E245: SpaceX Jun ’26 IPO; OpenAI Q4’26 IPO; Decagon $4.5B Val; Synthesia $4B Val; + more

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for January 30, 2026. Decagon AI, the AI agent customer service company, raised$250 million in a new round that triples its valuation of$4.5 billion, including the new capital. The round is set to be announced Wednesday and was led by KOTU Management and Index Ventures with participation from Chemistry VC, Definition Capital and Starboard Capital Group, plus existing investors in Dresen Horowitz, Excel and Bain Capital Ventures. Decagon said it added 100-plus corporate clients last year, including Avis Budget Group and Deutsche Telekom, using AI agents for tasks like order tracking, returns, and travel booking.

0:40CEO Jesse Zhang and co-founder Ashwin Cervinas said that customer support was the highest priority pain point they heard from companies, with firms saying that they could not hire fast enough. The company is positioning its agents as systems that require ongoing feedback and updates, and it highlighted a proactive workflow such as calling customers to rebook flights immediately after cancellations. Tesla disclosed that it agreed to invest$2 billion in XAI through a share purchase tied to XAI's$20 billion Series E round announced earlier this month and said that the investment was made on market terms consistent with other investors.

1:16XAI is Elon Musk's AI large language models business. Tesla said it entered into a framework agreement to evaluate potential AI collaboration and expects the deal to close in Q1 2026 subject to customary regulatory conditions. Tesla's shareholder materials reference Master Plan Part 4. They describe Tesla as focused on AI in the physical world, while XAI develops digital AI products such as Brock Model, which is also integrated into some Tesla vehicle infotainment systems. Tesla noted it already supplies Megapack batteries to power XAI data centers, and XAI has discussed AI for humanoid robots like Tesla's Optimist.

1:58XAI is a$230 billion secondary market valuation in line with its January 2026 primary round. Synthesia raised$200 million in a Series E at a$4 billion valuation to build interactive video training tools and including AI agent avatars that answer employee questions and support role play scenarios. The round was led by Google Ventures and included existing backers such as InVentures, which is NVIDIA, Excel, Kleiner Perkins, NEAP, SP Growth, and Airstream Capital, plus Hendo Sophia and Evantic. Synthesia said it signed Microsoft as a customer towards the end of 2025 and quadrupled contracts worth more than$100 ,000 over the past 12 months, putting it on track to reach$200 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

2:46The company said it crossed 100 million ARR in April of 2025 and has enterprise clients, including Bosch, Merck, and SAP, while offering a free tier capped at 10 minutes of video per month and paid subscriptions in enterprise packages. Synthesia structured an employee secondary sale facilitated with NASDAQ at the same$4 billion valuation designed to provide liquidity while the company remains private. The company has 500 plus team members, a 200 ,000 square foot headquartered in London and offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Munich, New York City and Zurich. Elon Musk is reportedly targeting a SpaceX IPO in June of 2026 with the Financial Times saying he wants timing that aligns with his birthday on June 28 and a rare alignment of Mercury, Venus and Jupiter in early June.

3:38The report said SpaceX is looking to raise at least$50 billion at a$1.5 trillion valuation, while noting that the figures could change. Capital will be used on Starship builds and aims to reach Mars. SpaceX's delayed first flight of its upgraded Starship V3 is now slated for mid-March. Starship V3 is larger and more powerful, designed to launch next-generation Starlink satellites that weigh more and are larger. V-3 is the first version meant to dock with other starships in Earth orbit to support lunar and Mars missions. SpaceX has been progressing towards a late 2025 launch, but in November, the booster stage exploded during gas system pressure testing and blew out an entire side of the steel rocket.

4:22So good luck to the SpaceX team on the March test flight. Gulf Air signed an agreement with SpaceX's Starlink, the company's satellite internet service division, to deploy onboard Wi-Fi starting on Airbus A320s in the middle of the year and then rolling out across its entire fleet with the service provided for free to passengers. Gulf Air operates about 40 jets, including Boeing 787 Dreamliners and Airbus A320s and A321 aircraft, and purchased 18 Dreamliners in July. SpaceX is delivering the fastest aviation internet speeds using roughly 8 ,000 satellites and lists signed deals with British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Deutsche Lufthansa, and major Middle East airlines, including Qatar Airlines, which began offering Starlink in 2024 and deals with Emirates and Fly Dubai that were announced in November.

5:19AI researcher Richard Soker is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a new startup called Recursive. That's with an E. With the financing discussions valuing the company at roughly four billion dollars, not including the new capital. GV and Graycroft are in discussions to lead the round. Talks are ongoing and terms may change. Recursive's stated goal is to build super intelligent AI that can improve itself over time without human feedback. The company has eight co-founders, including Soker, who led You.com, valued at most recently at$1.5 billion and co-founded AIX Ventures. Soker will continue, will keep his roles at AIX and You.com while building Recursive.

