E242: OpenAI raise at $830b; Anthropic raise at $350b; xAI raise at $230b; Databricks raise at $134b; + more

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for January 9, 2026. XAI completed a$20 billion funding round, surpassing a previously reported$15 billion target. The financing values the artificial intelligence company in$230 billion valuation, placing among the most valuable private AI firms globally. Investors include NVIDIA and Cisco Investments as strategic participants alongside Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, Abu Dhabi-backed MGX, and Barron Capital. NVIDIA and Cisco already work with XAI's vendors and infrastructure partners.

0:42XAI said that the capital will fund accelerated infrastructure expansion, large-scale GPU deployment, and continued development of its Grok models, which now reach approximately 600 million monthly active users across X and Grok combined. The company highlighted that it ended 2025 with over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents deployed across Colossus 1 and 2 data centers, describing them as the largest AI supercomputers in the world. XAI also disclosed that Grok 5 is currently in training and positioned the financing as critical to reaching billions of users while advancing long-term research goals.

1:21Some news on XAI's financials. Internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg show that XAI is consuming capital at an accelerating pace. The company reported a $1.46 billion net loss in September quarter, up from a billion dollar in the first quarter, a billion dollar loss in the first quarter. Over the first nine months of the year, XAI spent$7.8 billion in cash driven by data center construction, compute purchases, and aggressive hiring. Revenue nearly doubled quarter over quarter to$107 million for the three months ended September 30, 2025, while gross profit increased from sharply from$63 million up to$14 million in the private quarter.

2:01Despite this improvement, EBITDA losses widened to$2.4 billion from January to September of 2025. That's a nine-month period, exceeding its previously projected$2.2 billion, a full year loss in 2025. xai told investors it was targeting 500 million in 2025 annual revenue though reported sales totaled just over 200 million from january september of 2025 stock-based compensation reached roughly 160 million from jan to september reflecting continued expansion for ai talent xai now has raised at least 40 billion in equity including the latest 20 billion round yet continues to burn close to a billion per month, suggesting new capital may fund less than two years of operations at the current pace.

2:50XAI is positioning Grok as an enterprise AI platform through its Grok Business and Grok Enterprise offerings. The company said Grok Business supports small and mid-sized teams via a self-serve model, while Grok Enterprise adds features such as custom single sign-on, SCIM, directory sync, and advanced auto controls. XAI emphasized privacy guarantees, stating customer data is not used for training and remains isolated with enterprise-grade encryption in transit and at rest. The Enterprise Vault tier adds customer-managed encryption keys, a dedicated data plane, and application-level encryption. Grok integrates directly with enterprise tools, beginning with Google Drive, where XAI said it enforces permission awareness and provides document level citations with highlighted source text.

3:40XAI also described agentic search capabilities through its collections API, positioning Grok as suitable for legal analysis, financial modeling, and large document repositories. Management framed the product as a unified platform with centralized billing, real-time usage monitoring, administrative controls designed to scale from small teams to global enterprise. Anthropic has signed a term sheet for a$10 billion funding round at a$350 billion valuation, nearly doubling its valuation from$183 billion just four months earlier. The round is being led by Code 2 and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, with discussions expected to close in the coming weeks.

4:21Financing follows a period of aggressive capital formation across the sector, AI sector, excuse me, with PitchBook reporting that the AI startups raised a record of$222 billion in 2025. That's more than 2x the 2024 levels. Anthropic has secured strategic capital commitments with Microsoft and NVIDIA announcing plans to invest up to$5 billion and$10 billion, up to$10 billion, respectively. As part of those relationships, Anthropic said it would purchase$30 billion of compute capacity for Microsoft Azure running on NVIDIA systems. The company released three new models late last year and told investors it expects to reach break even in 2028 earlier than some peers.

5:02Anthropic is widely expected to pursue an IPO in 2026. OpenAI is in discussions to raise up to$100 billion in new capital at a post-money valuation of$830 billion. The round will dilute existing shareholders by 12%. The company aims to complete the financing by the end of the first quarter, first calendar quarter, excuse me, with sovereign wealth funds expected to play a significant role. The fundraise would significantly expand OpenAI's already sizable balance sheet, which analysts estimate holds more than$64 billion in cash. The company was last valued at roughly$500 billion in a secondary transaction.

5:38OpenAI is seeking capital as it commits to massive long-term spending on compute, inferencing, and global infrastructure, with reports suggesting its annualized revenue run rate is approximately $20 billion. OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Health, marking its most significant expansion in healthcare to date. The company said more than 200 million users already ask ChatGPT Health and wellness questions every week. ChatGPT Health will allow users to annualize medical test results, prepare for doctor's visits, and receive guidance on diet and fitness. while explicitly avoiding diagnosis. OpenAI said it consulted more than 260 physicians over two years to refine the product and will silo health conversations away from standard chats to enhance privacy.

