Journal archive, page 5

Unitree priced its Shanghai IPO at a $9 billion valuation and 36 times sales, raising $905 million after retail investors oversubscribed it more than 8,000 times, a STAR Market record.

Stripe agreed to buy AI model router OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, a 5.4x markup on its three-month-old valuation. It's now both OpenRouter's payments processor and its owner.

SpaceX completed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor-maker Anysphere on August 14, the largest venture-backed startup buyout on record, as Elon Musk pushes into enterprise AI.

Anthropic's Q2 revenue jumped 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion, and the company posted its first positive operating income right as it preps a fall IPO.

CodeRabbit tripled its valuation to $1.5B on 2 million weekly AI code reviews. For founders shipping with AI, review is now the bottleneck worth funding.

OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate topped $40 billion in July, doubling in a year, the same week its chief revenue officer resigned, the second senior exit in days ahead of its IPO.

Uber and Pony.ai plan to deploy over 2,000 robotaxis across Europe with no cities, dates, or revenue terms disclosed. Markets are waiting for the August 18 earnings report instead.

Databricks closed a $5B round at a $190B valuation, a third of the $15B investors wanted to write, as its revenue run rate topped $7B growing above 80% a year.

Vantage Data Centers, backed by Silver Lake and DigitalBridge, is weighing a $100 billion IPO that could raise $10 billion, the largest data center listing on record.

Lovable closed a $400M Series C at a $13.3B valuation, doubling its price in eight months as ARR raced past $500M, proof AI coding is now a real enterprise budget line.

CoreWeave's revenue backlog surged to $104 billion and its stock jumped 20% in a single session, even though the AI cloud provider's quarterly loss widened to $626 million.

Nvidia partnered with six Wall Street giants to mobilize over $500 billion for AI data centers, using its own chips as collateral, and investors read it as a warning sign, not a win.

Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner, signed a 20-year, $9.1 billion lease to supply Anthropic with 191 megawatts of computing power in Texas, and its stock jumped 25% overnight.

Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30B-parameter agent model, under a fully unrestricted Apache 2.0 license on August 10, compressed to under 20GB so it runs locally on a single consumer GPU.

Intel launched a $15 billion share sale on August 10 to fund its AI chip and foundry buildout, and investors sent the stock down 5% despite a blockbuster 2026 rally.

Zoox began charging fares in Las Vegas on August 10, the first commercial launch for a robotaxi with no steering wheel, after a first-of-its-kind NHTSA exemption.

AMD acquired Taalas, a silicon startup whose chips ran a single AI model 48 times faster than Nvidia's GPUs, after the company raised $219 million in two years.

Live-shopping marketplace Whatnot raised $545 million at a $20 billion valuation, nearly double its price from ten months ago. Its advertised 6% take rate and its actual 12.5% one tell two very different stories.

Apple asked a federal judge to freeze OpenAI's first hardware device before it ships, and OpenAI just asked the same judge to throw the whole case out.

Cloudflare's Q2 revenue jumped 36% to $696 million and its stock hit an all-time high, but the real story is that AI agents now generate more web traffic than humans do.

July payrolls fell 23,000 against a +83,000 forecast, and May and June were revised down a combined 103,000. Fed hike odds for September cratered to 44%, and that's the number that matters for founders raising this fall.

Defense manufacturing startup Hadrian closed a $1.37 billion Series D at a $7.87 billion valuation, five times what it was worth in January. JPMorgan anchored it, and the reason says more about 2026 capital than AI hype does.

Robinhood Ventures Fund II opens for trading August 13 with a $200 million target and access to 80 Y Combinator-linked startups. No minimum to invest, but a hedge-fund-style profit cut applies.

Alphabet shares fell as much as 5% on August 5 after Demis Hassabis stepped down as Google DeepMind's CEO and Jeff Dean left to co-found a new AI startup, Discovery Loop.