6:02Recursive has hired researchers from Google, OpenAI, and Meta, and that much of the capital is intended for more computing power. uh recursive intelligence that's with an i r-i-c uh raised a 300 million dollar series a at a four billion dollar valuation two months after launch the round was led by light speed the company is building an ai system design and automatically improve ai chips including creating its own silicon substrate layer and iterating chip improvements recursive has raised 355 million total after launching with a seed investment led by sequoia recursive was founded by former Google researchers, Anna Goldie as CEO and Alicia Mirosini, I think I butchered that name, as CTO.

6:48Their alpha chip reinforcement learning method has been used in four generations of Google TPU chips. Other investors included DST Global, InVentures, Felicius Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, and radical ventures. C3.ai is in talks to merge with privately held Automation Anywhere, a deal that would effectively take Automation Anywhere public through a combination of which Automation Anywhere would buy C3.ai. C3.ai went public in 2020 and has seen its market cap slide to 1.7 billion, about 10 % of its valuation from six years ago. Automation Anywhere is a UI path rival that developed software for automating repetitive tasks.

7:34The valuation of the deal was not disclosed. Automation Inuitary was valued at$6.8 billion in 2019, but currently has a$3.7 billion private secondary market valuation. C3.ai sell-off accelerated after Thomas Siebel said that he would step down as CEO in July following an autoimmune disease diagnosis that caused significant visual impairment. C3.ai began working with bankers in November after receiving takeover interest. Legal AI startup Harvey was acquired Hexis, a two-year-old startup that builds tools for product demos, videos, and guides, and said that Hexis's San Francisco team has joined Harvey while India-based engineers will join Harvey after it establishes a Bangalore office.

8:18Hexis founder and CEO Sakashi Pratap said that she will lead an engineering team focused on accelerating Harvey's offerings for in-house legal departments. Texas has raised$1.6 million from PairBC, Liquid2 Ventures, and Angel Investors. Deal terms were not disclosed, and the structure was described as aligned around long-term team incentives. Harvey has 1 ,000-plus clients across 60 countries, including a majority of the top 10 U.S. law firms. Harvey has an$8 billion secondary market valuation. That's flat from its December 2025 primary round. Andrew, the AI-focused defensive technology company, announced plans to expand in Southern California with a Long Beach campus expected to support about 5 ,500 new jobs.

9:04Founder Palmer Luckey said that these new roles are rather new roles rather than transfers. The campus will span 1.18 million square feet across six buildings and combine office space with industrial areas dedicated to R &D with completion expected by mid-2027. The company is headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, and also has a major manufacturing facility in Ohio, outside of Columbus. Lucky said that the hiring mix will include manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers, engineers across disciplines, build and test roles, and logistics staff. Andrel has a$91.4 billion secondary market valuation.

9:43That's 156 % above its July 2025 primary round. Anthropic, the AI large language model company, launched a feature that lets Claude users call interactive apps inside their chatbot interface, starting with workplace tools, including Slack, Canva, Figma, Box, Clay, and with a Salesforce implementation expected soon. Anthropic said the apps provided a long-in instance of the service accessible to Cloud, enabling actions such as sending Slack messages, generating charts, or accessing cloud files, depending on enabled tools. The feature is available to Pro, Max, and Team and Enterprise subscribers, but not free users, and eligible users can activate tools at cloud.ai slash directory.

10:30The system is described as similar to OpenAI's apps system launched in October, and both are built on the model context protocol introduced by Anthropic in 2024, with MCP adding support for apps in November. Anthropic has a$372 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 6.5 % versus its November 2025 primary round. Anthropic was selected by the UK government's, excuse me, UK's Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology to build and pilot an AI-powered assistant for gov.uk with an initial focus on employment support for job seekers. The program is designed as an agentic system designed to guide users through government processes with tailored support, maintain context across interactions, and provide user control over data, including opt-out and aligned with UK data protection laws.

11:26The effort builds on a memorandum of understanding signed in February of 2025 between Anthropic and the UK government. The project includes Anthropic engineers working alongside civil servants and developers at basically Anthropic Forward Deployed Engineers at the government digital service with the goal of enabling independent maintenance by the UK government. Anthropic raised its revenue forecast and projected sales will quadruple this year to as much as$18 billion and reach$55 billion next year, while delaying expected cash flow positivity to 2028, one year later than prior projections. The forecast say Anthropic expects to burn about$11 billion this year and$11 billion next year, and it projects interest costs of nearly$7 billion this year and about$16 billion next year, described as 36 % and 71 % higher than earlier forecasts.

12:19The company's optimistic growth margin forecast rise to as much as 63 % this year and 70 % next year, compared with 40 % in 2025, and it projects 77 % gross margins by 2029. Training costs are projected at more than$12 billion this year and nearly$23 billion next year, up about 51 % and 129 % versus prior projections. With 2028, training costs around$30 billion and cumulative 2026 to 2029 training spend of more than$100 billion. Anthropic ended last year with more than$9 billion of annualized revenue. Cloud Co generated more than$1 billion in annualized revenue in November, or about 14 % of the total annualized revenue at the time.

