🚀  Meet you on Mars?

👋  Happy Monday. Staring down the barrel of a day full of meetings? Roughly 1B of them happen every day, and CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in them. The ubiquity of meetings has led to a whole branch of research focused on studying them, and the results are in for what makes a good one: send an agenda, start on time, let people socialize first, and please, for the love of god, chill with the overhead fluorescent lights. If you really want to knock their socks off, just make it an email instead. 

NEWS FLASH 

🚙 Buckle up — flying cars are here: Tesla unveiled its next-gen Roadster in a livestreamed demonstration where the car drove up a massive curved ramp until it was upside down. The Roadster then flipped midair before landing safely and dramatically in a cloud of thruster smoke. The two-seat car comes in three configurations, and you’ll need to put down a $250k deposit for the thrust version. Want “rocket trim”? Too bad — it’s invite-only. 

⚕️ All in the family: Home care startup Abby Care raised $82m to turn family members into caregivers — while compensating them for the work. Family members often shoulder much of the responsibility of caring for loved ones, even with outside support. Abby Care, a Medicaid provider, trains them to become certified home health aides and nursing assistants for children, older adults, and those with disabilities. The approach can help detect labor shortages and health issues early.

🕵️  Watching the agents: As concerns over rogue AI agents grow, one startup aims to provide an overview of what those agents are actually doing, what risks they pose, and when to rein them in. AI security startup Opsin raised $21m to help companies track the autonomous software, which is often deployed by nontechnical employees, and keep it from misusing personal or confidential data. Opsin hopes to make companies feel safer using AI agents, though we're not sleeping any easier just yet.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• No more fool’s gold: Veritas, which develops anti-counterfeit chips, just released an updated version that can be embedded in metal and scanned through glass, allowing brands and consumers to verify the authenticity of items like jewelry, trophies, and fragrance bottles.
  
• Team Coke or Pepsi? KFC announced that its US restaurants will switch from PepsiCo beverages to Coca-Cola next year, ending a partnership that began when Pepsi bought the fried chicken chain in 1986. 
  
  
• A quick scan: BeSound is opening a flagship clinic in Manhattan to bring its ultrasound and near-infrared photo-acoustic imaging to the 40%+ of women with dense breasts, for whom traditional mammograms can miss cancer. The startup’s $350 exams promise pain-free imaging and results in 48 hours.
  
• Pounding the pavement: An ambitious 16-year-old New Yorker is employing an old-school job-search technique: flyers. The signs — which read "Do you have a cool job and a big heart? Let me shadow you" — have landed him follow-alongs with a radio host, a dog groomer, even a part-time gig.
  

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THE BIG IDEA

Make it so (eventually): Startups are still eyeing Mars

"Space: the final frontier," one of the most famous lines in television history, has never felt more real. Every year, it seems like a new, ambitious startup wants to boldly go where no one has gone before and build the first city on Mars.

Which raises the question: has anyone actually gotten anywhere? No, not even close, but the work happening on Earth is starting to feel more real.

Getting equipment to Mars has proven much harder than expected. Even SpaceX postponed its trip to the Red Planet in late 2026 to focus on a more attainable goal of a 2027 uncrewed mission to the Moon.

Some of the startups leading the way are focusing their efforts on building up to it — kind of like generation after generation of USS Enterprises, each one better than the last.

Startups in the space race

Cosmic Robotics

• The company was founded in 2024, is based in San Francisco, and was part of YC's Summer 2026 batch.
  
• Its first machine, Cosmic-1, is a 10k-pound autonomous robot built for heavy lifting.
  
• It places 90-pound solar panels with millimeter precision, through heat, freezing rain, snow, and dust.
  
• It has more than doubled labor productivity across tens of thousands of installs on some of the largest US solar projects.
  
• The company is expanding into data centers and building lunar construction robotics under a NASA contract.

TerraFirma

• The company was founded by former SpaceX engineers and is based in Austin.
  
• It raised ~$115m, including a $100m Series A.
  
• It uses retrofitted heavy machinery that small crews can run remotely.
  
• Past projects include site excavation for a Starbucks in North Austin and a sports arena and power substation elsewhere in Texas.
  
• Its long-term goal is to build the heavy civil infrastructure for an industrial society on Mars.

ICON

• The company has a NASA contract to develop technology for building landing pads, habitats, and roads on the Moon.
  
• The Olympus system is designed to use local resources on the Moon and Mars as building materials.
  
• It works with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on its Moon-to-Mars autonomous construction project.

Spacer Robotics

• Its first product, GRID, is an autonomous rebar-tying robot.
  
• The company was founded by Lesya Hendrix, who previously worked at Tesla, Scania, and Nuro.

Failure to launch

No company has broken ground on Mars or the Moon yet. What is working is a shared strategy: build up revenue on Earth with solar farms, data centers, and construction projects, while keeping Mars as the guiding star.

The real test for these companies isn’t just reaching Mars in the 2030s; it’s whether their Earthbound ventures can keep the cash and excitement flowing long enough to make that dream a reality.

If SpaceX is second-guessing the timeline, what hope do these starry-eyed startups have?

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Number of users on Letterboxd today, up from 1.8m in 2020. The movie-reviewing platform’s fast-growing community of dedicated film buffs — from Francis Ford Coppola to your local cinephile — has made its influence over moviegoers larger than the silver screen, and others in the industry have taken notice.

Canadian holding company Tiny is exploring a sale of its controlling stake in Letterboxd, and media companies like The New York Times Company, A24, and Sony Pictures Entertainment are all vying to snatch it up, per The New York Times, which reported that any deal is expected to value the company at $300m+ — ~20x greater than its expected earnings for 2026 of just $15m.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1985, the first Blockbuster store opened in Dallas, Texas, with 8k tapes and a computerized check-out.

🎾  Game: Grab a racket, play some tennis.

📚  Feeling smart?: Put your literature knowledge to the test.

💰  That’s wild: Try your best to spend all of Elon Musk’s money.

🐱  Aww: Meet Ophelia.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Hopefully humans will be more like cats than mosquitos to AI when they takeover. SOURCE

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

Editing by: Sara "Houston, we have a lot of problems" Friedman.

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