QUASA Connect: News and Analysis on Business, Finance, Tech, Web3, and Crypto

Uzbekistan has its first unicorn — and it’s growing at breakneck speed.On March 10, 2026, Uzum, Central Asia’s fast-rising fintech and e-commerce holding, announced a new funding round that values the company at $2.3 billion — a 53% jump from the $1.5 billion valuation it achieved just seven months earlier in August 2025.

Meta has pulled the plug on the VR version of Horizon Worlds, its long-promised social metaverse platform for Quest headsets.

Palmer Luckey is on a roll most founders can only dream of. At 21 he sold his VR hobby project Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. He then built Anduril, the defense-tech unicorn now targeting a $60 billion valuation in 2026.

Global venture capital just shattered every previous monthly record. According to Crunchbase data released in early March 2026, startups worldwide raised an astonishing $189 billion in February alone — the largest single-month total in history.

Remember the entire premise of the HBO show Silicon Valley? A scrappy startup called Pied Piper invents a revolutionary compression algorithm that shrinks files to a fraction of their size with zero quality loss. It was supposed to be the holy grail of data efficiency.

For creators, Mosaic is more than a database. It’s a reputation layer that finally gives them leverage.When your name is verifiably attached to successful campaigns, you stop competing on price and start competing on track record. You can walk into negotiations and say, with evidence: “Here’s exactly what I delivered last time — and here’s the proof.” That single shift changes the power dynamic entirely.

The majority of businesses that already depend on the largest LLM providers—and will depend on them even more in the coming years—do not fully grasp the underlying dynamics of the compute market.

Most startups chase headlines from day one. ZaiNar did the exact opposite.Founded in 2017 in Belmont, California, the company stayed in total stealth for nine full years. No press releases. No demo videos. No funding announcements. Just quiet, relentless engineering.

Anthropic just dropped one of the most revealing studies on AI agents yet. Published February 18, 2026, the paper “Measuring AI Agent Autonomy in Practice” analyzed 998,481 real-world tool calls from their public API and Claude Code deployments.

In the high-stakes world of AI fundraising, speed and headline numbers matter more than ever. A new tactic is emerging that lets founders announce eye-popping “unicorn” valuations while quietly giving lead investors a sweetheart deal.

If you’re serious about AI and product building, you probably already subscribe to a dozen different tools. Cursor. Perplexity. Framer. Linear. ElevenLabs. The list gets expensive fast.

You’re going to laugh, but yes — there’s yet another AI image generator in 2026. This one calls itself Phota Studio (and its API counterpart Phota API), and it’s positioning itself as the first truly personalized photography tool.

Google has officially entered the vibe era of spatial computing.On March 25, 2026, Google Research launched Vibe Coding XR — a groundbreaking rapid-prototyping system that turns casual text or voice prompts into fully interactive, physics-aware XR (augmented or virtual reality) applications in under 60 seconds.

CapCut has dropped one of the most ambitious AI video tools of 2026.

Netflix has done it again. On March 26, 2026 — just over a year after its previous U.S. price hike — the streaming giant quietly updated its website and bumped up the cost of every subscription tier.