E238: Thinking Machines eyes $60B valuation; Cursor locks $29.3B valuation; Blue Origin lands first rocket booster; Raises from Clio, Skims, Scribe, WisdomAI, Wonderful

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for November 14, 2025. Thinking Machine Labs, founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Mirati, is in early discussions to raise funding and evaluation of around$50 billion pre-money. It's potentially reaching$55 to$60 billion post-money, which would more than quadruple its July valuation of$12 billion and position it among the most valuable private companies shortly after its February launch. launch. The startup focuses on building AI models and products to enhance human AI collaboration in various fields, having raised$2 billion in seed funding earlier and released its first product, Tinker, for customizing large language models, which has received positive feedback from universities like Princeton and Stanford, as well as paying business customers.

0:52Murati has assembled a team of former OpenAI talents like co-founder John Schulman and VP Barrett Zoff. Cursor, an AI coding tool startup launched in 2022, has raised$2.3 billion in funding at a$29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly tripling its value from a June 2025 round and marking its third round this year with investors including Excel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Code2, NVIDIA, and Google. The tool assists software developers in generating, editing, and reviewing code, achieving over$1 billion in annualized revenue and growing to more than 300 employees since its 2023 launch.

1:34Praised by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang as his favorite enterprise AI service and claiming to generate more code than most large language models. Founded by four MIT graduates in their 20s, Michael Chul, Sula Asif, Amon Sangar, and Arvid Lunamark. Cursor emphasizes low hype and high pragmatism, offering flexibility with multiple AI models while facing competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cognition. And rebuffed acquisition interests launched its own model, Composer, to reduce third-party dependency and plans to use funds for research and growth without immediate IPO plans. finance. Canadian software company Clio has secured a$500 million Series G funding round led by new enterprise associates with participation from existing investors like Goldman Sachs Asset Management, TCV, Sixth Street Growth, and JMI Equity, valuing the firm at$5 billion and making it one of Canada's most valuable tech startups alongside Hopper, Cohere, and Wealthsimple.

2:36Based in Vancouver, Clio provides tools for lawyers to automate practice management tasks such as client intake, accounting, and document management. This follows a 2024 round value in at$3 billion with a$900 million raised and coincides with its billion-dollar acquisition of Vilex to enhance AI capabilities, where Oakley Capital took Clio stock as part of the deal. Skims, the shapewear and apparel brand founded by Kim Kardashian and Jens Greedy in 2019, has raised$225 million in funding led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives with participation from BDT and MSD Partners funds, valuing at$5 billion.

3:18That's up from$4 billion in 2023 and approaching$1 billion in annual net sales. The company plans to use the capital for brick-and-mortar expansion, international growth, product innovation, and category diversification, aiming to become predominantly physical with 18 U.S. stores, one in Mexico and more overseas by 2026, while delaying a potential IPO. Known for inclusive sizing and minimalist aesthetics and high-profile campaigns, Skims has partnered with Nike for activewear and consolidated with Kim Kardashian's SKKN Beauty brand under Koti. This raise aligns with trends in celebrity-backed ventures like Elf Beauty acquiring Road and investors bet on founders' marketing power.

4:06Scribe, a five-year-old startup that automates workflow documentation for enterprises, has raised$75 million in an all-equity series C round led by Stepstone with participation from existing investors like Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global, Mirondo Ventures, and New York Life Ventures at a$1.3 billion post-money valuation. That's five times its previous round, despite not fully utilizing prior funds. Founded by Jennifer Smith and Aaron Polanyi, Scribe's flagship capture tool generates step-by-step guides with text and screenshots via browser extensions and apps, saving users 35 to 42 hours monthly and accelerating onboarding by 40%, while the new optimized platform maps enterprise workflows to identify automation and AI opportunities, addressing inefficiencies in traditional methods.

4:56With over 10 million workflows documented across 40 ,000 apps, 5 million users, and presence in 94 % of the Fortune 500 companies and 78 ,000 paid organizations, including New York Life and T-Mobile, Scribe has doubled revenue yearly and plans to double its 120 employee headcount and competes against manual processes rather than direct rivals, with strong growth in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe. Wisdom AI and AI data analytics startup founded by Rubrik co-founder Shom Mazumdar, I brutalized that name, has raised$50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from InVentures, that's NVIDIA's VC arm, following a$23 million seed from Kotu six months prior.

