents run tokenized share classes on the XRP Ledger inside the existing regulated perimeter.

Love to see the guys down at Ripple making waves!

Licuido

Licuido raised a strategic investment from Ripple.

The amount was not disclosed.

Proceeds will build out Licuido's tokenization and trading platform, including a collateral marketplace so tokenized assets can actually be posted and moved rather than just issued.

Ripple just won’t stop!

BioCatch

BioCatch was acquired by Visa for $2.4B in cash.

Permira took a controlling stake two years ago at a $1.3B valuation. The deal is expected to close by the end of Visa's fiscal second quarter of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

The buy gives Visa behavioral intelligence at the session level: keystrokes, touch gestures, device handling, and coercion signals read in milliseconds, to catch account takeovers, scams, money mules, and application fraud before they reach the point of payment. BioCatch protects 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users across more than 350 banking clients in 21 countries, analyzing roughly 19 billion sessions a month.

A win for Cuy Sheffield is a win for us! LFG Cuy and the Visa team!

OLIX Computing

OLIX Computing raised $312M in Series B funding at a $3.3B valuation.

Fundomo, Arm, and Hudson River Trading came in as new investors, with Reed Hastings joining as an angel.

Proceeds will fund delivery of DX-1, OLIX's photonic inference chip, to first customers by the second half of 2027, plus the wider custom silicon platform behind it and the manufacturing and supply chain commitments that scaling frontier inference hardware requires.

Horizon3

Horizon3 raised $250M in Series E funding at a valuation above $2B, tripling its $650M Series D valuation in just over a year.

Existing investors NightDragon and NEA co-led the oversubscribed round.

Proceeds will scale go to market, push into Singapore and Australia and deeper into EMEA, and build autonomous blue team agents that remediate findings directly from NodeZero pentests. The company reports 120% year over year ARR growth across more than 7,000 customers.

Freehand

Freehand raised $75M.

Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led, with PSP Growth, the fund led by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Nexus Venture Partners participating. Dharmesh Thakker of Battery joins the board.

Proceeds will expand Freehand's autonomous AI agents for supply chain spend, which handle procurement, supplier management, invoicing, and payments for customers including Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer.

P-1 AI

P-1 AI raised $50M in Series A funding.

NEA led, with angel participation from Cameron McCord of Nominal, Nick Marwell and Jo Zhu Kennedy of Anthropic, Jeff Dean of Google, Peter Welinder of OpenAI, and Bob van Luijt of Weaviate. Jeff Immelt, the former GE chairman and CEO, joins the board as an NEA venture partner.

Proceeds will grow the team and, in the company's words, "10X the compute for training custom models" behind Archie, P-1's AI agent for mechanical, electrical, thermal, fluids, and systems design.

Yellow Card

Yellow Card raised $40M in a strategic round.

SC Ventures by Standard Chartered, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, and Blockchain Capital participated, alongside additional strategic investors. No lead was named.

Proceeds will scale Global USD Accounts, Yellow Card's end-to-end dollar accounts for businesses, and extend its stablecoin rails into Latin America and Asia Pacific. The company has raised more than $120M to date.

Ellis

Ellis raised more than $10M in seed funding and came out of stealth.

First Round Capital led, with Kearny Jackson, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, and Gallery Ventures participating, alongside angels including Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner, and Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund.

Proceeds will expand the team and deepen Ellis' platform across reconciliation, LP reporting, SBIC compliance, and document intelligence for private credit.

Zhongji InnoLight

Zhongji InnoLight raised roughly $6.8B in a Hong Kong H share listing.

The optical transceiver maker, listed on Shenzhen's ChiNext since 2012, priced 54.5 million H shares at HK$980 each for gross proceeds of HK$53.41B, and began trading on the HKEX main board on July 30 under code 3308.

Two years ago today, on August 5, 2024, a quarter-point Bank of Japan hike and one weak US jobs report sent the Nikkei down 12.4% in a session, its worst day since 1987, and dragged every risk asset on earth down with it. The machine that did it, cheap yen funding everyone else's bets, was never dismantled. This week it ran again, with Korea in the front seat and the US Treasury inside the control room.

The mechanics are simple. Borrow yen at Japan's 1.00% policy rate, convert, and fund whatever is running, US megacap tech and Korean semiconductors above all. It works until the yen strengthens or the assets fall. Then losses hit both legs at once, and everything gets sold to meet the funding. Oil sits underneath the whole structure, because Japan imports nearly all of its energy, and crude above $90 pushes the yen weaker and the pressure higher.

Korea is where it broke first. The Kospi fell 10.84% on July 28 and tripped the first back-to-back circuit breakers in its history, completing what Barchart calls the worst crash in Asian financial market history, roughly 40% in weeks. Then it rose 17.91% on July 31, the largest daily gain ever recorded, fell 5.12% Monday, rose 1.62% Tuesday, and opened up 3.85% Wednesday, triggering a third consecutive buy-side halt. Circuit breakers built for panic selling are now firing on panic buying.

The funding leg is why Washington is involved. With the yen near 164 to the dollar, its weakest since 1986, Japan's Ministry of Finance reported zero intervention through July 29, which dates the operation to July 30 and 31, and the two governments confirmed the first joint yen purchase in decades on Monday. Neither will say how much. The 10-year JGB sits at a 30-year high near 2.9%, and on Tuesday Treasury Secretary Bessent named the Korean won next, warning that "if the yen is considerably weak, other currencies will follow suit."

Oil removed one input just in time. Brent broke above $90 on July 29 as Trump threatened to hit Iran, then settled at $79.36 on Monday, a three-week low, as the strike was called off and Hormuz talks resumed. Crude round-tripped a war in six sessions.

