🚽  AI’s unexpected winners

👋  Good morning. If you’re reading this from your beach chair in Europe right now, don’t tell us — we can’t take the envy. But also, you might be wrestling for a cabana: More than 56m Americans traveled overseas last year, up from ~33m a decade ago, and the US issued a record 27.3m passports in the 2025 fiscal year. Many are jetting to Europe, which saw a record ~24m American tourists, with Portugal and Greece seeing the most growth in US visitors (and, likely, baseball hats and jorts) over the last decade.

NEWS FLASH 

🦟 Spent all summer clawing at mosquito bites?: First, same. Second, the Chinese company promising a next-level skeeter zapper says it's taking pre-orders. The Photon Matrix, which will run $1k, locates mosquitoes with LiDAR and then takes ‘em down mid-air by firing a laser. The devices are in mass production, but will they actually work and also meet global safety standards? TBD. Our desperation to escape the mosquito menace needs it to be a yes.

🤖 You must be this old to chat: OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Teens, a mode that automatically adds stronger safeguards when it estimates a user is under 18 (or they say they are). The experience limits higher-risk content, adds parental controls, and steers youths away from shortcuts on schoolwork. If you’re thinking about lying to cheat on that math quiz, know that OpenAI tracks 2k+ signals to detect whether a user is under 18, so good luck.

🏃 A well-timed, terrifying announcement: Chinese robotics juggernaut Unitree introduced its latest humanoid, “Superman,” whose athleticism is… upsetting. The robot achieves sprinting speeds faster than Usain Bolt’s record time and also tops the all-time human mark for a standing high jump, and honestly the only thing in the world scarier is GD01, Unitree’s $650k massive wall-smashing robot. The timing of Superman’s unveiling was all theatrics: Unitree IPO’d today in Shanghai.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• The fix is in: Dutch smartphone maker Fairphone has arrived in the US. Its devices are made with easily replaceable parts and meant to be “opened, repaired, and kept alive for many years,” per its CEO.

• Rolling with it: Grounded opened a 50k-square-foot manufacturing plant in Detroit to scale up its modular vehicle design business and turn electric and gas-powered vans into everything from mobile clinics and command centers to coffee shops and campers.

   

• AI’s gender gap: Women accounted for just 26% of new hires for US-based AI roles in 2025, according to LinkedIn, with an even larger share of the highest-paying jobs going to male candidates. 

• “Critical infrastructure”: There’s controversy over which industries should be labeled essential and gain added cyber attack protections from the EU. Currently on the list: Christmas light makers, chewing gum wholesalers, and ice cream manufacturers (can’t disagree with that one).

STATE OF SALES

The State of Sales in 2026 report

Ninety-four percent of sales leaders say their teams are using AI. Which sounds like progress, until you ask whether it's actually working.

HubSpot talked to over 1k sales and revenue leaders to learn more.

The State of Sales in 2026 report looks at what’s driving pipelines today, where buyers are pushing back, and what the gap looks like between teams that are ready for the AI era and teams that just think they are.

Download now

THE BIG IDEA

From toilets, textiles, and MSG to AI semiconductor chips

Sounds like a dad joke, but some of the biggest winners of the AI boom are better known for making toilets, MSG, and textiles.

Three Japanese companies — high-end toilet maker Toto, MSG seasoning producer Ajinomoto, and textile manufacturer Nittobo — produce components critical to semiconductor manufacturing.

All three companies, each over a century old, reported dramatic growth in fiscal year 2025 due to semiconductor demand, per CNBC.

Flush with cash

Founded in 1917, Toto is probably best known for its luxurious porcelain thrones. In the 1980s, the company utilized its ceramics expertise to develop electrostatic chucks for Japan's burgeoning semiconductor industry.

About the size of a pizza, ceramic chucks use electrostatic force to hold silicon wafers in place during chip production.

While Toto's chucks didn't initially make headlines, they've proved incredibly useful for advanced chips. The company's advanced ceramics division is seeing tremendous success:

• 42% jump in operating profit to ~$181m
  
• Shares are up ~48% so far this year

But Toto doesn't plan to get off the pot, instead aiming to sustainably grow both segments.

Boosting flavor and profits

Ajinomoto has been in the flavor business since 1909, having identified umami and invented monosodium glutamate (MSG) seasoning — falsely demonized for decades.

In the 1970s, Ajinomoto found that an MSG byproduct could be used to create a thin insulation film for microprocessors.

Ajinomoto's build-up film (ABF) now dominates 95% of the market and nearly every high-performance semiconductor relies on it. The AI boom has boosted Ajinomoto's bottom line:

• 45.1% YoY profit increase
  
• The company's "Healthcare and Others" segment, which includes ABF, accounts for one-third of the company's profit, surpassing frozen food

The company plans to expand production capacity but not hike prices.

From spinning silk to glass fibers

Nittobo, a 103-year-old company that began spinning silk and cotton, developed glass fiber by weaving together ultrathin glass fibers like fabric.

The company's special T-glass is essential for AI chips, servers, and smartphones. As Nittobo controls roughly 90% of the high-end glass fabric market, the company's electronic materials sector has seen dramatic success:

• 20.4% YoY increase in net sales 
  
• 39.7% increase in operating profit
  
• Net sales rose by $34m

Despite increasing demand for T-glass, Nittobo also plans to grow sustainably, while expanding other segments.

Thank us later when these tidbits prove useful at trivia night.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Have you heard of the Judgment of Paris? It’s the blind taste competition that changed the wine industry forever. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Number of used and rare books purchased in an online order that was traced to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where the ecommerce giant has been scanning books to train its AI before destroying them, per a 404 Media investigation. Several booksellers have reported similarly unusual orders dating back to at least September 2024, and Amazon isn’t the only one behind them — AI companies like Anthropic have been found guilty of the same offense.

At least independent bookstores are finally doing well?

HOW YOU HUSTLE 

Our readers are always up to neat things. Here’s our weekly feature highlighting one of your ventures.

Founder: Anil Nathan

Building: Rafter — a $10/month AI platform that monitors what your home needs, flags potential problems, and helps homeowners save on insurance, repairs, and bills.

Edge: Rafter says members save an average of $847 in their first year, and guarantees at least $120 in savings or it refunds the difference.

Advice: “Urgency is the most important feeling in a startup. As a founder, you should never be truly satisfied with how fast you're moving.”

Working on something cool? Tell us here.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1909, the first race was held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

😂  That’s funny: A parody social media site.

👾  Game: Make a pixel puzzle.

🌐  That’s cool: Internet history roulette.

🐈  Aww: A baby predator.

SHOWER THOUGHT

To guarantee a child's right to education, we first deny their right to refuse it SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Singdhi Sokpo, Danny Jensen, and Ben Berkley.

Editing by: Sara "Chipping away at it" Friedman.

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