6:25The feature integrates with electronic medical records and wellness platforms, including Apple Health, Function, MyFitnessPal, and OpenAI stated that the health data will not be used to train models. Access will initially roll out via a wait list with broader availability planned in the coming weeks. OpenAI has established a$50 billion employee stock grant pool to equal 10 % of the company based on a October valuation of$500 billion. According to people familiar with the plans, the pool is expected to last roughly five years and follows a surge in equity awards for the OpenAI having already distributed approximately$80 billion in invested equity.

7:07Employees sold about$10 billion worth of shares last year, an unusually large liquidity event for a private company, following a restructuring and converted profit-sharing units into common stock. Employee equity now represents about 26 % of the company. OpenAI projects stock compensation of roughly$10 billion this year,$13 billion next year, ramping into nearly$21 billion by 2030, with an additional$20 billion in projected equity costs through 2030 versus prior forecasts. Head count has expanded from roughly 800 employees to about 4 ,000, underscoring the scale of the talent arms race. Lambda AI-focused cloud provider is seeking to raise at least$350 million in a pre-IPO financing as it prepares for a public listing in the second half of the year.

7:56Mutabala Capital is in talks to lead the round, which is structured as a convertible note, priced at a 20 % discount to the expected IPO valuation. The structure includes penalties if Lambda fails to go public within one year, including additional equity or interest payments. Lambda generated more than$520 million in revenue between October 2024 and September 2025, with third quarter sales up 80 % year over year while posting losses of about$175 million. NVIDIA agreed to rent 10 ,000 of its own AI chips from Lambda for$1.3 billion over four years, plus a separate$200 million deal covering 8 ,000 additional chips.

8:35Lambda has a$9.9 billion secondary market valuation. It's up 61.3 % versus its September 2025 round. Databricks, the AI-focused data management and agent platform, raised more than$4 billion in a Series L round, valuing the company at$134 billion, a 34 % increase from its$100 billion valuation just three months earlier. The round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Asset Management, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, and Blackstone. Databricks reported a revenue run rate of$4.8 billion. That's up 55 % year over year, with over$1 billion attributed to AI-driven products.

9:13The company plans to add thousands of new employees globally and expand AI Research Lab, which currently employs around 100 researchers. Databricks said part of the funding will facilitate employee secondary sales, highlighting continued investor demand for late-stage private liquidity. Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock launched a new AI lab, Hark, funded with$100 million of his personal capital. Hark's first GPU cluster went live this week. Though capacity details were not disclosed, Adcock will remain CEO of Figure, the humanoid robotics company, which has raised nearly$2 billion and was last valued at$39 billion while also leading Hark.

9:53The move follows broader trend of senior AI executives launching parallel research labs while remaining at existing companies, even as established AI firms generate billions in revenue. Lovable, the AI no-code app website solution, raised$330 million in a Series B round at a$6.6 billion valuation led by Capital G and Menlo Ventures with participation from Coastal Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Databricks Ventures. The raise follows a$200 million Series A completed just five months earlier when the company was valued at$1.8 billion, representing a valuation of increase of more than 3.5x. Lovable said it reached$100 million ARR in eight months after launch and surpassed$200 million ARR four months later.

10:43the platform claims 100 ,000 new projects are created daily with 25 million projects built in the first year and counts major enterprise customers, including Klarna, Uber, and Zendesk. Open Evidence, the AI large language model for doctors, is raising$250 million at a$12 billion valuation, doubling its valuation financing completed just two months ago. The company generates roughly 150 million in annualized advertising revenue equivalent to more than 12 million per month that's a 3x increase since august open evidence told investors it is monetizing only 10 of its ad inventory implying potential annualized revenue exceeding a billion dollars at full utilization for what it's worth that would be a 12x multiple if they did realize that full like full 1 billion so uh perhaps low but uh seems pretty full to me for this type of a business Gross margins exceed 90%, placing the company among the most profitable AI application businesses.

11:45An off-call survey of 1 ,000 U.S. physicians found 45 % use open evidence, compared with 16 % using ChatGPT and 5 % using AdBridge. The chatbot answers roughly 20 million physician questions per month in the U.S. Waymo the autonomous vehicle company is in early talks to raise several billion dollars potentially up to 15 billion at a valuation between 100 billion and 110 billion. Waymo's annualized revenues expressed 350 million though the business remains heavily loss making. The company reported 14 million rides completed this year and expects to reach 1 million rides per week late 2026. Waymo last raised$5.6 billion at a$45 billion valuation in October 2024, with Alphabet committing$5 billion as part of a multi-year investment.