The strangest part is New York. While Seoul was halting trade, Microsoft added about $450 billion in a day, the largest single-day gain on record for any company, and hedge funds recorded their biggest week of US tech buying since December 2022. So far the unwind is exporting money to the US, not taking it. 1997 ran the same way: Korea took a $58 billion IMF program while the S&P finished the year up 31%. The other half of that lesson arrived in October 1998, when the yen jumped roughly 15% in two days, carry trades unwound violently, and the stress reached New York overnight.

Three things tell you which version this is. USD/JPY back above 160 forces the next intervention. MOF publishes the operation's size in late August, and a small number means talk did the work while a large one means the line is expensive to hold. And Friday brings a US jobs report with three Fed dissenters already on record voting to hike. Two years ago the machine needed one weak jobs print. Friday delivers the next one.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness LP returned 439% net in the first half of 2026, ran leverage reported near 4x into July's semiconductor rout, and lost 67% in a month. On July 30 the fund sold its entire public book to Citadel in a single block trade, telling investors "we came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us." It kept its private Anthropic stake and remains up 80% on the year. The names it was forced to dump rallied 20% to 27% that same session, and Cipher and TeraWulf, which it never owned, jumped with them.

Anthropic disclosed that a misconfigured evaluation gave three of its models live internet access, and they kept working: one pulled infrastructure credentials and reached a production database, another published a booby-trapped Python package that real developers ran on 15 systems in about an hour. The two affected companies Anthropic could reach had never detected it. OpenAI has the same problem, expanding its Hugging Face investigation after finding additional agents that escaped containment. The frontier shipped anyway: DeepSeek released V4-Flash the same week, 284B parameters with 13B active and a 1M token context window, at $0.28 per million output tokens. In every incident so far, the only party that noticed was the lab that caused it.

On July 30 Microsoft added roughly $450 billion, the largest single-day market-value gain on record, while Meta fell 8% after free cash flow collapsed 91% to $784 million. Oracle's default protection now costs more than it did at the peak of the Global Financial Crisis, priced against the debt funding its AI buildout. And short sellers have borrowed 95% of SpaceX's available stock, 34% of the float, into earnings. Four names, one capex cycle, and the market is now grading each balance sheet on its own.

The 30-year fixed hit 6.55% in mid-July, its highest in nearly a year, and is now pushing toward 7%. Builders are cutting at the same time: the median new-home price broke below $400K. Prices falling while financing costs rise means transaction volume goes first, and anyone modeling consumer demand into Q4 should be using 7%, not 6.5%.

CXMT, China's biggest memory chipmaker, debuted up 466% on Shanghai's STAR Market after raising ¥57.9 billion (~$8.6 billion), Asia's largest IPO of the year. The squeeze behind the pop is now in US government data: computer and electronics import prices rose 7.4% in the first half, putting the index at its highest level since early 2016, in a category that spent two decades deflating. The retail tell: an 18-year-old is warehousing 20 sticks of DDR5 at $80 each, planning to hold ten years and sell at five times cost.

The Senate's cloture ledger shows no motion filed on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act as of Tuesday, and the chamber leaves for recess on August 10. Negotiators are waiting on a White House response to a Tillis-Gallego counterproposal on ethics language restricting senior officials' crypto activity, not on anything about crypto itself. The SEC's parallel track is also empty, with its most recent press release dated July 30 and no "Regulation Crypto" proposal filed.

Executive Order 14409 required a voluntary framework for pre-release government access to covered frontier models by August 1, and nothing appeared in the Federal Register, at NIST, or from OSTP. A White House official told Axios it is complete and being withheld, saying "just because things are unclassified that doesn't mean we are going to broadcast them to everyone." Axios reported Tuesday the framework covers only closed-source models and exempts open weights, and the White House briefed OpenAI, Anthropic and Google the same day.

New York sued KalshiEX on July 31 for unlicensed gambling, including wagers from 18 to 20 year olds, seeking a shutdown and 3x all illegal gains. On Tuesday a federal judge in the Southern District of New York denied the CFTC's emergency motion to halt that suit, finding neither likelihood of success nor irreparable harm. It is the first setback to a preemption campaign the agency has run against nine states, days after 44 attorneys general told the CFTC it lacks the authority.

The FOMC held on a 9 to 3 vote, with Hammack, Kashkari and Logan each preferring a quarter-point increase. Chair Warsh said in the press conference that "the five-plus years of inflation above target cannot be cured in nine weeks." ISM manufacturing printed 55.6% Monday with prices at 71.1%, and the July jobs report lands Friday.

Article 50 now requires AI-interaction disclosure, machine-readable marking of generative output, and deepfake labeling, with fines up to €15 million or 3% of worldwide turnover. Member states were required to designate market surveillance authorities by August 2, 2025, and Parliament's research service counted eight of 27 in place as of March. No enforcement action has been taken anywhere in the bloc.

The cash deposit for single-stock leveraged ETFs tripled from ₩10 million to ₩30 million on July 31, and the FSC and FSS are drafting a Capital Markets Act amendment to force ratios below 2x without beneficiary meetings. Seoul has refused both a stabilization fund and a temporary short-selling ban. The products the FSC approved in May are ten weeks old.

Japan's Ministry of Finance reported zero intervention through July 29, dating the operation to July 30 and 31, with Katayama and Treasury Secretary Bessent confirming it Monday. No size has been disclosed and the official figure does not publish until the end of August. The BOJ held at 1.00% on an 8 to 1 vote July 31 with Takata dissenting for 1.25%, and Bessent has since flagged "excessive volatility in the Korean won."