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Arda Industries, founded by ex-OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, emerged from stealth with $232M to build automated robotic assembly lines for US manufacturing.

For most of the 20th century, money was tethered to gold - and then, in a single August evening in 1971, that tether was cut. A short walkthrough of how the gold standard actually worked, why a fixed gold price ($35 an ounce) became an economic straitjacket, what Bretton Woods tried to do, why Nixon ended gold convertibility, and why fiat money - backed by nothing but trust - turned out to be more flexible, more resilient, and the foundation of every modern economy.

If fiat money isn't backed by gold, silver, or anything you can actually touch - why does anyone accept it? A short walkthrough of the three foundations that hold modern currencies up: legal enforcement (legal tender laws), institutional control (central banks), and confidence (sustained public trust). Plus the role taxes play in creating baseline demand, why hyperinflation is the one failure mode that ends a fiat currency, and why the U.S. dollar - pure paper for half a century - became the most powerful currency in human history.

Swiss biotech Nouscom raised a €120M Series D for its cancer-prevention immunotherapy for Lynch syndrome.

Brent crude holds near $110 as Washington sends a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, Hormuz traffic falls about 70% and Iran talks remain unscheduled.

Kapital acquired the AI startup Woz for $30M to strengthen its banking platform.

Only 2% of the money in the world is physical - coins and bills. The other 98% is digital: numbers in databases, IOUs from your bank, balances that move between accounts without anyone ever printing a thing. A short walkthrough of what digital money actually is (a bank's promise to pay), how fractional reserve banking lets banks create new money by lending, why payment networks (cards, ACH, blockchain) make digital money usable, and the one failure mode that has haunted the system for centuries: the bank run.

Boomi agreed to buy the data-observability startup Elementary Data for more than $40M.

The textbook story says barter came first, then commodity money, then credit. The archaeological record tells a different story. A short walkthrough of how Mesopotamia, Egypt, and early China ran sophisticated debt-based economies thousands of years before coins existed - and why money, at its core, is information about who owes what to whom, not the physical token in your hand.

Manchester VR sports-training company Rezzil raised $10M.

If a government can print money, why doesn't it just print enough to pay off every debt and end every shortage? A short walkthrough of why scarcity is the load-bearing feature of every functioning currency, how all three jobs of money break the moment supply goes infinite, and why hyperinflations from Weimar to Zimbabwe to Venezuela all follow the same script - deficit, printing, inflation, confidence collapse, abandonment.