29 Jul 2026Anthropic Responds | SSI’s $5B | Prior Labs Close €1B SAP Acquisition | Human Fridges
Emma Mayer on Stablecoins, BVNK & Mastercard
BVNK CMO Emma Mayer explains stablecoin adoption's evolution from trading and brokerage platforms in 2022, to payments companies moving money globally, to today's infrastructure phase of embedded digital dollar accounts, with embedded wallet volume up 263x and $3.5 billion in payments volume since launch. She discusses why over half of BVNK's payments happen outside banking hours, the Mastercard acquisition and its distribution upside toward BVNK's trillion-dollar volume ambition, and programmable stablecoins as the payment rail for agentic commerce. She closes on how AI has changed marketing work and why quality content and in-person events matter more than ever.
Psychedelic Billionaire: atai's $2.8B Eli Lilly Exit
The hosts cover Forbes's story on German investor Christian Angermayer netting roughly $360 million from Eli Lilly's $2.8 billion acquisition of his psychedelic pharma company atai Beckley, which grew out of a mushroom trip and a pipeline including a 5-MeO-DMT nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression. They riff on his beachside set-and-setting story and share an anecdote about day-trading pharma stocks around phase trial results at university, concluding the alpha is long gone. The segment ends with a look at David Beckham's IM8 wellness drink and a debate over nootropics and supplement culture.
Laura McGinnis: Building Singular's London Office
While waiting for the guest, the hosts marvel at a Flux 3 one-prompt video of walking data centers and joke it could be an AI industry PR play. Laura McGinnis then introduces herself — a decade-plus operator at Abercrombie & Fitch, H&M.com, and Away, followed by four and a half years at Balderton — and explains her new role building out Singular's London office for the seed-to-Series-B, ~€400M fund. She describes Singular's first-conviction-over-hype, data-moat thesis as foundation models commoditize, and argues the open-weight letters are really an incentives game-theory shift — a US-China prisoner's dilemma whose cooperative, open path may favor Europe, as Mistral's signing shows.
Dwelly's $170M Series B & UK Lettings Roll-Up
Dwelly co-founders Ilya and Dan announce their $170 million Series B — $95 million equity led by EQT Growth with angels, plus $75 million in debt from Trinity Capital with room to extend the facility to $125 million. They explain the UK lettings roll-up thesis: a ~£100 billion rent roll market with ~£10 billion in commissions, acquired profitable agencies run at 35-40% EBITDA margins by redeploying staff from admin to revenue with AI. They argue VC and PE are converging in services roll-ups and size a total addressable market in the hundreds of billions across the UK, Europe, and the US.