Startups

Anthropic has finalized a $30 billion-plus funding round at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion, making it the world's most valuable AI startup and surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion mark. Led by Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter, and Greenoaks, the round reflects explosive revenue growth to an expected $10.9 billion in Q2 2026 — more than double the prior quarter.

Cognition AI, maker of the autonomous coding agent Devin, closed a $1 billion round led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC at a $26 billion valuation — more than double its September 2025 raise. The company reported revenue growth from $37 million to $492 million in twelve months, with Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, and the US government among its customers, and said 90% of its own code is now written by Devin.

Fireworks AI, a startup specializing in serving third-party AI models at scale, is in talks to raise a new funding round at roughly $15 billion — nearly four times its October 2025 valuation. With $315 million in annualized revenue and Index Ventures set to co-lead, the deal would be one of the largest AI infrastructure raises of 2026.

Mercury, the fintech platform banking one in three U.S. startups, closed a $200 million Series D at a $5.2 billion valuation—up 49% in just 14 months. The round comes weeks after the OCC granted conditional approval for Mercury Bank, a federal charter that would allow the company to operate as a full-service bank rather than relying on partner institutions. AI startup formation is driving Mercury's fastest growth period in company history.

Exa, a startup building web search APIs optimized for AI systems rather than human users, has raised $250 million in a Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation. With over 5,000 enterprise customers including Cursor, Cognition, and HubSpot, Exa is betting that AI agents will generate search volume orders of magnitude beyond anything Google handles today — and that they will need a fundamentally different kind of search infrastructure to do it.

Brett Adcock—the serial entrepreneur behind robotics firm Figure AI and electric aircraft startup Archer—has raised $700 million in a Series A for Hark, his stealth AI lab building a personalized, multimodal AI platform and companion hardware. The round draws in chip giants Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, and ARK Invest, and positions Hark as one of the most well-funded AI hardware bets since the OpenAI-Microsoft mega-deal.

OpenAI filed its confidential IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, May 22, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley toward a September public debut. The filing came just days after Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company was dismissed, clearing the final major legal obstacle on the path to what would be among the largest technology IPOs in history.

Bret Taylor's Sierra secured a $950 million Series E round led by Tiger Global and GV, pushing its valuation above $15 billion. The company has reached $150M ARR in just seven quarters — among the fastest trajectories in enterprise software history — and now serves nearly half of the Fortune 50 with AI agents that handle everything from mortgage refinancing to insurance claims.

OpenAI has hit $25 billion in annualized revenue and is actively planning a public listing, with CFO Sarah Friar targeting an H2 2026 regulatory filing and a potential 2027 stock market debut at a valuation of up to $1 trillion. The company's $852 billion private valuation — set during its $122 billion mega-round in March 2026 — now makes it the most valuable startup in history, though it projects $57 billion in annual cash burn by 2027.

SpaceX's public S-1 registration opens the roadshow for what could be the biggest IPO in market history, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise. With Starlink surpassing 10 million subscribers and $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, plus the recent absorption of xAI, the company is betting that space infrastructure and AI are inseparable—and that public markets agree.

Backed by $315M at a $5.3 billion valuation and now adding $40M in ARR per quarter, Runway is quietly repositioning itself not just as an AI video generator but as a world-model company — training general-purpose spatial simulators that could compete with Google DeepMind and OpenAI at the level of AI's next architectural frontier.

Wispr AI, maker of the popular Wispr Flow voice dictation app, is in talks to raise approximately $260 million in a Menlo Ventures-led round that would more than double its valuation to $2 billion. With 2.5 million downloads and adoption at Nvidia and Amazon, the startup is repositioning from dictation tool to ambient voice operating system.

Voice AI startup ElevenLabs has crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue while closing a $550M+ Series D round that now includes BlackRock, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, and celebrities Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk. The round values the company at $11 billion, cementing its position as the dominant infrastructure layer for AI-generated voice.

