E243: Cerebras 2.8x valuation to $23B + strikes $10B deal with OpenAI; Skild $14B round; 1X new humanoid robot AI-model; Anthropic drops “Cowork”

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for January 16, 2026. Cerebus Systems is an AI chip and systems company that builds purpose-built hardware for training and inference and sells both systems and remote compute services. Those are AI chips. The company's AI chips emphasizes low latency by combining large compute memory and bandwidth on one chip to reduce bottlenecks. It's a big chip physically. It is in talks to raise a billion dollars at a$23 billion post-money valuation as it prepares to go public later this year. The valuation would be a step up from the$8.1 billion in September of 2025 where it raised$1.1 billion.

0:45Revenue concentration has been a key overhang with most revenue tied to one customer of Group 42 Holdings, which hired Cerebris to build three supercomputers. Cerebrus and OpenAI signed a multi-year agreement where OpenAI buys up to 750 megawatts of capacity from Cerebrus with deployment launched in multiple tranches throughout 2028. This is a$10 billion deal, so a huge win for Cerebrus. The companies have said recent work supporting OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120 billion model ran 15 times faster than conventional hardware positioning service as a supplier aimed at making real-time responses more practical at scale.

1:28So skilled AI builds foundation models and general purpose software designed to act like a reusable robotic brain. So robots can adapt across tasks without being retrained from scratch each time. The company raised$1.4 billion in a Series C that values it at more than$14 billion and more than 3x. It's roughly$4.5 billion valuation about seven months earlier. The round was led by SoftBank with participation from NVIDIA, Macquarie, 1789 Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, plus repeat support from major venture backers. Skilled said its software can run on standard GPUs, and it trains on large libraries of human videos and simulations using real-world actions and mistakes as a feedback loop.

2:14The company said it went from zero to tens of millions of dollars in revenue over a few months in 2025 and is working with more than eight clients. Temporal builds developer tooling that helps companies orchestrate and run cloud applications by coordinating many services, which can be useful for complex AI agent workflows that need durable execution and reliable handoffs. Temporal is in advanced talks to raise at a$5 billion valuation, about 2x its value from a secondary financing just three months earlier at$2.5 billion. It raised$146 million last year at a$1.72 billion valuation, and it surpassed$100 million in annual recurring revenue last year.

2:57Andreessen Horowitz is in discussions to lead the round. Parloa is a customer service AI company building agent style systems that answer calls and handle enterprise support workflows with a focus on moving beyond simple call pickup towards a more contextual interactions across channels. The Berlin based startup raised$350 million in a Series D funding at a$3 billion valuation just eight months after raising$120 million at a billion valuation. Parloa disclosed more than$50 million in ARR and is competing in a market that Gardner estimates includes 17 million contact center agents globally. Rivals include Sierra, which raised$350 million at a$10 billion post-money valuation, and Poly AI, which raised$86 million at a$750 million valuation last month, and is rumored to have exited 2025 at$40 million in ARR.

3:54Parloa said it will invest in new capital into a multi-model contextual experience so agents can recognize a customer's identity and needs across app, web, and phone. Hicksfield is an AI video generation and editing platform that targets creators and social media teams, and it is positioning itself as a workflow tool for professional marketers rather than casual content creation alone. The company sold an additional$80 million of stock in an extension to its prior$50 million Series A, bringing the Series A total to$130 million and pushing valuation to$1.3 billion. Five months after launch, it reported 11 million users, and at nine months, it reported more than 15 million users.

4:38Pickfield says it's on a$200 million annual revenue run rate, up from$100 million trajectory in about two months. Founder Alex Masharab, previously led generative AI at Snap and after Snap acquired his prior startup AI factory in 2020 for$166 million. Torque sells an autonomous cybersecurity operations platform built around AI agents that can triage large volumes of security alerts and automate repetitive remediation steps. so security teams can focus on higher risk investigations. The Tel Aviv-based company closed$140 million round. That values it at$1.2 billion. Torque has more than 300 employees across Israel and the U.S.

5:29And it said it began building agent-based functionality after a generative AI surge, introducing an AI agent for security operations in summer of 2023. The founders previously built Illuminate Security in 2017 and sold it to Symantec for$250 million in less than two years. Etch is an AI chip startup building in a processor called Sohu to compete in AI accelerators, and it is working with TSMC's emerging businesses group on manufacturing while hiring semiconductor veterans from firms like Cypress and Broadcom. The company raised about$500 million in a round that valued it at$5 billion, led by Stripes with participation from Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, and Rivet Capital.

6:11Etch now has raised almost a billion dollars in total funding, underscoring continued investor appetite and specialized silicon as demand for AI compute rises. Harmattan AI is a defense technology company that builds autonomous and mission system software for aircraft and drones and is positioning its product as an embedded AI that is both sovereign and scalable for defense customers. Founded in 2024, is now valued at$1.4 billion after raising a$200 million Series B led by Dassault Aviation, the Raphael fighter jet maker. The company said the new round comes on top of$42 million it raised to date and plans to scale manufacturing for platforms spanning drone interception, electronic warfare, and ISR.

6:55Our matin disclosed it won a multimillion-US-dollar contract in July from NATO government about one year after founding, and it will exhibit at the World Defense Show in Riyadh next month as it expands its US team. X and A and XAI subsidiary is moving towards a more transparent and more AI driven recommendation stack with Elon Musk saying that the platform will open source its algorithm in seven days, including the code that selects recommended posts and ads. Musk said updates will repeat every four weeks with developer notes after earlier stating a goal of publishing changes about every two weeks.

