Agentic AI Explosion 🚀 + AWS Australia Push + Grok 3 Release
By Dr. Hernani Costa — Jun 18, 2025
Y Combinator backs 70 agentic AI startups, AWS invests $20B in Australia for AI, xAI rolls out Grok‐3.
Hello Movers, and good morning! Here's your daily First AI Movers Pro briefing. Today's spotlight: the boom in autonomous agents, major infrastructure scaling, and new AI model leaps. Let's get into it.
Lead Story: YC Backs 70 Agentic AI Startups in Spring 2025 Cohort
Y Combinator's Spring 2025 accelerator featured an impressive 70 startups focused on agentic AI, each receiving $500,000 in funding through the three-month intensive program. Demo Day highlighted autonomous software across sectors, with startups building AI agents for everything from cybersecurity to consumer fintech to healthcare. The Spring 2025 cohort marked YC's first-ever spring batch.
Why it matters: This surge confirms agent-based systems are no longer niche—they're going mainstream. For product leaders, it's a cue to fast-track agentic features in workflows, customer interactions, and operations. Whether you're building internal tools or public-facing products, agentic AI is now an investor-validated priority. An AI readiness assessment for your team can help identify where autonomous agents deliver the most value in your business process optimization roadmap.
📰 In Other News
AWS Commits AUD $20 billion to Australian AI Infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services has announced a AUD $20 billion investment through 2029 in Australia—the largest publicly announced technology infrastructure investment in the country's history. The investment will expand data center capacity in Sydney and Melbourne and support three new solar farms in Victoria and Queensland. This positions Australia as a key player in the Asia-Pacific AI infrastructure landscape, enabling regional digital transformation strategy and operational AI implementation at scale.
xAI Releases Grok 3 with "Big Brain" Reasoning
Elon Musk's xAI introduced Grok‑3 in February 2025, featuring advanced reasoning capabilities, multimodal processing, and optional "Think/Big Brain" mode. The model was trained using 10x more compute power than Grok 2 on xAI's 200,000 GPU Colossus supercluster. Claims tout performance rivaling GPT‑4o on mathematics and science benchmarks, with Grok 3 becoming the first model to break 1400 on Chatbot Arena. For enterprises exploring AI tool integration and workflow automation design, Grok 3's reasoning capabilities open new possibilities for complex decision-support systems.
🤖 Fun Fact
The term "agentic AI" was debated even by VCs—Andreessen Horowitz partners admit "no one really knows what an AI agent is"—yet they're clearly betting large, with mega-funds and ecosystem bets underway.
✍️ Conclusion & CTA
Agentic AI is accelerating from experimental to mainstream, backed by major startup funding, sovereign infrastructure, and next-gen models. For CxOs and product teams, now is the moment to embed agents in your roadmap. Whether through AI governance & risk advisory, AI compliance frameworks, or hands-on AI automation consulting, the infrastructure and models are ready.
What's your next action? Plan an agent pilot, explore Grok‑3 integration, or scope out cloud infrastructure scaling? Reply with your thoughts—or pass this briefing to your team and spark the discussion!
To empowered intelligence—where agents work for you,
—The First AI Movers Pro Team
Written by Dr Hernani Costa and originally published at First AI Movers. Subscribe to the First AI Movers Newsletter for daily, no‑fluff AI business insights, practical and compliant AI playbooks for EU SME leaders. First AI Movers is part of Core Ventures.
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