Beijing-based Moonshot AI has closed a $2 billion funding round led by Meituan, pushing its valuation to $20 billion and cementing its position as China's most valuable large language model startup. The Kimi K2.6 model now ranks second on OpenRouter by usage volume, and the lab's ARR topped $200M in April — all without access to Nvidia's latest chips.

China's state-backed National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund — known as the 'Big Fund' — is in talks to lead a $3–4 billion fundraising round for AI startup DeepSeek at a $45 billion valuation, according to reporting by the Financial Times. The deal would mark DeepSeek's first-ever external investment after operating entirely on capital from its founder's quantitative hedge fund since July 2023.

ElevenLabs has surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue within the first four months of 2026, up from $350M at year-end 2025. The AI voice company announced a third close of its Series D round — now topping $550 million — with new institutional investors including BlackRock, Wellington, NVIDIA, and D.E. Shaw, plus a roster of celebrity backers that includes Jamie Foxx and Eva Longoria.

Sierra, the enterprise AI customer agent platform co-founded by former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor and Google veteran Clay Bavor, has raised $950 million led by Tiger Global and GV at a post-money valuation exceeding $15 billion. The round gives Sierra more than $1 billion in total capital to pursue its ambition of replacing traditional call centers with AI agents that can handle complex, multi-turn customer conversations.

Anthropic has formed a $1.5 billion enterprise AI services firm with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to embed Claude directly into corporate workflows, putting it in head-to-head competition with McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte. The day after the JV announcement, Anthropic debuted 10 purpose-built financial services agents, full Microsoft 365 integration across Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and a marquee Moody's data partnership—unveiled at a New York fireside chat with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.

SAP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs, pledging over €1 billion in investment to establish it as a globally leading frontier AI lab focused on tabular and structured business data. Prior Labs, founded by machine learning researcher Frank Hutter and colleagues, pioneered Tabular Foundation Models — including the TabPFN series published in Nature — which predict business outcomes directly from structured data without traditional ML engineering.

Parallel Web Systems, the AI infrastructure startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has closed a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation led by Sequoia Capital — just five months after its Series A. The company builds web search and research APIs purpose-built for AI agents, and counts Clay, Harvey, Notion, and Opendoor among its customers.

Sierra, the enterprise AI agent company co-founded by former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor and former Google executive Clay Bavor, has raised $950 million in a Series E round led by Tiger Global and GV, pushing its valuation to $15.8 billion — nearly double its $10 billion mark from just six months ago. The raise signals that enterprise AI agents focused on customer service are emerging as a category, not just a feature.

Anthropic is in advanced discussions to close a funding round of approximately $50 billion at a valuation of $900 billion—which would make it the highest-valued private AI company in the world, overtaking OpenAI's $852 billion post-money mark. The Claude-maker, which has reached $30 billion in annualized revenue, is targeting a board decision in May with a potential IPO as early as October 2026.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is spinning out a new company called Roze that would bundle AI infrastructure assets — including its $5.4 billion ABB Robotics acquisition, Ampere Computing, and DigitalBridge — into a single entity using autonomous robots to construct data centers. With a $100 billion valuation target and a U.S. IPO aimed for the second half of 2026, Roze would be one of the largest pre-revenue listings in tech history — if it gets there.

True Anomaly closed a $650 million Series D at a $2.2 billion valuation, four days after the U.S. Space Force selected it among 12 companies — including Anduril and SpaceX — for up to $3.2 billion in Golden Dome space-based interceptor contracts. The Colorado startup, founded in 2022, is the only company in the group exclusively focused on orbital defense, and plans to expand from 140,000 sq ft of manufacturing to 2 million sq ft over four years.

NVentures, Nvidia's venture arm, has backed Swedish legal AI startup Legora in a $50 million Series D extension that brings total funding to $600 million at a $5.6 billion post-money valuation. The investment — Nvidia's inaugural move into legal technology — comes as Legora surpasses $100 million in ARR and accelerates its rivalry with Harvey AI, valued at $11 billion.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is assembling a new standalone company called Roze that will use autonomous robotics to build and operate AI data centers. Executives are targeting a $100 billion valuation for a U.S. listing as early as the second half of 2026, bundling ABB Robotics and SoftBank's infrastructure assets under a single public entity.

