| | Good morning. The EU ditched it in 2013, the UK in 2014, Singapore in 2020, and Japan in 2024. Could the US join its peers and get rid of mandatory quarterly reports? It's definitely on the table: The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing a proposal to end the more than half-century tradition. It could be published as early as April, triggering at least a 30-day public comment period before a vote among the agency's commissioners. Opponents of quarterly reports argue they foster corporate "short-termism," incentivizing executives to focus on their stock price and latest earnings rather than long-term growth. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden were vocal critics, and so is President Donald Trump. Leaders at private firms have cited the Denali-sized mountain of paperwork involved in running a publicly listed operation as reason enough to keep their books closed. See, your boss hates paperwork as much as you do. | | | | | The reach of Iran's ballistic missiles taps out at roughly 1,200 miles. The nation's hackers face no such geographic limits. A flurry of simple yet effective attacks by Iran in recent weeks has IT departments rethinking their defenses, potentially boosting cybersecurity stocks. State-linked Iranian groups have become especially good at doing more with less, according to researchers at Virginia-based Ultraviolet Cyber. Check Your 2FA Rather than "technically complex exploitation," they excel at rudimentary hacking methods: phishing, brute-force password spraying and social engineering to trick users into granting them system access. "These operations are designed to blend into normal administrative activity, enabling long-term intelligence collection and providing Iran with the option to escalate from espionage to disruption during periods of geopolitical tension," they wrote. Let this paragraph double as your semi-regular reminder to set up two-factor authentication. Since the US-Israel war with Iran began on February 28, that option to escalate has been a crucial component in Tehran's asymmetrical toolbox. Last week, Poland said early evidence in a foiled cyberattack on a nuclear research facility pointed to Iran. At the same time, an Iran-linked hacker group claimed responsibility for a breach of the Albanian parliament's systems. Palo Alto Networks researchers documented a surge in disruptive pro-Iranian cyber operations with targets including a Turkish media outlet, an Israeli civilian healthcare network, and Persian Gulf airports and financial institutions. The US hasn't been spared, with Michigan-based medical equipment manufacturer Stryker suffering a worldwide disruption last week when its "internal Microsoft corporate environment" was breached. An Iran-linked hacker group claims it stole reams of data and wiped information from company servers, while Stryker is still bringing ordering systems back online. For every exploitation, there's a potential market beneficiary: - Goldman Sachs analysts on Friday highlighted cybersecurity firms as an opportunity amid the S&P 500's "downside risk" from the Iran war, noting they are often "less volatile than the broader software industry during periods of market stress."
- That's proven true this year, with or without conflict: The broader software industry captured by the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF is down 20.5%, while the iShares Cybersecurity and Tech ETF is down just 8.8%.
  Secret Agentic Man: Four firms, Palo Alto, Okta, Cloudflare, and CrowdStrike, stand out to analysts, and for reasons beyond geopolitics. Each could prove a major beneficiary of the nightmare that so-called agentic artificial intelligence has unleashed on broader software stocks. While agentic AI could wipe out software use cases, IT organizations will need to secure the identities of AI agents and humans alike, increasing cybersecurity demand. Morgan Stanley upgraded its 12-month price target on CrowdStrike to $510, partly due to "favorable AI positioning" and implying 20% upside, while also flagging Palo Alto as likely to benefit. Written by Sean Craig | | | | | | | | | Photo via Alumni Ventures | | | | | | | | | Jensen Huang and his signature lizard-embossed leather jacket hit the stage yesterday to lead the keynote for Nvidia's annual GTC event, where he laid out massive growth ambitions. Among the keynote's big callouts: Huang doubled Nvidia's previous revenue projection for its Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips (expected to launch this year) to $1 trillion through next year. The CEO also unveiled a new product that combines chips from Nvidia and the startup Groq (not to be confused with Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok), and a tech stack called NemoClaw intended to improve upon the popular AI agent OpenClaw. As Nvidia scales up its business to meet the clamoring demand for AI, the industry is finding ways to make the power-hungry systems operate more efficiently. AI Is too Hot to Handle Remote workers who've tried to hit the beach only for their laptop to shut down in the sun will understand one key problem facing AI: Like phones and laptops, data centers have to be kept below a certain temperature to run. The operating temperature of chips needs to stay below about 175 degrees Fahrenheit, an expert from UC Davis told Marketplace, and maintaining that level is an energy-intensive process. Data centers that depend on air cooling use as much as 35% of their incoming electricity just on cooling. The solution? Energy-efficient liquid cooling, since liquid can transfer heat more efficiently than air. Nvidia has been moving toward liquid cooling since at least 2022, when it introduced a liquid-cooled version of its A100 chip that the company said used 30% less power than its air-cooled counterpart. Chips have only become more power-hungry since, stressing grids and creating a need for more efficiency. AI investments are flowing into the liquid-cooling space: - Frore closed a $143 million round on Monday that valued the startup at more than $1.6 billion. It was founded eight years ago with a focus on air cooling for devices that lack fans, like phones. It switched to liquid-cooling tech about two years ago after Huang suggested that data centers were increasingly relying on it.
