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• Monaco, which came out of stealth earlier this year, is developing AI software to automate sales.
• Monaco announced Tuesday that it raised a $50 million funding round led by Benchmark.
• This is the first deal longtime investor Jack Altman has made since joining Benchmark.

Monaco had no revenue in February. Three months later, the AI sales startup says it is adding more than $1 million in revenue every month. That kind of hockey stick growth is what turned Benchmark’s newest partner, Jack Altman, into a believer and landed the startup a fresh $50 million round.

Monaco announced Tuesday it raised a $50 million Series B funding round led by Benchmark, bringing its total funding to more than $85 million. Altman, the former Lattice CEO and brother of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who joined Benchmark earlier this year, will join Monaco’s board.

Returning investors Founders Fund and Human Capital also participated in the round. The valuation was not disclosed.

The raise is the latest example of how quickly capital is flowing into AI startups, especially those that show strong revenue growth. Companies are increasingly raising massive rounds only months after launching products publicly as investors race to back potential category leaders early.

“We launched in February, we had no revenue,” founder and CEO Sam Blond told Business Insider. “During February, March, and April, we added seven figures of ARR each month, and revenue is accelerating.”

Monaco is developing AI software to automate key parts of the sales process, including prospecting, outbound outreach, pipeline management, and customer tracking. Blonde wants the company to be known as the “Cursor of sales,” referring to the popular AI coding startup that made a $60 billion deal with SpaceX.

‘When stuff works, it works fast’

It used to be startups waited years, not months, to raise a Series B, but these are not normal times. Just two months ago, Monaco announced a $25 million Series A round led by Founder’s Fund, where Blond was a partner until 2024.

Altman said Monaco’s early traction was part of what convinced Benchmark to move quickly.

“I think in general, when stuff works, it works fast,” Altman said. “You back great people as early as you can back them.”

Still, Altman said the investment decision ultimately came down to Blond, a former Brex and Zenefits sales executive who spent two years in VC before saying that he missed being an operator.

“I think it’s really all about the founder,” Altman said.

The startup is part of a crowded, increasingly competitive market that includes incumbents like Salesforce and HubSpot, as well as a wave of newer AI-native challengers such as 11x, Artisan, and Aurasell.

“Generally speaking, any good software market is going to be competitive,” Altman said. “But my view on it was very clearly that the momentum is night and day and that what Sam and Monaco are doing is just dramatically faster than what I’m seeing at other places.”

Altman said the flood of money pouring into AI startups has naturally raised questions about whether the industry is entering bubble territory.

“We’re in a moment when a lot of capital is available, markets look very big, there’s a real technology disruption happening,” Altman said. “There will be a correction because there has always been one. What we don’t know is whether it’s tomorrow or in seven years. You just don’t know.”

Blond said Monaco did not need to raise another round so quickly after, as it had roughly $24 million in the bank. Adding Altman to the board was a key factor, and Monaco can use the additional capital to hire engineers, which does not come cheap these days.

“There are things that we will be able to do with this infusion of capital that we will use to accelerate that lead,” he said. “Despite being at it for far less time, we are moving much, much faster than the others in the space.”

Monaco has quickly been building buzz in Silicon Valley through its ubiquitous billboards and a high-end poker tournament it hosted last month that offered $100,000 in prize money. Altman said plans to play in the startup’s next tournament in June.

“I love poker,” he said. “Though I’m a little rusty,”

• University of Michigan’s $20 million bet on OpenAI could yield billions, a court exhibit shows.
• The school’s investment arrived before Microsoft poured billions into the AI lab.
• OpenAI’s meteoric rise means the potential for huge windfalls for early investors.

University of Michigan made a very good, very early bet on OpenAI.

Investors running the public school’s endowments put $20 million into one of the AI lab’s earliest fundraising efforts, according to an exhibit in the ongoing Elon Musk and Sam Altman litigation. The University of Michigan moved in before Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI and before ChatGPT’s release kicked off the modern AI boom. The Ann Arbor school stands to make a fortune.

While the document is unclear about the exact terms of Michigan’s stake, the university is sitting pretty. When it contributed $20 million, it set a “target redemption amount” of $2 billion. That’s how much the university aims to earn back from OpenAI.

The university’s $20 million stake arrived in the same early cluster as $50 million investments from Khosla Ventures and from LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman’s venture philanthropy fund, the Aphorism Foundation. The batch also included $10 million from a Y Combinator fund and $3 million from the trust of Gmail creator Paul Buchheit. Microsoft’s 2019 infusion of $1 billion came later, the document shows.

The University of Michigan and the other early investors would be prioritized above Microsoft in OpenAI’s payout order, the document says. Their “target redemption amounts” also rise with inflation.

The University of Michigan and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

It’s common for endowments to invest with Silicon Valley venture capitalists, though it’s rarer to see a direct stake. Michigan’s total endowment is huge — valued at $21.2 billion last year — and has also invested with Sam Altman’s and his brother Jack Altman’s venture funds.

