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Happy Friday. Rajat Bhageria gives us an investing pick, new home sales are on the rise, a drone startup quintupled its value, and the NYSE is partnering with Blockchain.com. Let’s dive in!
🎤 Listen: To the latest episode of Smart Humans, where Slava Rubin talks with Chef Robotics Founder/CEO Rajat Bhageria about the present and future of the robotics sector.
This issue is brought to you by Atlassian - for product teams moving at AI speed.
📈 DAILY MARKETS
✅ PICK OF THE WEEK
SpaceX
Current share price: $148.03 ($2.01 trillion market cap)
Never bet against Elon
He has so many different bets in parallel that even if fails, there are a lot of others that could succeed, such as Starlink, Elon Web Services, Grok (xAI)
xAI will become a real contender against OpenAI and Anthropic
Starlink could be bigger than companies like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile
I can imagine SpaceX being worth 4 or 5 trillion in the next 3 years
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👨🏫 TODAY'S EXPERT
Rajat Bhageria is the Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics. Prior to Chef, Rajat was Founder and Managing Partner at Prototype Capital, a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in founders who apply new technology to old industries. Before that, Rajat was the Founder and CEO of ThirdEye, where he led a team to build a product that empowers the visually impaired by recognizing what’s in front of them; ThirdEye was ultimately sold. Rajat has written a book about education reform, published a scientific paper in electrical engineering, and written for Forbes about entrepreneurship. He has a Master’s degree in Robotics and Machine Learning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
🎤 PODCAST
"What we need today in the industry is people to actually deploy robots...that are actually adding value to customers." - Rajat Bhageria
In the newest episode of Smart Humans, Slava Rubin talks with Chef Robotics Founder/CEO Rajat Bhageria about scaling his company, the present and future of Physical AI and Robotics, and why he is bearish on humanoid robots.
📰 NOTABLE NEWS
🏡 New home sales rise: Sales of new single-family houses in the U.S. were up 6.4% in August, but still remain down 2% year-over-year. The increase can be traced directly to lower prices, as the median new home price fell 5.8% annually, and more than half of sales were of houses priced below $400,000.
🚀 Tekever fundraise: The European AI drone maker raised a $580 million round at a valuation of $6.4 billion, nearly five times its valuation of $1.3 billion in May 2025. This fundraise is just the latest in the drone defense sector where companies have seen exponential valuation growth.
🪙 NYSE and Blockchain.com: The New York Stock Exchange signed a partnership with Blockchain.com to offer tokenized stocks on the the NYSE’s planned 24/7 digital trading platform.
🤖 DeepSeek update: The Chinese AI company is reportedly closing a $7.5 billion funding round at a valuation of $75 billion, as its annual revenue run rate has topped $1 billion. The company is rumored to be preparing for a public offering on the Shanghai stock exchange.
🏢 Rents at pre-pandemic growth trend: After years of pandemic-induced volatility, the U.S. median rent has converged to its long-term growth rate of around 2.5% annually. The market where rent has grown the most above that trendline is Buffalo, NY, while Austin, TX is the market whose rent has fallen the most off the pace.
💵 Apollo again caps withdrawals: The asset manager limited redemptions from its flagship $26 billion private credit fund for the third straight quarter, as holders of nearly 15% of outstanding shares requested withdrawals versus the 5% cap.
📝 IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Monday: ⚾ Weekend collectibles auction, 🤖 Instinct fundraise
Tuesday: 🪙 Crypto surge, 🚀 Nscale IPO
Wednesday: 🚀 Oura IPO, 💵 Private credit report
Thursday: ⚾ Yankees PE sale, 🦇 Batmobile sale
Have a great weekend!
