Good morning VC enthusiasts. It’s Data Thursday again. Today we’re looking at Amazon walking away from its physical retail experiments, a chip startup hitting $4B two months after launch, several mega rounds across robotics, space and AI, plus fresh free VC resources and junior roles. Let’s jump in!

In today’s Data Thursday edition:

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The Inside: Amazon is shutting down its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores and is reallocating capital toward same-day grocery delivery and aggressive expansion of Whole Foods, effectively ending its experiment with operating Amazon-branded convenience retail at scale. (If you’ve never seen these stores in action, this short video is a great explainer.)

What the data shows:

Why it matters: Amazon is conceding that operating experimental retail formats is a distraction. Its grocery strategy is consolidating around two scalable engines: logistics-driven same-day delivery and a premium physical brand with proven unit economics. The lesson is simple: Amazon builds platforms and distribution layers, not niche store chains.

The Inside: Ricursive Intelligence just hit a $4B valuation two months after coming out of stealth, off the back of a simple but heavy idea: use AI to design the chips that run AI. Instead of training models, Ricursive is automating the physical layout of silicon, the stage that decides how fast a chip runs, how much power it burns, and how expensive it is to manufacture. The team behind it previously built AlphaChip at Google, which has already been used to design multiple generations of TPU chips.

The details:

Why it matters: As compute becomes the main bottleneck for AI, controlling how chips are designed starts to matter as much as who trains the best model. The fastest way to move the cost and performance curve may not be better architectures, but better silicon.

Samsung is bringing its first triple-folding smartphone to the US on January 30, featuring a 10-inch unfolding display and the highest price tag ever for a consumer smartphone.

The device unfolds twice, measures just 3.9mm at its thinnest point, supports up to 200,000 folds, and positions Samsung years ahead of Apple in foldables, as Apple is only rumored to enter the category later this year.

Google is expanding its lower-cost AI Plus plan to all markets, including the US, where it’s priced at $7.99 per month, bringing Gemini 3 Pro, Flow’s AI filmmaking tools, NotebookLM, and 200GB of storage into a cheaper subscription tier.

The move targets users who don’t need the $20 Pro plan and mirrors OpenAI’s $8 ChatGPT Go, signaling that the next phase of the AI wars is about converting hundreds of millions of casual users into paying subscribers through aggressive mid-tier pricing.

Waabi raised $1B and partnered with Uber to deploy 25,000+ robotaxis on the platform, expanding beyond autonomous trucking and betting that its single AI stack can scale across multiple self-driving verticals.

Phia raised a $35M round led by Notable Capital with participation from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins to scale its AI shopping agent, after reaching hundreds of thousands of monthly users, 11x revenue growth, and onboarding 6,200 retail partners in under a year.

Northwood Space closed a $100M Series B co-led by Washington Harbour Partners and Andreessen Horowitz and secured a ~$50M U.S. Space Force contract to modernize ground-based satellite communications infrastructure.

Obvious Ventures raised its fifth fund at $360M to back early stage startups across planetary, human, and economic health, continuing its strategy of keeping fund sizes small enough that a single breakout company can return the entire fund.

Climate VC firm 2150 raised a €210M second fund to back Series A startups tackling cities’ emissions and infrastructure bottlenecks, bringing its AUM to €500M and doubling down on industrial heat, recycling, automation, and direct air capture.

See you soon,

Jannis & Felix — the humans behind Inside/VC