7:38X has been integrated with XAI's Grok AI large language model into the feed ranking process. And Musk wrote that the company aimed to have more than 100 million daily posts evaluated by Grok to surface what users are most likely want to see. Anthropoc, the AI large language model business, is pushing Claude deeper into healthcare by shipping a HIPAA compliant offering that supports protected health data and adds scientific data integrations for clinical and biological research. The company said Banner Health has more than 22 ,000 clinical providers using Claude, an 85 % report working faster, excuse me, with higher accuracy, highlighting earlier usage at scale inside a large nonprofit system.

8:24Anthropic is also enabling customers to export health data from Apple Health and Function Health to help consolidate records for provider conversations. It said medical outputs are grounded with citations from sources such as PubMed and the MPI registry, and it said it will not train models on healthcare user data. Anthropic is currently raising a primary round at a$350 billion valuation. Cowork is Anthropic's attempt to make agent-style workflows more accessible by letting users point Claude Desktop at a specific folder that Claude can read or modify through chat, creating a sandbox file boundary without command line setup.

9:09The tool is in research preview and is available to Mac subscribers with a waitlist for other plans. Cowork is built on the Claude Agent SDK, and Anthropic warns about the risks like prompt injection or unintended deletions if instructions are vague. It builds on momentum from Claude Code, which launched as a command tool in November of 2024 and followed a web interface followed by web interface in October and a Slack integration two months later. Merge Labs is a brain-computer interface startup positioning itself as a research lab aimed at connecting biological and artificial intelligence with high bandwidth links with an initial focus on medical products rather than consumer augmentation.

9:52It raised$252 million in a seed round led by Bain Capital with OpenAI as the largest investor. Merge did not disclose valuation, though separate reporting cited $850 million valuation for an approximately$250 million seed round. The company says it is pursuing a non-invasive approach that relies on molecules and modalities like ultrasound rather than implanted electrodes, and it has fewer than 50 employees with plans to hire more. Torch is an AI healthcare app building a unified medical memory that pulls together patient data across health systems and wellness apps, addressing a core friction point in consumer health where records are siloed across vendors and formats.

10:35OpenAI agreed to acquire Torch for about$100 million in equity, including about$60 million up front and the remainder as retention equity. Torch has four employees and all four plan to join OpenAI, including CEO Ilya Abizov, who previously co-founded Forward, which shut down in late 2024. The acquisition follows OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT Health and positions OpenAI to deep its ability to reconcile conflicting data sources such as fitness trackers versus clinical records. One X develops humanoid robots and is aiming to push NEO, its latest humanoid robot model, towards generalization in the home by pairing a human-like factor with a world model that can translate prompts and video into new behaviors.

11:20The company availed One X world model. It's a physics-based model that uses internet-scale video plus prompts so NIO can attempt tasks it has not been explicitly trained on. Pre-orders opened in October with plans to ship in 2026, and the company said pre-orders exceeded expectations without giving a number. The company clarified that the current learned skills remain basic, such as removing air fryer basket and putting toast in a toaster and giving a high five. but it frames this as first steps towards more complex actions. 1X has a$10 billion valuation after its latest primary round. 11Lab sells AI voice generation and voice agents products that can be grounded in a company's own knowledge base, making it useful for customer support and customer experiences automation at scale.

12:11The company crossed$330 million in ARR, and the CEO said the ramp accelerated sharply, taking 20 months to reach$100 million and 10 months to reach$200 million and five months to reach$330 million. The enterprises have deployed its voice agent technology to handle more than 50 ,000 calls per month, the company said. Eleven Labs raised$180 million in a Series C at a$3.3 billion valuation in January 2025, then raised another$100 million to buy employee shares at a valuation that doubled. 11 Labs is an$8.7 billion secondary market valuation. It's up 31.3 % versus its September 2025 primary round.

12:50Erebor is a branchless digital bank that is positioning itself as regulated infrastructure for crypto and frontier tech clients leaning into compliance rather than trying to route around oversight. The bank raised$350 million at a$4.35 billion valuation and is progressing through a staged regulatory process. After preliminary conditional approvals, the OCC granted preliminary conditional approval on October 15 and the FDIC approved deposit insurance in December, subject to conditions including at least$276 million in initial paid-in capital and a Tier 1 leverage ratio of at least 12 % for the first three years.

13:26Erebor plans to keep lending conservative, implying a low loan to deposit ratio, and it expects revenues to skew towards fees such as crypto transactions. The U.S. has 4 ,379 FDIC insured banks as of last year's third quarter. That's now 50 percent since 2025, which frames the bank's launch as a bet on a specialized niche rather than broad based lending scale. replit is a vibe coding platform that uses ai agents to let novices and developers write debug deploy and now publish software with minimal manual coding and it is pushing into mobile app creation as a concrete distribution channel it introduced mobile apps on replit which lets users generate ios apps from natural language prompts preview and test them and publish to app stores with stripe integration for monetization replit is in advanced talks to raised about$400 million at a roughly$9 billion valuation, including the new money after raising $250 million at a$3 billion valuation in September.

14:28Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks and see you guys next week.