13:01Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI large language model business, released an upgrade to its flagship Kimi model called K2.5 that can process text, images, and videos from a single prompt. As China's AI's companies rush ahead of an expected deep-seek rollout, Moonshot raised$500 million last month from investors, including Alibaba and IGG Capital, at a post-money valuation of$4.3 billion. And it started new rounds seeking a valuation as high as$5 billion. Recent IPOs by rivals Shifu and Minimax Group collectively raised more than a billion in Hong Kong. Moonshot said K2.5 outperforms OpenSys source peers on several benchmarks, narrows the coding gap with top proprietary models, and is rolling out an automated coding tool aimed at rivaling Claude Code.

13:53OpenAI, an AI large language model business, is laying the groundwork for a potential public listing in Q4 2026. The company is holding informal talks with Wall Street banks and expanding its finance team, according to people familiar with the matter. New hires, including Chief Accounting Officer Ajmer Dale and Corporate Business Finance Officer Cynthia Graylor, who will oversee investor relations. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, expects to delegate some responsibilities to Fiji SEMO, CEO of Applications. OpenAI executives are pushing to IPO ahead of rival Anthropic this year. OpenAI is seeking to raise up to$100 billion.

14:34It currently appears Amazon will invest$50 billion, SoftBank$30 billion, and NVIDIA and Microsoft will come in for the remaining$20 billion. OpenAI estimated that last summer that the compute and related costs would cumulatively exceed$430 billion between 2026 and 2030, with$70 billion in burn over that period. Amazon's investment could depend on separate deals, including potential expansion of OpenAI's cloud server rental deal with Amazon and commercial distribution for enterprise ChatGPT subscriptions. OpenAI committed in November to spend$38 billion renting servers from AWS over the next seven years.

15:17OpenAI launched a scientific workspace tool called Prism, a free web app integrating with GPT 5.2 aimed at drafting and revising research papers and collaborating with colleagues. Prism supports LaTeX, I believe I said that correctly, and OpenAI said an unlimited number of people can collaborate on a project with initial availability for free and paid individual ChatGPT users and a planned rollout to business and education users. OpenAI said ChatGPT averages 8.4 million messages per week related to advanced science and math topics, and that advanced science messages rose 47 % in 2025. In a demo, OpenAI researcher Alex Loup-Saska used Prism to convert a whiteboard diagram into a formatted version in minutes, and he said the manual process can take hours.

16:12And Kevin Wheel, VP of OpenAI for Science, said 2026 could be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI and software engineer. Obviously, he's referring to the coding solutions or coding apps that are out there. Tether launched a US-focused stablecoin called USAT issued at Anchorage Digital Bank NA as it prepares to return to the US market. Kenner Fitzgerald, which manages reserves for Tether's$186 billion USDT stablecoin, will also manage reserves for USAT as reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. Exchanges include Bybit, Crypto.com and OKEx made USAT available for trading on Tuesday. Stablecoins total$308 billion plus in global circulation with USDT, the company's primary stablecoin, representing about 60 % market share.

17:09The recent US legislation known as the Genius Act restricts reserve assets and requires large circulation tokens to be issued by nationally chartered banks. Tether stopped allowing U.S. customers to buy or redeem tokens directly with the issuer in 2018. The company paid$41 million in penalties in 2021 over allegations that misrepresented reserves. USDT reserves include short-term treasuries and cash equivalents, plus Bitcoin, structured loans, and precious metals that are not permitted under the Genius Act, and frames USAT as the regulated complement for the U.S. market. Google joined investors backing Redwood Materials, pushing the company Series E from$350 million to$425 million after the round was initially led by Eclipse and included a strategic investment by InVentures.

17:59Redwood said existing investors Capricorn and Goldman Sachs also added new capital. The post-money valuation is estimated to be north of$6 billion. That's more than a billion above the prior valuation. The company did not publicly disclose the valuation. The Philatis financing brings Redwood's total private capital raised to$2.3 billion. Redwood, founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Strubel, is expanding beyond recycling into cathode production and an energy storage business launched last summer that repurposes EV batteries into microgrids to supply AI data centers and industrial sites. The company said it recovers 70 percent plus of used and discarded battery packs in North America and one plus gigawatt hour of inventory in June.

18:46Expected another four gigawatt hours in the coming months and targets deployment of 20 gigawatt hours of grid scale storage by 2028. The Trump administration changed the U.S. Department of Energy oversight rules for nuclear power plants built on DOE property. This is important because of all the demand for AI data center electricity. About one third of the rulebook was removed and multiple sections were heavily revised. Previous requirements aimed at limiting groundwater environmental contamination are now framed as suggestions. Worker exposure limits were increased. Limits were increased, excuse me, and security protocols are now largely left to the companies.

19:29The changes were developed without any public comment or notice and apply only to reactors on DOE property. Non-DOE sites remain under nuclear regulatory commission oversight. Nuclear startups have raised well over$1 billion in recent months. And this is primarily the small nuclear reactor businesses. Perplexity. The AI-powered search engine company signed a$750 million deal with Microsoft over three years, adding Azure alongside its longtime relationship with AWS. The commitment allows Perplexity to deploy models throughout Microsoft's Foundry service. Perplexity said AWS remains Perplexity's preferred cloud infrastructure provider with expansions expected in coming weeks.

20:15The company built much of its business on AWS, including using Bedrock to access anthropic models. Okay, that's it for the week. Thank you and see you next week.