12:37Recent disclosures cited approximately 450 ,000 weekly paid rides, with total lifetime trips expected to exceed$20 million by year-end. rain raised 250 million at a 1.9 uh 1.95 billion excuse me valuation in a round led by iconic burning total fundraising to more than 338 million rain issues stable coin length cards on the visa network that operate in over 150 countries enabling spending and atm withdrawals the company plans to expand across north and south america europe asia and africa and is working to connect to additional payment rails, including ACH in the U.S. and CEPA in Europe. Management said that the capital will also support regulatory engagement as global stablecoin frameworks take shape.

13:26ServiceNow agreed to acquire Armis, a cybersecurity company, for$7.75 billion in cash, a significant premium to the$6.1 billion valuation established in a$435 million pre-IPO round completed last month. Armus reported$340 million in annual recurring revenue, growing at more than 50 % year-over-year. The company raised$1.45 billion in venture capital prior to the deal. The acquisition follows ServiceNow's purchase of MoveWorks for$2.85 billion and VEZA for a billion, underscoring aggressive cybersecurity expansion strategy. Cursor acquired Graphite. It's an AI-powered no code or AI powered, excuse me, code review startup.

14:10The acquisition price was reportedly way over Graphite's last valuation of$290 million. The valuation was set earlier this year in a$52 million Series B. The deal enhanced Cursor's software development stack by pairing AI code generation with Graphite's AI-driven debugging and stacked pull request workflows. Cursor's last primary round valued the company at$29 billion in November and has completed multiple acquisitions, including growth by design and aqua hire of Koala at$129 million post-money valuation. Cursor, which the parent company's Inisphere, has a$38.5 billion secondary market valuation.

14:51That's up 26.8 % versus that November 2025 round. Plaud, the AI-powered voice recording hardware company, launched the$179 NotePin S and a new desktop app ahead of the CES 2026, expanding its AI note-taking lineup. The NotePin S includes$64 billion of storage, 20 hours of recording, and two means microphones with a 9.8-foot range, the 300 minutes of free monthly transcription. Plot said it sold more than 1.5 million devices with over 50 % of its customers converting to paid subscriptions. The Plod Note Pro measures just 0.12 inches thick and weighs 30 grams, includes four men's microphones, and supports up to 30 hours of continuous recording and offers 60 days of standby.

15:43The company said the device charges in two hours and targets professionals who rely heavily on in-person meetings. Mobileye is acquiring Minty Robotics. It's a humanoid robotics company for$900 million paying$612 million in cash, plus up to$26.2 million in shares, with closing expected in Q1 2026. Menti was founded in 2022 and has raised over$50 million and employs fewer than 100 people. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that humanoid robotics markets for car assembly could reach $5 billion by 2035, though current robotics operate at roughly 50 % of human efficiency and It costs about$150 ,000 a year, implying a 10-year ROI.

16:27Mobileye cited an automated revenue pipeline of$24.5 billion over the next eight years, up more than 40 % from January 2023, and said Menti will remain independent for at least two years. LM Arena, the AR's large language model evaluation company, raised$150 million in a Series A at a$1.7 billion post-money valuation, seven months after a$100 million seed round at a$600 million valuation. Total capital raise now stands at$250 million. Element Arena reports over 5 million monthly users across 150 countries and approximately 60 million conversations per month fueling its AI model leaderboards. Its enterprise AI evaluations product launched in September, has reached an annualized consumption rate of$30 million by December, less than four months after launch.

17:22Swap Commerce raised$100 million just six months after closing a$40 million Series B with DST Global and Iconic participating. Founded in 2022, Swap provides an AI-powered platform for global storefronts, inventory, cross-border payments, and returns with a focus on luxury brands. The company declined to disclose valuation, but the rapid back-to-back financings from top-tier investors, signaling a signal accelerating adoption amid competition with Shopify. Discord confidentially filed for an IPO and is working with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. According to people familiar with the matter, the platform has more than 200 million monthly users and was valued at approximately$15 billion in the 2021 funding round.

18:05Secondary market trades imply a valuation between$7 and$8 billion, while analyst site and IPO valuation range from$5 to$6 billion. Discord employs a freemium model anchored by its Nitro subscription and said about 15 % of staff focus on trust and safety initiatives. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the nuclear power company, is working with NVIDIA and Siemens to build a digital twin of its fusion reactor, aiming to compress years of experimentation into weeks. The company said installed one of 19 high-strength magnets required for its fusion machine, with the remaining 18 expected to be completed by this summer.

18:47CFS is targeting commercial fusion power in the 2030s and has secured a power purchase agreement with Google. The U.S. Energy Department recently awarded$2.7 billion to nuclear fuel suppliers, and President Trump has called for 4x growth in nuclear generation over the next 25 years, reinforcing political and industrial support for nuclear technologies. Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks and see you guys next week.