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Apr 02, 2026
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Supported by
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Happy Thursday! SpaceX submits a confidential filing for an IPO. Apple turns 50 years old. Alphabet's venture arm is in talks to lead OpenRouter's funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation.
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SpaceX has submitted the initial filing for its initial public offering, Bloomberg reported, a critical step for Elon Musk’s space company toward its much anticipated listing. The company submitted what’s known as a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. SpaceX is not required to share its prospectus with the public until shortly before it goes public in June. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn’t immediately respond for comment. The filing follows a report from The Information last week that SpaceX expected to file by this week. The company is aiming to raise $75 billion in what would make it the largest U.S. IPO in history.
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Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary on Wednesday. Leading up to the date, the company has mounted a full-scale media blitz, giving out numerous executive interviews and putting on big events. On Tuesday, it rang the Nasdaq opening bell, and later that night, Paul McCartney played a concert at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. Not surprisingly, nostalgia figured heavily into all of these events. Executives spent time reminiscing about the early days and talking about the company’s philosophy imparted by cofounder Steve Jobs. “Fifty years ago, there was a single computer prototype in a garage,” Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook wrote to employees in a memo. “Today, there are 2.5 billion active Apple devices in the hands of people in every corner of the earth.” “As extraordinary as it is to reflect on
the past fifty years, what excites me most is what comes next,” wrote Cook.
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OpenRouter, a startup that lets AI app developers choose from hundreds of models on its application programming interface, is in talks to raise $120 million in new funding at a $1.3 billion valuation, including the investment, The Information reported Wednesday. Capital G, one of Alphabet’s venture arms, is expected to lead the investment round. Developers can access over 300 closed- and open-source models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others on OpenRouter’s API. The startup, which is currently doing over $50 million in annualized revenue, makes money by
charging a small fee when engineers purchase credits to run AI models. If it closes, the round would more than double OpenRouter’s private valuation. The company, founded in 2023, last raised $40 million in 2025 in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures at a roughly $500 million valuation.
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ByteDance is helping OpenClaw operate a Chinese version of its ClawHub marketplace, which distributes OpenClaw’s special files that enable AI agents to perform specific tasks. OpenClaw’s official X account said in a post on Wednesday that it has launched an official China version of its ClawHub, where users can find and install software files known as skills, which help expand OpenClaw agents’ capabilities. ByteDance is providing the cloud servers that host ClawHub’s new localized Chinese-language service. In the X post, OpenClaw thanked ByteDance’s cloud computing unit for its “infra sponsorship.“
ByteDance’s latest collaboration with OpenClaw could intensify its rivalry with Tencent Holdings, which has been launching many OpenClaw-based products and services in recent weeks to capitalize on the country’s OpenClaw fever. Last month, Tencent
launched SkillHub, an unofficial localized version of ClawHub that copies the OpenClaw community’s skills and distributes them to Tencent’s users in China. In a post on X, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger criticized Tencent for operating SkillHub, saying the company was benefitting from OpenClaw without giving back to its open-source community. Since then, Tencent has stepped up its effort to build a better relationship with OpenClaw. After SkillHub became controversial, the company made a donation to OpenClaw via GitHub and a senior Tencent executive had a meeting with Steinberger in California to discuss collaborations, The Information reported.
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Alibaba Group’s shift from open-source AI models is becoming more apparent. On Thursday, the Chinese tech giant, which has become a global leader in open-source models in the past two years, launched a new large language model called Qwen3.6-Plus, touting its “significant advancement in agentic coding.” It is a proprietary model, unlike its predecessor Qwen3.5-Plus, which was released in February. Earlier this week, Alibaba released Qwen3.5-Omni, a new multimodal model that understands text, audio, images and video, also as a proprietary model. That model’s predecessor, Qwen3-Omni, was an open-source model. The latest moves reflect the company’s new strategic priority. Alibaba, which operates China’s largest cloud computing service, is trying to generate more revenue from enterprise customers who pay to use its proprietary models. The AI model business is crucial for Alibaba Cloud, as it faces fierce competition from ByteDance. While Alibaba continues to offer some open-source models that can be downloaded for free, the company is rolling out its new high-performance models as closed-source models. Alibaba said Qwen3.6-Plus will be available on its AI model marketplace, Model Studio. The model will also be integrated into the company’s Qwen chatbot app for consumers, as well as its recently launched Wukong app that offers work productivity AI agents for enterprise users.
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