This week's largest fundraising recipient was frontier AI lab Recursive Intelligence, and agentic AI, AI-compute, and AI-native startups filled up much of the rest of the Top 10 list. Other areas that attracted sizable funding include biotech, nuclear power, and security. 1. Ricursive Intelligence, $300M, AI: Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier AI lab, announced that it has raised $300 million in a Series A round of funding at a $4 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the latest round, which comes just two months after the Palo Alto, California-based company's launch. 2. Cellares, $257M, biotech: Cellares, a startup focused on the automated, large-scale manufacturing of cell therapies, said it secured $257 million in a Series D financing led by BlackRock and Eclipse. Founded in 2019, South San Francisco, California-based Cellares has raised $612 million to date. 3 (tied). Upwind Security, $250M, cloud security: Cloud security unicorn Upwind Security closed on $250 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The round brings total investment for the San Francisco-headquartered company to over $430 million....

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for 'no less than two years' in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. Blue Origin made the announcement just a few weeks ahead of the expected third launch of its New Glenn mega-rocket, which is slated for late February. The company had previously suggested it was going to use the third New Glenn launch to send its robotic lunar lander to the moon, but that spacecraft is still undergoing testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump has put pressure on NASA to send astronauts back to the moon before the end of his second term. That has cleared the way for companies other than SpaceX to compete for these missions. Blue Origin first flew the New Shepard rocket more than a decade ago, and it became the first rocket to go to space and safely land back on Earth. Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9, though, the New Shepard rocket was never intended to reach Earth orbit. Its utility has therefore been limited to space tourism flights, which allow passengers around four minutes of weightlessness in Blue Origin's space capsule, and science missions....

The modern world runs on chemicals and fuels that require a huge amount of energy to produce: Industrial chemical separation accounts for 10 to 15 percent of the world's total energy consumption. That's because most separations today rely on heat to boil off unwanted materials and isolate compounds. The MIT spinout Osmoses is making industrial chemical separations more efficient by reducing the need for all that heat. The company, founded by former MIT postdoc Francesco Maria Benedetti; Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez '17, PhD '22; Professor Zachary Smith; and Holden Lai, has developed a polymer technology capable of filtering gases with unprecedented selectivity. Gases ' consisting of some of the smallest molecules in the world ' have historically been the hardest to separate. Osmoses says its membranes enable industrial customers to increase production, use less energy, and operate in a smaller footprint than is possible using conventional heat-based separation processes. Osmoses has already begun working with partners to demonstrate its technology's performance, including its ability to upgrade biogas, which involves separating CO2 and methane. The company also has projects in the works to recover hydrogen from large chemical facilities and, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, to pull helium from underground hydrogen wells....

On this week's Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel opens with what it means to live in 2026, when our phones can drop us into graphic, real-time violence without warning'and when documenting that violence can be both traumatizing and politically consequential. Using recent footage out of Minneapolis as a lens, he explores the uneasy collision of algorithmic feeds, misinformation, and the moral weight of witnessing. Charlie also traces how viral documentation can puncture official narratives, pushing stories beyond political circles and even into 'apolitical' corners of the internet. Then, Charlie is joined by Amanda Litman, a political digital strategist and the co-founder of Run for Something. They discuss how to be a good citizen in the information war without losing your mind. Specifically: In an age of algorithmic fragmentation and billionaire-owned platforms, does sharing that devastating image or news article actually accomplish anything' Or is it just performative activism' Together they explore how nonpolitical creators and everyday people can be especially persuasive messengers, and how to pair online engagement with offline activism. It's an episode about how to stay engaged without surrendering your nervous system and how to use the internet as a tool for connection, clarity, and action, not just despair....