Good morning and Happy Thursday!

Good morning and Happy Friday!

Sorry for being a bit tardy this week, but if last week felt like the calm before the storm, this week blew the doors completely off.

Between Citadel’s Ken Griffin dropping a historic $3 billion commitment to plant a paradigm shifting Carnegie Mellon University campus right in Wynwood, and local agentic networking infrastructure taking center stage, South Florida’s long game just leveled up in a massive way.

Here is what moved the needle over the past week across global tech, and kicking things off with our local backyard this time:

South Florida Beat

Ken Griffin Gifts Historic $3B to Bring Carnegie Mellon to Wynwood: In the largest single educational donation in US history, Ken Griffin committed $3B to Carnegie Mellon University including $2B earmarked to construct a 35-acre CMU campus right in Wynwood. Slated to welcome over 3,500 students starting in 2028, the campus permanently cements Miami’s position as a premier global talent and research hub.

doxx.net Raises $38M Series A to Build Sovereign Networks for AI Agents: Miami-based doxx.net announced a $38M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with backing from local shop ANIMO Ventures. Founded by Barrett Lyon, the startup launched its open beta for "Agentic Defined Networking" (ADN)—providing sovereign, peer-to-peer encrypted infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous AI agents.

Jeeves Secures $110M for Global Stablecoin Expansion: The Miami-headquartered fintech locked in $110M in fresh capital as stablecoins on its corporate spend platform surged to an annualized $1.5B in volume, doubling down on borderless B2B liquidity across Latin America and global corridors.

Notable Raises

Varda Lands $251M to Manufacture in Orbit: Space infrastructure continues to print mega-checks, with Varda closing $251M led by Lux Capital and Natural Capital to scale off-planet pharmaceutical processing and orbital re-entry capsules.

Volantis Raises $88M for Photonic Inference: As electronic chip interconnects hit power walls, photonic compute startup Volantis scored $88M in Series A backing led by Abstract Ventures to rethink optical inference hardware from the ground up.

Builder Buzz

Photon Unveils Agentic SDK Inside iMessage & WhatsApp: San Francisco-based messaging layer Photon emerged with $4.5M in seed funding co-led by Gradient and A*, launching its Spectrum SDK to allow developers to deploy autonomous workflows natively into default SMS and messaging channels.

OpenAI Apologizes & Pledges Tougher Safe-Testing Protocols: Days after the Medicare incident sparked backlash across Canberra and Capitol Hill, OpenAI published formal disclosures detailing new containment frameworks, committing to freeze unmonitored web-crawling evaluations until strict run-time airgapping is implemented. And delayed the release of their new model.

South Florida founders are heads down shipping and building like never before. The momentum in the 305 is palpable so let’s keep it running! 🚀 🏃

Cheers,
Danny

Welcome CMU!

If you hadn’t heard, you either live under a rock or were on a digital detox retreat. In either case, tisk tisk! This is MASSIVE for Miami and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome the CMU to Wynwood.

Upcoming Events

Tuesday October 6th | 7:00PM to 9:00PM

Cafe Compute Meetup: Miami

Grok Bot Miami Kickoff 🤖

Ready to build at wafer-scale speeds? Cerebras is bringing its high-octane Cafe Compute Meetup to Miami for an evening of late-night building, bites, and serious compute power.

Hosted by Cerebras Ambassador Luis Gonzalez, this hands-on session gives you direct access to test out inference running up to 15x faster than leading GPUs on the massive WSE-3 engine.

Bring your laptop as the night features an open build sprint, an interactive technical Q&A with Gen AI Solution Architect Golara Azar, and plenty of space to hack alongside the local tech community. To sweeten the deal, attendees will score $100 in Codex credits to keep their models spinning long after the event wraps.

Doors open at 7:00 PM sharp, so arrive early, grab a drink, and plug in.

The LAB Miami | Tuesday, October 6th | 7:00PM - 9:00PM

Tuesday, October 6th | 6:00PM - 9:00PM

Paid Media Community: Miami

Miami October Meetup 💸

If you own, run, or optimize ad accounts, mark your calendar for an evening built entirely around high-impact performance marketing.

The Paid Media Community: Miami Meetup brings together local media buyers, agency founders, and growth operators for targeted networking and actionable, tactical breakdowns.

Across three fast-paced sessions, you’ll learn how Understory uses internal AI workflows to scale agency output without headcount spikes, get BeaconMatch’s updated playbook on post-click landing page conversions, and dive into Gatsby’s proven framework for converting LinkedIn clicks into qualified pipeline.

Bring a colleague or a fellow media buyer. The evening kicks off with open drinks at 6:00 PM and runs into latenight conversation to swap notes and campaign experiments.

The DOCK Miami | Tuesday, October 6th | 6:00 - 9:00PM

Saturday, October 10th

Hack for Humanity

Come Build for the Better 🤖

Building on the civic challenges surfaced during this summer’s Humans in AI Week, the Miami chapter is teaming up with The AI Collective for Hack for Humanity.

This full-day sprint runs from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, gathering engineers, designers, and local changemakers to translate pressing community issues into working, human-centric software solutions. You will spend nearly five uninterrupted hours building, followed by live demos, open judging, and catered lunch to keep the momentum going. Top builds stand to win real leverage: winning teams may be invited onto a grant-funded track to commercialize their projects, alongside a feature in front of 300k+ global subscribers.

Capacity is hard-capped at 50 builders, so secure your spot before seats fill up. You must be pre-approved to attend.

The LAB Miami | Saturday, October 10th | 10:00AM - 5:00PM

See you next week!