$39B Robots and Smart Glasses: 5 Tech Bombshells Nobody Is Telling You About

THE BOMBSHELL OF THE WEEK

Figure Robotics: The startup with no products that’s worth 3x more than Snapchat

On September 16, Figure announced its $1,000 million Series C, reaching a valuation of $39,000 million—almost 3x Snapchat ($14B) and comparable to Ford Motor ($46B).

The explosive part: This 3-year-old startup, without A SINGLE ROBOT in production, is already worth as much as Ford, a century-old company that builds 4 million vehicles a year. With NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Salesforce, and Qualcomm betting big, Figure has raised nearly 2,000 million in total. To justify its valuation, each of its 100,000 promised robots would need to be worth 390,000 dollars — more than the average house in Valencia.

POWER MOVES

• CodeRabbit’s NVIDIA Connection (Sept 17): The SF startup raised a $60M Series B with NVIDIA Ventures participating—right as NVIDIA invests in ALL the competitors to its own tools. CodeRabbit’s AI already has traction at 3 of the top 5 Big Tech companies. CEO Harjot Gill is hiring more than 50 engineers for Q4.

• The 4 tech executives who joined the Army Reserve: Shyam Sankar (CTO Palantir), Andrew Bosworth (CTO Meta), Kevin Weil (CPO OpenAI), and Bob McGrew (ex-CRO OpenAI) are now officially military officers. It looks like Silicon Valley is gearing up for massive defense contracts in 2026.

• Oakley Meta Hiring Spree (Sept 18): After announcing their smart glasses for athletes, Oakley/Meta are hiring aggressively, with more than 50 open positions for “wearables engineers” in the Bay Area. Meta is betting EVERYTHING on winning the AR glasses war before Apple Vision Pro drops in price.

MONEY TALKS

• Groq (Sept 17): $750M at a $6,900M valuation—doubling its value in 12 months. Disruptive alone put in $350M. Its LPUs (Language Processing Units) are 10x more energy-efficient than NVIDIA’s GPUs. They already have 2 million developers using their models (vs 356K a year ago). Myself among them.

• Figure (Sept 16): Series C of more than $1,000M at a $39,000M valuation. Parkway Venture Capital led, with NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Salesforce, T-Mobile Ventures. They plan their first Asia-Pacific facility before the end of 2025.

• RegScale (Sept 18): More than $30M in a Series B for cybersecurity compliance, with Microsoft M12 Ventures and Hitachi Ventures leading. GDPR/AI Act fines in the EU are driving demand.

• Blacksmith (Sept 17): $10M in a Series A just 4 months after the seed round, led by Google Ventures. They’re solving the CI/CD problem for AI models.

PRODUCT SECRETS

• Apple AirPods Pro 3 (Sept 16): Live Translation in 5 languages, preserving voice inflections. $250. It also arrived as an update for AirPods 4 and Pro 2 the same day—Apple is turning ALL its legacy hardware into AI-enabled devices.

• Google Pixel 10 Voice Translate (Sept 16): Translation on phone calls that keeps the speaker’s original tone. Now everyone can talk to everyone, regardless of language.

• Meta’s Smart Glasses (Sept 17-18): Meta Connect revealed its 3 new smart glasses—Ray-Ban Display ($799), Oakley Vanguard ($499), and Gen 2 ($379).

They come with a “neural wristband” for gesture control. Meta is betting that sunglasses, not the Vision Pro, are the future of AR.

NUMBERS VS REALITY

The metrics that aren’t in the press releases

• Groq’s Saudi Arabia deal: The $1,500M agreement with HUMAIN (the Saudi fund of Prince Mohammed bin Salman) represents $500M in revenue this year alone — 33% of the entire deal in 12 months.

• Figure and the math: To produce 100,000 robots in 4 years they need to manufacture 68 robots/day. They currently produce 3/week. Gap: 136x of scaling required.

• The AI chip explosion. It’s an $83,800M market projected to reach $459,000M by 2032. CAGR: 35.2% annually. That’s bigger than the entire current smartphone market.

• Traction by the truckload: Groq went from 356,000 to 2,000,000 developers in 12 months — 462% annual growth, faster than GitHub, Docker, or Kubernetes in their prime.

VALLEY DRAMA

• The xAI vs OpenAI/Apple war: Musk’s xAI has sued both for “anticompetitive practices” just as Apple deepens its partnership with OpenAI for iOS 26. With this, Musk is blocking himself from the $100B Apple will spend on AI.

• NVIDIA and Sun Tzu: It participated in BOTH mega-rounds this week (Groq and Figure). If you can’t beat them, invest in all of them to hedge your position.

WHAT TO WATCH NEXT WEEK

• VC World Summit Silicon Valley (Sept 23): The biggest venture capital event of Q3 in San Francisco. With Groq and Figure raising $1.75B this week, I expect announcements of new mega-funds and non-public deals during the networking.

• Meta Ray-Ban launch (Sept 30): The $799 glasses with a built-in display go on sale ONLY in select physical stores in the USA. Sold out within hours, reselling at 2x on eBay. Meta is limiting supply to build hype ahead of Q4.

• Tech Week SF Preview (Oct 6-12): Early bird starts next week. The companies that confirm speakers next week will reveal their strategic priorities for 2026.

MY TAKE

Robots at home will be “the next big thing,” and although I think it’s still a way off, Roomba lovers won’t take 5 years to have a domestic robot at home. The next step will be personal-care robots for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Obviously, these robots run on AI and need AI chips — hence that market-size projection that outgrows smartphones.

It recently leaked that the Chinese government may have used Sinner’s brainwaves for military purposes, and it seems Silicon Valley doesn’t want to fall behind on the military applications of everything being created. If you, Jose Manuel, think it’s crazy to build a menu calendar for your kids with Lovable or Bolt, imagine what the military minds are dreaming up.

I’m a fan of the Meta glasses — I bought them the moment they came out, and my wife’s words were “the best gift you’ve ever given me.” So if any friend of mine who I KNOW WILL BE at some meeting in the USA around that date wants to gift me a pair and is reading this, know that I value spontaneous gifts more than ones tied to special occasions. :)

What truly blows my mind is simultaneous translation, whether with AirPods Pro 2 or the new ones. Unfortunately, in Europe it will take a while to arrive because of that law that protects us from everything except from them — the ones who write the laws. But I think it will be a revolution. There are a lot of brilliant people who, for lack of languages, never make the leap to expand their ideas or projects. Very soon: “never again.”

The traction of the AI compliance company proves it’s a real problem that worries businesses. But if we already struggle to comply with GDPR, imagine the AI Act.

In the end, AI copilots that comply with the regulation coming to Europe are a clear defensive moat for chatbots in finance, healthcare, insurance, and so on…

And one more thing.

I woke up today full of excitement AGAIN. You read me once more, and new subscribers have arrived.

But it’s not enough. The idea is for you to join in with comments. I’m running out of friends to ask to comment :)

So I ask you: if you liked it, share it everywhere you can and leave comments with your questions or contributions.

Thank you