September 3, 2026

Oh my Claude

Hey there,

Here’s what we’re watching this week:

1. Generalist’s $3B valuation
2. Apple's mafia
3. Longevity tech’s credibility problem

Let’s get into it.

This founder thinks the AI boom people are watching isn't the one that matters.

Generalist is one of the most interesting startups that we interviewed. The company builds an AI model that controls different types of robots, rather than one built for a single robot design.

It hit a $3B valuation last week, up from $2B just two months earlier, with investors including NVIDIA, 8VC, and Bezos Expeditions.

"I think that in the next half-decade, the physical AI market may just start to overtake the digital AI market as people start to get bored with their AI slop videos."

Andy Zeng,
Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Generalist

Its newest model lets robots learn a new task from a video as short as 3 to 12 seconds. Zeng thinks chatbots miss something basic, like the ability to recover when things go wrong without being told what to do next, and takes that to its extreme: “imagine sending off your Claude bot to run an entire supplements company with robots. It’s gonna be freaking wild.”

Zeng compares this moment in robotics to GPT-2. It proved that the idea could scale, but GPT-3 made it useful. He expects robotics to follow the same path.

Read our interview with Generalist here.

While Apple gets a new CEO, former employees never stopped cooking.

John Ternus took over as Apple CEO this week, while Tim Cook moved to executive chairman.

But the bigger shakeup at Apple has been happening quietly for years, as thousands of people walked out the door to start their own companies.

CB Insights People data shows that 1,923 people left Apple and later founded companies.

Besides the obvious names like Jony Ive, a few stand out:

• Dmytro Soboliev and Ievgen Soboliev both worked at Apple before co-founding River AI this year, a startup valued at $5B that builds personalized AI agents.
• Ishan Mukherjee worked at Apple for two years before founding Rox in 2024, an AI sales automation platform also valued at $1.2B.
• Jonathan Wang spent a year at Apple before co-founding Assort Health in 2023, a healthcare AI platform and 2026 AI 100 winner now valued at $1.2B.

Apple keeps building people as well as products, whether it means to or not.

See where other Apple alumni went with our People search.

Longevity has a credibility problem.

Investors have decided longevity clinics are the future of preventative care, but physicians are still waiting for proof. It's one of the conversations we'll be following at HLTH this year.

Take Neko Health: its US expansion already has a waitlist of more than 350,000 people. But Prenuvo, one of its competitors, is facing a high-profile malpractice suit from a customer who paid $2,500 for a whole-body MRI and then had a stroke the scan allegedly missed predicting.

In 2026, these preventive clinics have answered by partnering with companies that have clinical research behind them:

• Superpower added GRAIL's Galleri multi-cancer test as a paid add-on in April
• Human Longevity and Insilico Medicine are building a joint foundation model aimed at predicting disease decades out
• Neko and Neuralink are reportedly piloting a screening pipeline for Neuralink's spinal-injury trial

These partnerships are about borrowing evidence. Each partner has had to answer to a regulator, a reviewer, or a trial registry (exactly what the clinics have skipped), implying that physician skepticism is warranted. Also, collecting that data in-house would take longer than the current wave of demand will last.

Track the trends shaping healthy aging and longevity in the Insights Hub we built with HLTH. It'll get you smart on every tech player heading to HLTH USA 2026. Register with CBI's code H26PAR_CBI250 to save $1,050 before prices go up on September 12th.

• The AI Security Gold Rush
• State of Insurtech Q2’26 Report
• Partnerships and Hiring Data Show AI Companies are Expanding Beyond NVIDIA Chips

We love you.

The CB Insights Team

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