5:44The platform enables natural language queries on structured and unstructured and dirty data without hallucinations by using LLMs only to generate queries for data warehouses supported by an enterprise context layer, drawing from founders' rubric experience. Since late 2024, Wisdom AI has grown from 2 to 40 enterprise customers like Descope, ConicalPhillips, Cisco, and Patreon with rapid usage expansion and added agentic features for real-time alerts on monitored metrics, transforming static reports into dynamic proactive analytics. Israeli AI agent startup Wonderful has raised$100 million in a Series A led by Index Ventures with participation of Insight Ventures, IVP, Bessemer, and Vine Ventures, bringing total funding to$134 million just four months after emerging from stealth with a seed round.

6:37Focused on deploying customer-facing AI agents for voice, chat, and email across markets and languages, wonderful tailors its platform to local norms, regulations, and teams, achieving rapid growth with tens of thousands of daily requests at an 80 ,000 % resolve rate and expansions into countries like Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Greece, Poland, Romania, the Baltics, the Adriatics, and UAE, with plans for Germany, Austria, Nordics, and Portugal in 2025, and Asia Pacific in 2026. The company aims to extend beyond customer support to areas like employee training, sales, compliance, IT support, and onboarding positioning itself as infrastructure for scalable multi-agent systems in a crowded market with investors highlighting its quick global scaling and cultural fluency.

7:29Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket on its second attempt, achieving first booster landing for an orbital class rocket outside of SpaceX, deploying NASA's Escapade Michigan twin spacecraft Blue and Gold to study Mars magnetic fields and plasma interactions, along with the VASAC communications demo. The 321-foot heavy rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, after minor countdown delays, separated its reusable booster, Never Tell Me the Odds, which landed precisely on the floating platform, Jacqueline, in the Atlantic Ocean, marking a milestone for reusability and cost reduction.

8:09This operational debut following a January test flight where the booster crashed positions Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX's near monopoly in medium and heavy lift launches, supporting ambitions like Amazon's LEO satellite constellation, a robotic moon lander and potential Mars precedents while creating flexible trajectory for the future interplanetary missions and highlighting Rocket Lab's first deep space involvement. Anthropic has announced a$50 billion investment in U.S. computing infrastructure, partnering with UK-based FluidStack to build custom data centers in Texas and New York, with more sites planned set to come online throughout 2026 and creating 800 permanent and 2 ,400 construction jobs while aligning with Trump administration's AI action plan for American leadership.

9:01These facilities focused on efficiency for Anthropic's workloads, support frontier research and development of capable AI systems like Claude, which serves over 300 ,000 business customers with large accounts growing sevenfold yearly. As a safety conscious rival to OpenAI, Anthropic emphasizes cost-effective scaling amid industry-wide massive investments with FluidStack providing agile gigawatt scale power. This marks Anthropic's first major direct data center build out beyond cloud partnerships with Amazon and Google amid concerns over AI spending bubbles. Anthropic has a$228 billion secondary market valuation.

9:41It's up 25 % versus its August 2025 round. Anthropic is also expanding its European presence by opening up new offices in Paris and Munich, its first in France and Germany, increasing its EMEA hubs to five alongside existing ones in London, Dublin, and Zurich, established late last year. This move responds to surging demand for its cloud chatbot in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Now its fastest growing region with large business accounts, over$100 ,000 in revenue each, multiplying more than tenfold yearly. To support growth, Anthropik has tripled its EMEA staff. Appointed leaders like Thomas Remy for EMEA South, which is covering France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and the Middle East, and PIP White for EMEA North, which is the UK, Ireland, Nordics, and Israel, and plans a new head for Central and Eastern Europe.

10:36The expansion aims to foster safety, reliability, and trust amid competition from OpenAI's aggressive European push. OpenAI has urged the Trump administration to expand the CHIPS Act 35 % Advanced Manufacturing investment credit to include AI data center servers and grid components like transformers and specialized steel, aiming to lower capital costs, de-risk investments, and accelerate US AI infrastructure amid$1.4 trillion commitments for data centers and chips. And a letter from Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehan to White House OSTP Director Michael Castios. The company also advocates for government grants, cost sharing loans or guarantees to manufacturers to counter Chinese market distortions in materials like copper, aluminum, and to shorten lead times for grid components.

