Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
This week: the EU started enforcing its AI Act, video game data became a $453M investment thesis, and Mars, the candy company, is quietly building the most comprehensive pet genome database on the planet. And 3 acquisitions, 2 funding rounds, and 4 reads worth your time.
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🌐 WORLD OF DAAS SUMMIT 2026
The Watergate Hotel, Washington, D.C. | September 3, 2026
⏳ Almost there.
28 days until the World of DaaS Summit. This September 3, a highly curated group of 200+ DaaS leaders for closed-door conversations, curated roundtables, and high-signal networking.
⚠️ Heads up: Due to high demand and room expansion needs, ticket prices will increase to $3,200 next week. Register now to lock in your current rate.
⭐️ World of DaaS Sponsor Spotlight
Photo: IPRoyal
IPRoyal | Summit Partner
They're one of the sponsors making the World of DaaS Summit 2026 possible. We're glad to have them in the room.
IPRoyal is the proxy infrastructure behind enterprise data operations, delivering Residential, ISP, Datacenter, and Mobile Proxies across 195+ countries. Data and AI companies use it as the access layer of their data supply chain, with a network that adapts to any use case and a dedicated account manager from day one.
📰 News & Reads
Anthropic, Open AI and Google now face EU regulators with real teeth, the AI Act’s enforcement powers just activated, putting data training disclosures and model access on the line.
As of August 2, the European Commission's AI Office can inspect AI models, restrict EU market access and fine providers up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover. For the first time, companies must disclose the data used to train their models. A U.S. address is no shield, if your model reaches EU users, you're in scope.
Scale AI just named a new CEO and confirmed its pivot from data labeling to enterprise apps, the data training business is reinventing itself.
Francis deSouza, former COO of Google Cloud, takes over on August 10. Scale AI, the company that built its empire on human-labeled data for AI training is now betting its future on enterprise applications built on top of that same data infrastructure. The labeling business isn't disappearing. It's becoming the foundation.
LSEG just listed its 100-trillon-row Tick History database on Databricks, making the world’s most comprehensive financial data archive queryable at enterprise AI scale.
Decades of global market microstructure data now accessible directly inside Databricks. For anyone building AI on financial data, this changes what's possible.
ICE is wiring bond pricing data directly into Claude and ChatGPT via MCP, turning one of the most guarded financial datasets into a real-time AI input.
Fixed income data has historically lived behind expensive terminals. ICE just opened a direct channel into the most widely used AI interfaces. The financial data product just got a new distribution model.
🎙️ DaaS Podcast Spotlight
Why the future of AI runs on video game data — and why $453M just bet on it. Summation with Auren Hoffman — August 4, 2026.
→ Moritz Baier-Lentz — investor in OpenAI, SpaceX and Palantir, and co-founder of General Intuition — argues that video games are the richest behavioral data set ever created for training AI agents. Every action, decision, and failure a player makes is labeled, timestamped, and contextually rich in a way no other human-generated data source can match. General Intuition has raised $453M to build on that thesis.
In this episode, they discuss:
Why video game data produces better AI agents than any other training source — including text, images, or real-world behavioral logs.
How humans only truly learn during play — and what that means for how we should think about data collection for AI.
Why the next phase of AI isn't about more compute — it's about better data environments.
The $453M bet on video game data as the foundation for agentic AI.
Why Germany's fear of risk is cultural — and what it costs the data and AI ecosystem.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
The company behind Snickers is building the world's largest pet genome database — in partnership with MIT and Harvard. Mars, yes, the candy company — also owns Banfield Pet Hospital, VCA Animal Hospitals, and BluePearl, making it the largest veterinary network on the planet.
For the past three years, it's been quietly enrolling dogs and cats into the MARS PETCARE BIOBANK: a 10-year study collecting genome sequences, health records, blood samples, gut microbiomes, and daily activity data from 20,000 pets. The business case: whoever owns the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset of pet health owns the future of veterinary medicine, pet insurance pricing, and personalized pet nutrition.
It's the Human Genome Project — for your dog.
Where Data Meets Art
In the heart of Bruges, Belgium, centuries of urban memory are being turned into a living artwork.
Latent City, Refik Anadol's first solo exhibition in Belgium, transforms historical and real-time data from the city archives of Bruges, Berlin, Stockholm, NYC, and Seoul into immersive AI-driven environments at BRUSK — the city's new landmark cultural museum.
The archive isn't stored. It breathes.
🔥 In Case You Missed It…
M&A Funding Roundup
GSK acquired Relation Therapeutics for up to $110M to build its AI training data pipeline for drug discovery.
ADA acquired Algonomy to expand its agentic data decisioning platform across 34 markets.
Bending Spoons acquired Airtable for $1.28B to scale its no-code data organization platform.
Databento raised $97M Series B to expand its global market data infrastructure.
DataBahn raised $40M Series B to build an agentic data control plane for enterprise AI.
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📍 See you in September
This September 3, the World of DaaS Summit returns to Washington D.C. at the Watergate Hotel.
200+ DaaS leaders. Candid conversations. Curated roundtables. Private networking. And the rooms where decisions actually get made.
Due to high demand, ticket prices will increase to $3,200 next week. Register now to lock in your current rate.