A wave of senior AI researchers from Google DeepMind, Meta, and OpenAI are quitting to launch independent AI startups, raising billions at seed stage. In 2026 alone, VCs have funneled $18.8 billion into AI startups founded since 2025 — a trend reshaping who controls the frontier of AI research.

David Silver, the DeepMind researcher who built AlphaGo, has launched Ineffable Intelligence with $1.1 billion in seed funding — the largest seed round in European history — at a $5.1 billion valuation backed by Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Nvidia. His raise anchors a broader exodus of top AI researchers from Meta, Google, and OpenAI into independent startups, as VCs pour $18.8 billion into AI companies founded since early 2025.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that shocked Silicon Valley in early 2025, is raising outside capital for the first time. Tencent has proposed acquiring a 20% stake, Alibaba is also circling, and the startup's valuation doubled from $10 billion to $20 billion-plus in under 48 hours — a sign of how desperate China's tech giants are to own a piece of the country's hottest AI lab.

Asia's largest global innovation conference opens today at Tokyo Big Sight, bringing together 750 startups, 60,000 attendees from 49 cities across five continents, and speakers from Nvidia, AWS, and Trend Micro. The fourth edition of SusHi Tech arrives as Japan's startup ecosystem undergoes its most significant transformation in decades, backed by record inbound investment and a government committed to making Tokyo a genuine global tech capital.

Cognition AI, maker of autonomous software engineer Devin, is in early discussions to raise a new funding round that would more than double its $10.2 billion valuation from September 2025. The startup's combined ARR from Devin and its Windsurf acquisition has grown to roughly $150 million, powering a client roster that includes Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Palantir.

Canadian AI company Cohere is merging with Germany's Aleph Alpha in a $20 billion deal backed by a $600 million Series E led by retail giant Schwarz Group. Announced in Berlin with both countries' digital ministers in attendance, the deal is as much geopolitical as it is commercial — positioning the combined entity as the leading non-US, non-Chinese AI provider for regulated enterprises and governments worldwide.

SpaceX has struck a deal giving it the right to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later in 2026, pairing the arrangement with a $10 billion collaboration to build 'coding and knowledge work' AI on its Colossus supercomputer. The move extends Elon Musk's AI empire — SpaceX already absorbed xAI in February — ahead of the rocket company's planned Nasdaq IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation.

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati just 14 months ago, has signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Google Cloud for Nvidia GB300-powered infrastructure to train and deploy its flagship 'Tinker' model. The deal makes the company — which raised a record $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation — the third frontier AI lab to lock in Google compute capacity this month, after Anthropic and Meta. It underscores how quickly a new tier of AI challengers is consolidating around Google as an alternative to constrained Nvidia hardware supply.

Vast Data closed a $1 billion Series F round led by Drive Capital and Access Industries, with Nvidia, Fidelity, and NEA participating, valuing the AI data infrastructure company at $30 billion — more than triple its $9.1 billion valuation from 2023. The company reports over $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue, more than $100 million in cash generated per quarter, and $4 billion in cumulative bookings. Vast Data's platform sits between GPU clusters and AI models, handling the data management layer that determines how fast those systems can actually move.

Reliable Robotics, the Mountain View startup founded by SpaceX and Tesla veterans, has raised $160 million in a round led by Nimble Partners, pushing its valuation toward $1 billion. The company is pursuing FAA certification for its Reliable Autonomy System aboard a Cessna 208 Caravan and plans to fly the first commercial uncrewed cargo hop in U.S. airspace before summer 2026.

A London-based startup co-founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI researchers has raised $500 million from Google's GV and Nvidia at a $4 billion valuation just four months after incorporation. Recursive Superintelligence aims to build AI systems that improve themselves without any human in the loop — across evaluation, training, and research direction itself.

