Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
Some stories make you stop and look twice. 👀
This week: AI creating new scientific data, specialized datasets drawing serious capital, and companies finding smarter ways to turn information into products, platforms, and revenue.
Here’s what caught our attention. 👇🏻
🚀Not Just September
Two days brought everyone into the room. Membership keeps the conversation going long after.
Because the best part of being part of World of DaaS isn’t just what happens at the Summit. It’s what happens next.
Here’s what staying connected looks like.
📰 News & Reads
Google’s Gemini hacked three companies during a security test, guessing passwords in one case, finding credentials in a public repository in two others.
Two months after OpenAI's agents hacked Hugging Face, Google's did the same. AI agents accessing data they shouldn't is no longer theoretical.
The “SaaSpocalypse” is over, and the reason Salesforce survived is exactly what WoD has been saying all year: the companies that own the data win.
AI agents don't replace Salesforce, they need it, because they need the customer data inside it. Nine out of ten top AI companies run on Salesforce. The value of data as a moat is no longer a thesis. It's a result.
OpenAI just committed $125M to turn failed biotech companies’ trade secrets into open scientific datasets for medical AI, starting with data from bankrupt drug companies’ FDA filings.
90% of drug candidates fail in clinical trials, often because researchers can't predict how molecules move through the body. OpenAI's Public Data for Health initiative is buying the regulatory filings and safety data from bankrupt biotech companies and making them open. The bottleneck for medical AI isn't the model. It's the data.
Every company has operational data, but Ben Lorica of Thoughtworks argues that archive isn’t the asset: what the company learns by operating is.
Google paid $10M for Spirit Airlines' workflow data, not its final documents. AI agents need to see the process, how employees investigated, decided, corrected course. The most valuable dataset in your company probably isn't in any dashboard.
🎙️ DaaS Podcast Spotlight
Why nobody actually cares about privacy and what finally scares Chris Hulls, founder of Life360, about AI.
Chris Hulls built Life360 into a $3.3B company used by 70+ million people worldwide, one of the largest consumer location data platforms on the planet. In this episode with Auren, he goes deep on what it's actually like to run a company sitting on that much data, why going public in Australia was a strategic masterstroke, and the one thing about AI that genuinely keeps him up at night.
In this episode, they discuss:
Why nobody actually cares about privacy, and what that means for every company building data products.
What finally scares him about AI after years of building on top of consumer data.
What 70 million users and their location data actually teaches you about human behavior.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
What If AI Could Make Its Own Data?
Anthropic is moving beyond analyzing scientific data and into generating it. Its new biology lab uses Claude to analyze DNA, generate hypotheses and test them through physical experiments. This week, Anthropic said the team identified a previously unknown enzyme system with properties reminiscent of CRISPR.
The interesting part? AI analyzes data → generates a hypothesis → experiments create new data → the model learns from it.
The bigger data story: the next generation of AI may not just consume datasets. It may help create entirely new ones.
Where Data Meets Art
When Invisible Data Becomes Physical
Canadian artist and creative technologist Jordan Shaw is turning something most of us never see into physical art: the digital signals moving around us.
For his exhibition Data as Material, Shaw captures nearby Bluetooth and wireless signals, recording their presence, strength, proximity and time. He then transforms that information into paintings, prints, electronic textiles and sculptures. The result is a different way of seeing the invisible digital infrastructure surrounding us every day.
🔥 In Case You Missed It…
M&A Funding Roundup
Snorkel AI raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation to scale its data-as-a-service business supplying specialized training datasets and reinforcement-learning environments.
Infillion acquired Foursquare to bring its location intelligence and proprietary data products into a broader advertising and measurement platform.
ETFBOOK raised $13M led by Expedition Growth Capital to expand its ETF data and analytics platform across the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
Till next time,
The World of DaaS Team.
