E247: OpenClaw … WHAT?!; Anthropic $380B primary closed; Stripe $140B tender; Harvey $11B round; + more

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for February 13, 2026. Okay, listen up and pay attention to this. I believe this is a material event happening in AI investing right here. So OpenClaw is an open source autonomous AI agent designed to function as a proactive personal assistant who runs locally on a user's computer. Originally launched in November of 2025 under the name ClaudeBot by developer Peter Steinberger. Steinberger. It underwent name changes to Moldbot and then ultimately OpenClaw due to trademark disputes with Anthropic. Unlike a traditional chatbot, OpenClaw operates as a self-hosted system that integrates with large language models via API keys, allowing it to connect to messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord for user interaction.

0:53It can access local files, execute shell commands, and interact with applications to perform tasks such as clearing inboxes, sending emails, managing calendars, and even automating more complex workflows by writing its own code to create new skills. This makes it a versatile tool that persists in the background, remembering context across sessions and acting independently to complete user-directed jobs. OpenClaw's AI agent memory is key here. The agents are effectively a recent MBA college graduate ready to learn how you do your personal life and business and able to execute tasks for you on demand or schedule tasks for you daily, weekly, or monthly.

1:37If you have time, I recommend that you watch Alex Finn or Jason Calacanis on YouTube. Calacanis is at This Week in Startups to learn more. My opinion, owning, quote unquote, owning, right? Your AI agent's memory.md file, that's important, memory.md file, will be increasingly critical in the same way that training an employee and retaining that employee to continue working for your company is critical. Unlike current AI platforms, OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, OpenClaw allows memory.md files to properly build and accumulate over time. So literally just like an employee, It's just like that MBA graduate employee that accumulates proprietary knowledge of your business over time and proves to be extremely differentiated and valuable.

2:25It's certainly something that everyone would want to fully own and control for themselves. There are rumors that Steinberger is looking to sell OpenClaw to a third party, so we'll continue to monitor. Anthropic, the AI large language model company, said it closed a$30 billion Series G on Thursday, taking its valuation to$380 billion. The step up is dramatic. The company's prior Series F valuation was$183 billion. So this new mark implies$197 billion increase or about 108%. The round was led by GIC and CO2 with co-leads that include DE Shaw, Ventures Founders Fund, and MGX. The investor list also includes names like Excel, General Catalyst, Jane Street, and Qatar Investment Authority, signaling broad institutional demand for exposure at this valuation.

3:18And Anthropic positioned the raise as demand led with CFO Krishna Rao saying Claude is becoming more critical to business workflows that proceeds with fund enterprise grade models and products. Stripe, the online payments company, is arranging a tender offer that would value the company at$140 billion. That would be a material reset hire. The company has used frequent tender offers since 2024 to provide employee liquidity while remaining private. And this structure continues to function as a pressure release valve that can reduce urgency around an IPO. Stripe has not announced new primary funding since 2023 when it raised$6.5 billion in a Series I led by Thrive Capital.

4:03It reached full year profitability in 2024. The company is pushing deeper into stablecoin adjacent payments infrastructure with acquisitions of Bridge and Privy last year as it works to integrate stablecoins into its core payment stack. Stripe is currently trading at a$151 billion secondary market valuation. Databricks, the AI-focused data management and analytics company, raised$5 billion in equity at a$134 billion valuation. The business also secured$2 billion in new debt capacity. Databricks said annualized revenue exceeded$5.4 billion for the recent quarter, up 65 % year-over-year, and it generated free cash flow over the past year.

4:43It also disclosed that AI products now contribute$1.4 billion in annualized revenue, positioning AI as a sizable line item rather than an experimental add-on. Management describes accelerating expansion, noting that in June it forecast 50 % growth while also keeping optionality around timing of an IPO. CEO Ali Ghodoshi said, Databricks is prepared to go public when the time is right, but it also made clear that the company can stay private if markets forsaken. The round included investors such as Goldman Sachs, Gladebrook, Morgan Stanley, Neuberger Berman, and Qatar Investment Authority, with J.P.