- Frore sets itself apart from competitors by creating liquid-cooling systems in customized, stackable 3D shapes rather than cold plates, which are the current standard used by companies such as Nvidia.
Feeling Jumpy: At the same time, investors are sensitive to any perceived cracks in the foundations that infrastructure companies say they're building. Companies that create chilling systems for liquid cooling slipped earlier this year when Huang said Nvidia's Rubin chips can be cooled with warmer water that doesn't need to be chilled by machines. Written by Jamie Wilde | | | | | | | | | Photo via YieldMax ETFs | | | | | | | | | Congress is finally trading the tractor for the algorithm. A new and overdue farm bill (dubbed the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2026) is gaining momentum in Washington, and it features a major boost in spending to help the US agriculture industry get with the AI-ified times. USDA-RPA While comprehensive farm bills are typically passed every five years, Congress has been quietly extending certain terms and provisions of the 2018 Agriculture Improvement Act since it expired in 2023, which means that the Republican-authored 2026 bill, which advanced through the House Agriculture Committee with bipartisan support earlier this month, has plenty of room to offer a major firmware update to the farming sector. The wide-ranging bill seeks to accelerate agri-tech adoption through a multipronged approach: - Like most agricultural policies, subsidies are central to the 2026 farm bill's agri-tech clauses. One key provision would fold "precision agriculture" (a.k.a., agri-tech tools ranging from software to internet-of-things-connected devices to AI systems) into an existing incentive program designed to help farmers de-risk conservation efforts, covering up to 90% of the costs of adopting precision agriculture technologies.
- Meanwhile, another provision would reauthorize the Agriculture Advanced Research and Development Authority (AGARDA), a DARPA-style research agency for farm tech. Another part of the legislation would establish an "Office of Biotechnology Policy" at USDA to boost research initiatives and streamline the regulatory environment.
Tough Times: The bill is expected to receive a full vote in the House of Representatives before Easter. It comes at a critical time for the US farming industry writ large, which continues to buckle under the weight of low prices, high input costs (fertilizer prices have spiked, again, amid disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz), and a labor shortage. Nearly 300 farmers or farm operations filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy in the first nine months of 2025, according to court filings analyzed by Reuters, a 36% increase from the entire year of 2024. Written by Brian Boyle | | | | | - Raw Deal: Thousands of meatpacking workers walked off the job at a JBS facility in Colorado on Monday, marking the first US beef plant strike in four decades.
- Layoffs Pay Off: Meta stock rose 2.3% Monday following weekend reports that the company plans to lay off a fifth of its 79,000-strong workforce to offset massive AI-related spending.
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**Partner | | | | Disclaimer *Co-investors are shown for illustrative purposes only, are not representative of all organizations with which AV co-invests, and do not necessarily reflect future co-investors. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested. | | |
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