Morning newsletter digest

Axios Pro Rata: “Explosive deal”

• Sweden Ballistics raised €30M to build TNT production capacity, with full-scale production slated for 2028. The bigger story is Europe trying to fix munitions supply bottlenecks and reduce foreign dependency.
• Kalshi raised a massive $1B Series F at a $22B valuation, led by Coatue with a very loud cap table: a16z, Sequoia, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, ARK, and others.
• Dealflow was rich: Corgi hit unicorn status with a $160M Series B, Quantum Motion raised $160M, and Roche agreed to buy PathAI for $1.05B.
• Why it matters: Best read today for private markets signal. Defense supply chains, prediction markets, and AI-adjacent infrastructure are still pulling serious capital.

Fortune Term Sheet: “Gusto hits $1 billion”

• Gusto says it crossed $1B in trailing 12-month revenue, now serves 500,000+ customers, and is valued around $9.3B.
• CEO Josh Reeves emphasized “clarity” around revenue rather than ARR gymnastics, which is a subtle but pointed jab at software-market metric creativity.
• The deeper angle: Gusto is proving that SMB-focused enterprise software can scale, even though small-business customers are operationally messy and harder to serve than a handful of giant contracts.
• Why it matters: Useful lens on durable vertical SaaS. Also worth noting Reeves’ view that AI labs may not easily move into tax compliance. Turns out “forms and penalties” remain a pretty good moat. Charming, in a deeply bureaucratic way.

The Rundown AI: “Anthropic, SpaceX(AI) become unlikely compute partners”

• Anthropic is leasing SpaceX’s Colossus 1 compute cluster, reportedly 300+ MW with 220K+ Nvidia GPUs coming online, and Claude usage caps are doubling across paid tiers.
• The newsletter frames it as Musk helping OpenAI’s biggest rival while turning SpaceXAI into a compute landlord for other AI companies.
• Other AI items: Mira Murati testified in Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit, DeepMind took a minority stake in Fenris Creations to use EVE Online as an AI research sandbox, and Anthropic launched managed-agent features around memory, “dreaming,” and orchestration.
• Why it matters: The compute market is getting stranger and more strategic. If frontier labs cannot secure enough power and GPUs, alliances will keep crossing old battle lines.

Short Squeez: “$50K Wall Street Internship Coach”

• The main story is the rise of expensive college career coaching, with some Wall Street placement packages running $30K to high five figures for networking, technical prep, and application strategy.
• The uncomfortable takeaway: elite recruiting already rewarded access and polish. The coaching market is just making the price tag explicit.
• Market notes included S&P 500 and Nasdaq at fresh highs, AI/data center IPO chatter, JPMorgan launching an index for 6,400 private midsize companies, and Anthropic/SpaceX compute news making another appearance.
• Why it matters: Good cultural read on how hostile labor markets and tuition math turn “first job” into a family capital allocation decision. Slightly bleak. Very on-brand for finance.

Worth opening: Axios Pro Rata and Fortune Term Sheet.