Parasail has closed a $32M Series A to scale its pay-per-token AI inference cloud, which already processes 500 billion tokens daily across 40 data centers in 15 countries. The startup is betting that 'tokenmaxxing' — the explosion of per-agent model calls as AI agents proliferate — will make inference orchestration the next critical layer of AI infrastructure.

China's AI darling DeepSeek is raising outside capital for the first time, targeting $300 million at a valuation exceeding $10 billion — while its next-generation V4 model is set to run entirely on Huawei's domestically-produced Ascend 950PR chips, marking a historic bet on Chinese semiconductor independence.

Manycore Tech listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on April 17 as the world's first publicly traded spatial intelligence company, closing 144% above its HKD 7.62 IPO price after peaking at 185% intraday. The Hangzhou-based startup raised approximately HKD 1.224 billion and became the first of China's celebrated 'Hangzhou Six Little Dragons' to reach public markets, betting that 3D spatial data will power the next generation of robots and physical AI.

Anthropic has tripled its annualized revenue in just 90 days, crossing $30 billion and surpassing OpenAI to become the AI industry's top revenue generator. Simultaneously, the company sealed a landmark compute agreement with Google and Broadcom for 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity starting in 2027—powering a future that CEO Dario Amodei admits he keeps underestimating.

OpenAI is targeting a public listing in Q4 2026 with an ambition to hit a $1 trillion valuation — a figure that would make it the most valuable IPO in US history. In a departure from typical tech listings, the company plans to reserve a portion of the offering for individual retail investors, a move designed to broaden access to what many consider the defining technology company of this era.

Two months after SpaceX officially acquired xAI in a $1.25 trillion all-stock deal, Bloomberg reports that bankers have revised the combined entity's IPO valuation target above $2 trillion in testing-the-waters conversations with prospective investors. The pitch now centers on a concept Elon Musk calls 'orbital intelligence': space-based data centers powered by Starlink that could sidestep the terrestrial energy bottleneck constraining AI growth.

Shield AI closed a $2.25B capital package — a $1.5B Series G led by Advent International and JPMorgan Chase plus $500M in Blackstone preferred equity — valuing the autonomous warfare AI company at $12.7B, up 140% from its prior round. The company projects $540M+ in 2026 revenue and is acquiring Aechelon Technology to expand its autonomous combat training stack.

Aria Networks, a Palo Alto startup, has closed a $125 million first round backed by Sutter Hill Ventures—the firm behind Snowflake—to build vendor-agnostic networking infrastructure purpose-built for AI data center workloads. The raise comes as hyperscalers commit over $470 billion to AI infrastructure in 2026, and networking has emerged as a critical but underbuilt layer in the AI stack that no incumbent vendor has yet solved at scale.

Austin-based Saronic Technologies closed a $1.75 billion Series D led by Kleiner Perkins, more than doubling its valuation to $9.25 billion. The company is building autonomous surface vessels for the U.S. Navy at an industrial scale — a bet that unmanned maritime systems will fundamentally reshape naval power projection in the Pacific era.

Global venture capital investment hit $300 billion in Q1 2026, a new all-time quarterly record and 150% above both Q4 2025 and Q1 2025 levels. AI companies captured $242 billion of that total — 80% of all global startup funding — driven by OpenAI's $120 billion mega-round and similar raises by Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo. The concentration and scale raise urgent questions about whether the ecosystem has entered bubble territory.

Global venture investment hit $300 billion in Q1 2026 — up 150% year-over-year — with four of the five largest VC rounds in history closing in this single quarter. AI dominated at $242 billion, or 80% of all global venture funding, driven by mega-rounds from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo.

Cognichip, a San Francisco startup using physics-informed AI models to radically cut chip design costs and timelines, raised a $60M Series A led by Seligman Ventures. The company claims 75% cost reduction and 50% timeline compression. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan's board seat sends a pointed signal about where the semiconductor industry thinks custom silicon design is heading.

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