The 3 biggest cloud providers — Amazon (AWS), Alphabet (GCP), and Microsoft (Azure) — are actively developing AI ecosystems through startup investments and strategic partnerships, often in the same startups.
In fact, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft have locked in numerous overlapping relationships with leading model developers.
Take Anthropic:
Amazon has invested $8B in Anthropic across several rounds and is its primary (but not exclusive) cloud and training partner. The companies are also collaborating on optimizing Anthropic's models for Amazon's Trainium chips.
Alphabet is a major investor in Anthropic, having poured close to $3B into the LLM developer, even as it’s focused on developing its own Gemini models.
Even Microsoft, which remains cozied up with OpenAI, announced this week that it will participate in Anthropic’s model context protocol (MCP) standard and will make Anthropic’s coding agent available in GitHub.
But ecosystem development isn’t the only path that these cloud giants are taking to capture more market share.
The recent Coinbase ransomware attack affected nearly 70,000 accounts, according to a filing yesterday with the Maine AG’s office.
The data breach, which ran for several months before it was discovered earlier in May, was the result of internal employees being bribed by cybercriminals. It could cost Coinbase as much as $400M in losses.
The breach underscores the critical necessity of security infrastructure, especially as more institutional capital flows into digital assets.
Using CB Insights data on job postings, we analyzed hirings at 7 fintech & blockchain leaders — Stripe, Circle, Ripple, Sardine, Chainalysis, Gemini, and Fireblocks — and every single one is prioritizing security infrastructure staffing.
Chainalysis and Gemini lead in overall security hiring activity.
Gemini, for instance, has 98 job openings in total, representing 7% of its overall headcount. Its rate of hiring places it in the top 3% of companies we track.
The No. 1 trend from its current openings? Prioritizing security as a competitive differentiator.
The company is hiring for 8 specialized security roles spanning threat detection, application security, platform security, and security governance.
Its open roles point to a focus on advanced cryptographic capabilities (like secure multi-party computation, partial homomorphic schemes, and zero-knowledge proofs) and fraud detection through AI/ML.
Last week Salesforce acquired early-stage startup Convergence, which develops an Operator-like AI agent that it says can navigate dynamic interfaces and manage complex, multi-step processes.
The use case complements Salesforce's aim to create more adaptive, capable AI agents that can handle sophisticated workflows, especially as Salesforce doubles down on its Agentforce offering.
Salesforce had previously invested in the company’s pre-seed round via its venture arm.
This is yet another example of Salesforce’s “try before you buy” strategy — where it first invests in a startup before eventually snapping it up.
Back in 2024, we deconstructed how Salesforce’s M&A strategy works. See the breakdown here.
Who else might Salesforce acquire to bolster its agent offering?
So far, Salesforce Ventures has backed 7 different AI agent startups, including:
a software automation testing platform with an above-average M&A probability score
an AI SDR developer that has previously partnered with Salesforce
This week, on a 60 Minutes segment, Anduril gave a closer look at Fury, the fully autonomous fighter jet it’s developing for an Air Force contract.
Anduril is still going head to head with General Atomics to secure the contract, but it’s already beat out legacy defense firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin in earlier rounds of bidding.
Founder Palmer Luckey is betting Anduril’s AI-powered systems can win out against what he calls “dumb weapons,” or traditional military technology that lacks modern intelligence capabilities.
To get a leg up on legacy defense firms, Anduril is using a combination of vertical integration and flexible manufacturing.
Its Arsenal manufacturing platform, for instance, replaces complex industry processes with simplified, modular designs and standardized supply chains. This lets Anduril scale output rapidly and address the vulnerability of quickly exhaustible US weapon stockpiles in a major conflict.
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