Funding & Deals

The new NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Monitor dropped a stunning claim: the pending OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, together with SpaceX's listing, will generate more value than every US VC-backed exit since 2000 combined. SpaceX is already public at $1.77 trillion, and with both AI labs pushing toward trillion-dollar debuts, the trio should land north of $4 trillion - against roughly $70 billion in total US IPO proceeds last year. For anyone buying AI services, the labs' shift to public-market scrutiny will reshape pricing, transparency, and vendor stability.

TechCrunch mapped the AI startups whose revenue is not just growing but accelerating - led by Mercor, the sub-three-year-old AI training-data firm that crossed $2 billion in gross annualised revenue in June, just four months after hitting $1 billion (it was at a $500M run rate last September). The list spans AI-natives and 14-to-18-year-old incumbents alike: Gusto passed $1B in actual trailing revenue after five straight quarters of acceleration, and legal-software firm Clio ran $200M ARR to $500M after embedding AI. One honest caveat: everyone defines 'ARR' differently, so read the metrics before you envy them.

Microsoft eliminated about 4,800 roles (2.1% of its workforce) on July 6, hitting Xbox and commercial sales hardest - Xbox alone loses 3,200 people (roughly a fifth of the division) through FY27, with four gaming studios spun out. Chief people officer Amy Coleman insisted the roles are not being replaced by AI while conceding AI is changing how work gets done; the cuts land days after Microsoft launched its $2.5B, 6,000-engineer Frontier Company AI-deployment unit. The wider tally is sobering: close to 154,000 tech layoffs in the first half of 2026, as a ~$190B capex year squeezes everything that isn't AI.

Japanese pharma giant Takeda signed a strategic collaboration with Insilico Medicine worth up to US$600 million, gaining exclusive worldwide rights to drug candidates surfaced by Insilico's Pharma.AI platform - but only about $60 million is upfront and near-term, with the rest gated behind preclinical, clinical, commercial, and sales milestones plus tiered royalties. It caps a staggering run for Insilico: over US$7 billion in combined deal value signed this year alone (Lilly, SK Biopharmaceuticals, now Takeda), and its Hong Kong shares jumped 13.5% on the news. The deal structure, not the headline number, is the real lesson for anyone buying or selling AI capability.

Sam Altman has proposed donating 5% of OpenAI's equity - roughly $42.6 billion at its $852B valuation - to a US sovereign wealth fund, with the expectation that other AI companies (Anthropic, Google, Meta are named in reporting) would contribute matching stakes, per the Financial Times. The fund would be modelled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, distributing returns to citizens; the FT frames the donation as securing good relations with the administration and defusing political blowback, and any formal version likely needs congressional approval. The alternative on the table is far harsher: Senator Sanders' bill demanding a one-time 50% stock tax on systemically important AI firms.

Microsoft launched Microsoft Frontier Company, a new operating business backed by US$2.5 billion and 6,000 industry and engineering experts, dedicated to delivering successful enterprise AI deployments on Microsoft's stack - with the London Stock Exchange Group, Unilever, Land O'Lakes, and Accenture as early partners. It landed just two days after AWS committed $1 billion to its own forward-deployed engineering org, and follows OpenAI's and Anthropic's private-equity-backed enterprise-services ventures. The message is unmistakable: the vendors have concluded that models don't fail in the lab, they fail in deployment - and they're monetising the fix.

Meta confirmed it will sell its excess AI computing capacity to outside customers - a cloud push first reported by Bloomberg that sent the stock up ~9% - while it debates offering raw compute versus access to models hosted on its infrastructure. The move reframes Meta's $125-145 billion 2026 capex from a bottomless cost into a revenue-bearing asset, and follows SpaceX, which already sells spare capacity under deals reportedly worth $1.25B/month from Anthropic and $920M/month from Google. The subtext, confirmed a day later by Zuckerberg's own town-hall remarks: Meta's internal AI isn't consuming everything it built.

UK self-driving startup Wayve is letting employees sell vested shares in an $85 million tender offer at its $8.5 billion valuation - the mark set by February's $1.2B Series D (Eclipse, Balderton, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Ontario Teachers', and Baillie Gifford participating). It's Wayve's second employee liquidity event after one alongside its 2024 Series C, and part of a widening pattern: Decagon, ElevenLabs, Linear, and Clay (twice in nine months) have all run tenders as retention tools while IPOs stay distant. Reporting adds that Wayve filed for a closed auction on the London Stock Exchange's new private market - a second liquidity valve.

Microsoft has quietly become the main supplier of OpenAI's GPT models in China, selling them through Azure to the country's biggest internet firms even though OpenAI and Anthropic both refuse to sell there directly on IP and misuse grounds. Per Bloomberg, ByteDance is Microsoft's largest AI customer and is on track to spend over US$1 billion a year. A unique OpenAI contract lets Microsoft set its own overseas terms - and it's simultaneously testing a Chinese DeepSeek model for Western customers, taking margin on both sides of the trade.

Corporate spend-management platform Ramp raised a US$750m primary round led by ICONIQ, GIC, and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, valuing it at US$44bn. The company is positioning itself as the infrastructure for a new category of corporate cost - AI token spend - alongside its existing card and procurement tools. It now tops US$1bn in annualized revenue with positive free cash flow and 70,000+ customers.

New York startup Jedify raised a $24M Series A led by Norwest (with S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, Oceans Ventures, and strategic investor Snowflake) to build "context graphs" that give AI agents a map of a company's data, permissions, and domain knowledge. The pitch: agents need to know how a business defines revenue or who can see which file before they can work reliably. The round brings total funding to about $33M.