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Jack Altman joins Benchmark as GP

Jack Altman and Benchmark announced today that he would be joining the firm as a general partner. 

This news is a big deal, especially since Altman has been running his own VC firm, Alt Capital, since at least 2024. The fund raised a $150 million Fund I in early 2024 and then, just last September, announced a $274 million Fund II, raised in just a week. On LinkedIn, Altman called the past two years running Alt Capital “the most rewarding” of his life, adding that he loved “new ideas and being part of a team with a mission.” 

Alt Capital invested in at least 52 companies, according to PitchBook, including Rippling, Antares Nuclear, and CompLabs. It’s unclear what happens to Alt Capital or whether Benchmark has acquired its portfolio, as Altman also announced that his teammates from the fund will be following him to Benchmark. (That’s also unusual, given Benchmark has historically been structured as a flat firm with primarily GPs only, versus layers of investors.)

Altman also said he will retain the board seats at the companies he backed while at Alt Capital. 

Altman did not respond to requests for comment earlier today; Benchmark declined to comment.

Altman, a younger brother of OpenAI co-founder Sam, is also the founder of the HR platform Lattice, which he still chairs, per his LinkedIn profile. 

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Snapchat launches creator subscriptions in the US

Social network Snapchat announced today it’s launching creator subscriptions in alpha with select people in the U.S. starting on February 23. The company noted that users will be able to buy subscriptions to creators, including Jeremiah BrownHarry Jowsey, and Skai Jackson. This will allow users to unlock exclusive content while creating monetization opportunities for creators.

Creators can set their own monthly prices for subscription within the app, while Snap will recommend different tiers to them. The subscription will unlock subscriber-only content, priority replies to a creator’s public Stories, and ad-free consumption for that creator’s Stories.

Snap noted that this is a new way for creators to earn more money besides the existing programs.

“Expanding on existing monetization offerings like the Unified Monetization Program and the Snap Star Collab Studio, Creator Subscriptions introduce a premium layer of connection directly into how Snapchatters already engage with creators across Stories, Chat, and replies,” the company said in the blog post.

Snapchat reached 946 million daily active users, according to the company’s Q4 2025 results. The platform noted during its earnings that the number of U.S.-based users posting to Spotlight grew over 47% year-over-year. The company also spun out hardware to a new entity called Specs last month.

The company added that it plans to expand the program to Snap Stars in Canada, the U.K., and France in the coming weeks.

Rival company Meta also allows creators to offer subscriptions on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which gives users access to exclusive content and badges.

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June 23, 2026

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Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to back its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.

Mistral has been primarily known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025, it had announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering which it now hopes Koyeb will accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure — a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as AI grew more demanding, also inspiring the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb said its platform will continue operating. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference — the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses — according to a press release from Mistral.

As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are set to join the engineering team of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to transition into a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming months.

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC firm Serena, whose principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the firm, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she told TechCrunch.

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In part thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its focus on helping enterprises unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will be focused on enterprise clients going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier. 

Mistral didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, and it is unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to prospective employees as an organization that is “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”

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Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6

Anthropic has released a new version of its midsized Sonnet model, keeping pace with the company’s four-month update cycle. In a post announcing the new model, Anthropic emphasized improvements in coding, instruction-following, and computer use.

Sonnet 4.6 will be the default model for Free and Pro plan users.

The beta release of Sonnet 4.6 will include a context window of 1 million tokens, twice the size of the largest window previously available for Sonnet. Anthropic described the new context window as “enough to hold entire codebases, lengthy contracts, or dozens of research papers in a single request.”

The release comes just two weeks after the launch of Opus 4.6, with an updated Haiku model likely to follow in the coming weeks.

The launch comes with a new set of record benchmark scores, including OS World for computer use and SWE-Bench for software engineering. But perhaps the most impressive is its 60.4% score on ARC-AGI-2, meant to measure skills specific to human intelligence. The score puts Sonnet 4.6 above most comparable models, although it still trails models like Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Deep Think, and one refined version of GPT 5.2.

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