Dan Feder, who leads the university endowment’s venture capital and private equity investments, joined Jack Altman’s podcast last June. Feder said that venture capital is “a pretty lousy area to invest unless you are investing or getting exposure to the underlying companies that really matter.”

Altman replied, “In which case it’s obviously very good.”

“It’s very good. Very, very good,” Feder said.

The University of Michigan wouldn’t be the only school to make a killing from an early tech investment. In 2017, a Catholic high school in the San Francisco Bay Area made $24 billion from Snap’s IPO.

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• Kevin O’Leary says people have misconceptions about what data centers are.
• O’Leary is building a data center in Utah despite community resistance.
• Data center development has become a serious issue for many American communities.

Many Americans don’t like the AI data centers popping up in their communities, though Kevin O’Leary thinks that’s because they don’t fully understand them.

O’Leary, the venture capitalist and “Shark Tank” investor who recently starred as a villainous businessman in “Marty Supreme,” said Americans have misconceptions about data centers and their environmental impact.

“It’s understanding the concerns of people, but at the same time, think about the number of jobs,” O’Leary said in a post on X on Friday.

Addressing environmental worries, O’Leary noted that he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in environmental studies.

“When a group comes to me and says, ‘Look, I have concerns about water, I have concerns about air, I have concerns about wildlife,’ I totally get it,” O’Leary said.

O’Leary has clashed with residents in Box Elder County, Utah, over a new AI data center he’s backing on a 40,000-acre campus.

County commissioners approved the project, which is also backed by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, on Monday despite the community opposition. O’Leary said, without providing evidence, that the criticism mainly came from “professional protesters” who were “paid by somebody.”

One major concern for residents about the data center — dubbed the Stratos Project — is that it could strain the water supply. Data centers can use millions of gallons of water each day. Increased utility bills, noise, and a drop in quality of life are also points of contention.

O’Leary said the public misunderstands the impact of data centers because they were “poorly represented” in the past, and that the technology powering them has “advanced dramatically.” He said data centers don’t use as much water as they once did and can use a closed-loop system to avoid evaporation. Data centers can also rely on air-cooled turbines as an alternative to managing the temperature of the computer arrays, he said.

A fact sheet published by Box Elder County said the project won’t divert water from the nearby Great Salt Lake, agriculture, or homes. It also says that Stratos won’t increase electricity prices or taxes.

Many residents, however, are not so sure. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on Thursday that an application to divert water from the Salt Wells Spring stream, near the Great Salt Lake and long used by a local ranch for irrigation, was rescinded after nearly thousands of Utah residents lodged complaints.

“At some point, understanding the value of sustainability, water and air rights, indigenous rights, and making sure the constituencies understand what you’re doing is going to be more valuable than the equity you raise,” O’Leary said on X.

Anjney Midha, a Stanford University adjunct lecturer who appeared on the “Access” podcast this week, would agree with that sentiment. He said that listening to local communities and being transparent about the intentions and impacts of data centers are essential to making them work.

“My view is that if it’s not legible to the public that these data centers and the infrastructure required to unblock this kind of frontier technology progress are serving their benefit, then it’s not going to work out,” Midha said.

In a subsequent post on X on Friday, O’Leary said his project would be “totally transparent.”

“We want it to be the shining example of how you do this,” he said.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
• Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here.

I went to Anthropic‘s developer conference this week with Business Insider’s new AI reporter, Stephen Council. He’s a terrific writer and a joy to work with, so give him a follow.

The big news: Anthropic is renting AI compute from a giant data center run by SpaceX. So if you use Claude because you think it’s the most ethical AI chatbot, you now have Elon Musk to thank when it runs smoothly and fast.

Hence the edited Claude catchphrase in the photo below. Full disclosure, I used generative AI to change this image to make a newsworthy point and have some fun.

The broader takeaway: After subtly criticizing Sam Altman last year for signing too many AI compute deals, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is now copying OpenAI’s playbook.

Why? AI demand is vastly outstripping compute supply. Anthropic has struggled with outages and imposed usage limits in recent months, frustrating developers.

“We’ve had difficulties with compute,” Amodei said on stage. “We’re sorry if sometimes it takes some time, but we’re gonna keep going to acquire as much as we can.”

Soon after the SpaceX deal was announced, Anthropic relaxed several rate limits, especially around Claude Code, its fast-growing AI coding service. That matters because some developers recently shifted to OpenAI’s Codex partly because OpenAI’s earlier compute deals meant fewer restrictions.

I heard versions of this theme all afternoon at the conference: startups, developers, and tech companies all need more AI capacity.

• One startup CEO told me he recently called a top Google executive to plead for more Gemini tokens, the core unit of AI usage these days.

• I also ran into a Cursor executive who crossed his fingers and looked anxious waiting for the startup’s own SpaceX compute deal to kick in. He said shifting massive data-center capacity between customers is relatively easy because most facilities use similar Nvidia GPUs. Indeed, Anthropic said it will have access to new SpaceX compute within the month.