11:31This aligns with OpenAI's infrastructure policy white paper supporting loan guarantees for U.S. chip purchases, although executives like CFO Sarah Fryer and CEO Sam Altman clarified that they seek no direct bailouts or backstops for OpenAI, emphasizing broad industry support for domestic supply chains projections. So OpenAI reached over$20 billion in annualized revenue by 2025 and growing to hundreds of billions by 2030. OpenAI has a$616 billion secondary market valuation. It's up 23 % versus August 2025 round. I should note that we got to bake in the nonprofit to for-profit dilution there. So that's all trickling out in the next couple of weeks.

12:15Cerebus Systems has partnered with Guana's government on a multibillion dollar deal to build the region's first hundred megawatt data center in Wales, operational by early 2027, sharing revenue and breaking ground in Q4 next year as part of Cerebus for Nations program to help countries develop supercomputers and AI models. The initiative drawing from collaborations with the US, UK, and UAE agencies, including building US-based supercomputers for UAE researchers and an advanced Arabic model aiming for deep partnerships in infrastructure and model development with early talks in countries like India, France, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore, and Tajistan.

12:59Powered by affordable, sustainable energy from a local plant, the Gawanna Project supports serving nearby nations. Cerebus, a NVIDIA rival valued at$8.1 billion after a$1.1 billion round and withdrawing IPO plans, joins efforts like NVIDIA's sovereign AI sales and OpenAI for countries to boost global AI capabilities. Sweet Security, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup founded by former Israeli army CISO Dor Kashti, retired Colonel EAL Fisher from the unit 8200 and Oriel Ben Aisha, which was raised$75 million in Series B, led by Evolution Equity Partners with Munich Re Ventures, Gilead Capital Partners, and KeyOne Capital, bringing total funding to$120 million since inception, including$15 million for secondary deals.

13:54Inspired by Cachedy's experience overseeing the IDF's cloud migration under Project Nimbus, the company offers a cloud-native application protection platform using a proprietary LLM to detect anomalies, provide visibility into attacks, configurations, vulnerabilities, and identities, plus API security and runtime analytics, expanding to secure AI models and agents via its AI security platform, which identifies shadow AI and risks, suite serves Fortune 1000 enterprises and plans US market growth and aims to triple salespeople while doubling overall headcount to 170 by next year and capitalizing Israel's resilient cybersecurity sector amid broader tech funding challenges.

14:41World Labs founded by AI pioneer Feifei Li has launched its first commercial world model product, marble available in freemium and paid tiers. It's$20 to$95 per month, enabling users to generate editable, downloadable 3D environments from text, photos, videos, 3D layouts, or panoramas with features like multi-input support, screen expansion, composer mode for combining worlds, and chisel, a hybrid editor decoupling structure from style for precise control, Differentiating from competitors like Descartes, Odyssey, and Google's Genie by creating persistent exportable worlds rather than on-the-fly generations, Marvel reduces inconsistencies and supports VR capability with Vision Pro and Quest 3 aimed at gaming, VFX, VR content, and potential robotic simulations.

15:38Marvel presents a step forward spatial intelligence per Lee's vision to enable machines to understand 3D interactions for breakthroughs in science and medicine following the startup's$230 million funding and beta previews. 11 Labs, a popular AI unicorn backed by A16Z and Iconic, has signed deals with actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey to generate AI versions of their voices with McConaughey, an investor, using it to translate his newsletter into Spanish amid Hollywood's evolving relationship with AI post strikes. The company also launched a marketplace for brands to access authorized AI generated celebrity voices, including Kane, Liza Minnelli and Dr.

16:22Maya Angelou, expanding on similar initiatives like Mattis Voice Assistance featuring Kristen Bell and Judy Dench. Eleven Labs has a$7.6 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 15.7 % versus that September 2025 round. OK, that's it for me this week. Thanks and see you guys next week.