This Week: Joulent, Together AI, Venice, GENIUS Act

This Week Overview (June 30 – July 3, 2026):

• Joulent secured $1.75 billion from National Grid Ventures, which takes a 35% stake, to build a 2.67-gigawatt gas power plant in West Texas ("Project Kilby") with Chevron, under a 20-year deal to supply a Microsoft data center.
  

• Together AI closed an $800 million Series C led by Aramco Ventures at an $8.3 billion valuation: total funding now ~$1.3 billion, with customers including Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon, and over $1 billion in annual bookings.
  

• Venice, founded by Erik Voorhees, raised its first-ever outside round: $65 million at a $1 billion valuation: led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, and North Island Ventures participating.
  

• Five federal regulators proposed KYC rules for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act, requiring legal name, date of birth, address, and government ID before opening an account.
  

Joulent and National Grid Ventures: $1.75 Billion for the Infrastructure Behind the Infrastructure

National Grid Ventures agreed to invest $1.75 billion in Joulent, taking a 35% equity stake in the company, National Grid announced. The capital funds Joulent's first project, a 2.67-gigawatt gas-fired power plant in West Texas, internally named "Project Kilby," developed as a 50/50 joint venture with Chevron's Energy Forge unit.

The plant will run on natural gas from Chevron's own Permian Basin fields and sits on more than 2,000 acres roughly 20 miles south of Pecos, Texas. Under a 20-year power purchase agreement, it will supply electricity directly to a Microsoft-operated data center. Chevron signed the underlying agreement with Microsoft on June 22, 2026; the site is expected to start delivering power in late 2028, with the full build-out continuing into the 2030s.

Chris James, Founder and CEO of Joulent, said: "This investment from National Grid Ventures strengthens Joulent's ability to deliver reliable, large-scale power on the timelines AI infrastructure and advanced industry now requires. We are building an independent company designed for speed, scale and execution, without shifting the cost of that growth onto local communities while also providing tailor-made and cost competitive solutions for our customers."

Beyond capital, National Grid is contributing its high-voltage transmission and grid-integration expertise; it separately expects to connect more than 10 gigawatts of data center demand across the U.K. and U.S. over the next five years.

Together AI: $800 Million Series C at an $8.3 Billion Valuation

Together AI raised an $800 million Series C led by Aramco Ventures, at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation, the company announced on July 1. Participants included Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, NVIDIA, March Capital, Pegatron, and S Ventures (SentinelOne).

The round brings Together AI's total funding to roughly $1.3 billion, following a $305 million Series B in February 2025 (at a $3.3 billion valuation) and a $102.5 million Series A in 2023 led by Kleiner Perkins.

Together AI provides GPU orchestration, fine-tuning, and inference infrastructure for open-source AI models. Its customers include Cursor, Cognition (maker of the Devin AI software engineer), and Decagon, and the company says it now serves over one million developers. Together AI reports more than $1 billion in annual bookings, with usage of open-source models on its platform having tripled over the past year. 

Venice: $65 Million Series A, First Outside Capital, $1 Billion Valuation

Venice, the privacy-focused AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees (previously founder of Satoshi Dice and ShapeShift) alongside Jesse Proudman, raised a $65 million Series A, its first outside capital, at a $1 billion valuation, TechCrunch and The Block reported on July 1. The round was led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, and North Island Ventures participating.

Venice says it is already profitable, with an annualized run-rate revenue over $70 million, more than 3 million active users, and a platform processing 1.3 trillion tokens per month across 1.7 million daily API calls. Under the deal terms, Series A investors received 8.98% of the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens, and warrants for up to 5 million additional VVV over eight years.

Voorhees said: “We’re optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days”. 

GENIUS Act: Five Regulators Propose Stablecoin KYC Rules

On June 18, 2026, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, OCC, FDIC, and NCUA jointly proposed Know-Your-Customer requirements for permitted payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. Issuers, including Circle and Tether, would need to collect four data points before opening an account: legal name, date of birth (or formation date for businesses), physical address, and a government-issued ID number.

The proposal draws a specific line: buying a stablecoin like USDC on an exchange does not trigger the requirement, but redeeming it directly with the issuer does, since that counts as opening an "account." NCUA Chairman Kyle Hauptman said the rule "sets clear standards for identifying and verifying account holders and safeguards the interests of credit unions and their members."

The public comment period runs 60 days from the proposal date. Regulators had already received 450 public comments on an earlier version of the rule circulated in September 2025.