• A senior Anthropic executive privately admitted the company underestimated demand. When usage surged far faster than expected this year, they scrambled to respond.

It’s an incredible problem to have. If Anthropic’s revenue growth continues at anything close to its current 80x annual pace for another year, the startup would become one of the highest-revenue companies in the world.

Stephen noticed signs of that hypergrowth everywhere at the conference:

“I’ve been covering Big Tech conferences for years. They’re almost always annual, with long-awaited products to peddle. But for Anthropic, the one-year cycle felt almost pointless. It’s growing and shipping absurdly fast. I got one demo from someone who’d been here a few weeks; other workers told me they can barely keep up. Features are flipping from research preview to public beta in no time. If Anthropic can’t teach its developers and customers week-in, week-out, no one will be able to follow along.”

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

“This is the real Met Gala.“

I was at the New York City Ballet’s 2026 Spring Gala inside the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, sharing a cocktail table with two other art lovers and fashion enthusiasts.

It was a fair assessment, considering that over the decades, this event has transformed from an arts fundraiser to a fixture on the New York City social calendar.

Ballet, here, is not just a performance. It’s a gathering of philanthropists, celebrities, artists, and even tech founders, as former ballerina turned the founder of Mirror, Brynn Putnam, was one of the gala’s chairs. She was joined by honorary chair Mick Jagger and members of a host committee, including Stephen Colbert, Claire Danes, Ashley Graham, Nicole Ari Parker, and Christian Siriano.

Around the room, Business Insider spotted looks that were deserving of their own curtain call. Take a look.

Yellow is very now

Diamonds are forever

Peachy keen looks

It’s the shades

Yes, we’re blushing too

Chic florals

A flower in bloom

Monogrammed perfection

A couple that slays together

Bustles are back

How to make black interesting

Flowers in the spring

Come for the green, stay for the Chanel

The case for orange

• April was a massive bounce-back for global markets, with stocks hitting all-time highs.
• Hedge funds across the board had strong Aprils; Hedge Fund Research states it was the best month since 2020.
• Funds such as Tiger Global, CastleKnight Management, Light Street, and more surged.

Claims of historic performance are often exaggerated on Wall Street. But April was one for the record books.

The sharp rebound across global markets pushed stocks to all-time highs, with the S&P 500 rising more than 10% in April. Hedge Fund Research called it a “historic gain” for the industry, with the average fund up 4.8% — the second-best monthly return since 2009, behind only November 2020.

And still there were funds that stood out for their eye-popping performance.

Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global, the long-running stockpicking firm, was up 15% in its flagship hedge fund strategy, putting it at roughly 3% for the year, a person close to the New York-based firm told Business Insider. Another of the firm’s growth-stock-obsessed peers, Glen Kacher’s Light Street Capital, returned 18.2% in April, pushing its 2026 returns to 11.3%.

But it wasn’t just stockpickers focused on US tech companies that dominated.

CastleKnight Management, the $3.6 billion event-driven fund run by billionaire David Tepper’s nephew, Aaron Weitman, was up 21.2% last month and has made 26.9% on the year. Kenneth Tropin’s Graham Capital, which manages $21.6 billion in assets, made 6.6% in its Tactical Trend strategy and 4.2% in its Quant Macro offering in April; those two strategies are now up 20.5% and 11.1%, respectively, in 2026.

Emerging-markets-focused manager Carrhae Capital, a London-based firm run by former SAC trader Ali Akay, was up 10% on the month through April 24 in the firm’s long-short strategy. It pushed the strategy’s year-to-date gains into black, with returns of 5.5%, HSBC’s Hedge Weekly stated.

In Hong Kong, another former investor for Point72 founder Steve Cohen, Angus Wai, has his Asia-focused multimanager firm firing on all cylinders. A person close to Polymer Capital, which runs fundamental and quant strategies, said the firm was up more than 7% in April and more than 15% on the year. The managers mentioned declined to comment.

Liberation Day lessons pay off

Several factors contributed to the stellar month for hedge funds. The commodity shocks and inflation fears in March stemming from the US-Iran war eased in light of ceasefire discussions, however tenuous.

AI and technology stocks also staged a comeback, ripping late in the month after robust earnings from hyperscalers Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.

“For most funds, April was less about embracing a benign macro regime and more about monetizing crisis hedges, covering shorts, and deciding how quickly to rebuild equity risk into a tape moving faster than most risk frameworks anticipated,” industry research firm PivotalPath said in a research report.

A common theme among outperformers was holding on to core positions during the chaos in March. One prime broker told Business Insider that client activity was more muted, focused on hedging rather than selling longs and cutting shorts, a contrast with the Liberation Day tariff mayhem a year ago.

That tactical adjustment was rewarded, PivotalPath noted, as the managers “who recovered fastest had maintained high-conviction core longs beneath index-level hedges through March and when ceasefire headlines improved the risk tone, they did not need to rebuild from cash.”