5:19Morgan leading the debt facility. Harvey, the legal enterprise AI application company, is reportedly in talks to raise$200 million at$11 billion valuation led by Sequoia and GIC. If completed, the valuation would raise by$30 billion from the$8 billion level it set in a$160 million round confirmed in December of 2025. That's just two months ago, implying roughly a 38 % uplift. The cadence has been steep. In June, Harvey announced$300 million Series E at a$5 billion valuation led by Kleiner Perkins and Co2. And in February 2025, it raised a Sequoia-led$300 million Series D at a$3 billion valuation.

6:02Revenue momentum is the core narrative. CEO Winston Weinberg cited$100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025, up from$100 million in ARR in August. So that's a 90 % growth in under six months. The company sells an AI large language model product built for law firms and has aspirations to expand into other knowledge work categories like finance, accountancy and others. Runway, the AI video generation business, raised up$315 million at a$5.3 billion valuation led by General Atlantic with partnership participation from NVIDIA, Fidelity, Alliance, Bernstein and Marais. Less than a year ago, Runway raised$308 million at a valuation of just over$3 billion.

6:46It's a 75 % increase. Total capital raised is now$860 million, and the company has about 140 employees, suggesting a high capital-to-headcount ratio consistent with compute-heavy model development. Runway helped kick off the AI video generator category in early 2023, starting with short clips from text prompts. Commercial adoption is broadening beyond film and advertising. Runway cited use cases ranging from Amazon's House of David, that's a TV show, to visuals for a Madonna tour and an ad for Puma. And said newer customers, including architectural firms such as KPF, are using the product for rendering.

7:27CEO Chris Valenzuela framed the value proposition as compressing cycle times from a week to a minute. Aptronic, the humanoid robotics company, said it reopened its Series A and lifted the round total to$935 million. The company did not disclose the valuation, but rumors put the post-money valuation at$5.3 billion. Aptronic previously announced a$350 million Series A a year ago, expanded it to$415 million due to demand, and now added another$520 million from earlier investors, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, and B Capital, plus new investors. The company is selling an embodied AI thesis, positioning its humanoid robot around perception plus reasoning for physical tasks like unloading trailers, picking warehouse inventory, and tending machinery.

8:20Aptronic has a$5.4 billion secondary market valuation. That's down 5 % versus November 2025 primary round and also down from this current round here. modal labs the ai inference compute cloud provider is in talks about a new round and evaluation of about 2.5 million according to multiple people with knowledge of the discussions modal's last disclosed valuation was 1.1 billion less than five months ago and an 87 million series b so the discussed valuation applies 125 increase modal has approximately 50 million in annual recurring revenue. General Catalyst is rumored to lead. That said, Modal's CEO said that the company is not actively fundraising and describes conversations as general.

9:06Modal is selling efficiency in inference. That's running AI model compute, focusing on reducing compute costs and latency between prompt and response, and it is benefiting from a broader investor push into two inference-focused platforms. Gather AI, the AI-focused warehouse inventory management company, raised a$40 million Series B, led by Smith Point Capital, founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. Gather has now raised$74 million total and employs about 60 people. Gather's core product uses off-the-shelf cameras placed on moving equipment such as forklifts, plus drones operating inside warehouses to monitor operations and log findings into warehouse management systems.

9:52The company says the system looked beyond barcodes and it also scans lot codes, text, expiration dates, case counts, damages, and occupancy, and then uses those signals to detect low inventory, misplaced stock, and workloads that may create safety issues. The company highlighted the technical angle as non-LLM, combining classical Bayesian techniques with neural networks, and positioned that choice as reducing hallucination style failure modes. Gather also operates in hard environments like freezers and cold storage, where human scanning is expensive and intermediate. Similarly, a company that creates AI digital twins of individuals raised $100 million.

10:36The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Hanabee Capital, plus contributions from Fei-Fei Li and Andre Kaparthi, giving the financing a brand-heavy roster, even without disclosed valuation. Similarly, spun out of Stanford and emerged from stealth after seven months of developing a model trained on interviews with real people about their lives, augmented with historic transactions, data, and text from behavioral science journals. CVS has been using Simile for five months to create AI agents representing real customers instead of running human focus groups.

11:14And the company says that those simulations have influenced decisions like what items to stock and display. The product direction is positioned as a new layer of decision intelligence that could sit between consumer research, investor relations, and corporate communications. Erebor Bank is a de novo bank focused on AI defense and crypto startup companies, became the first newly created bank to receive a national charter under the second Trump administration and said it will launch with$635 million in capital. The bank is designed to serve startups and high net worth clients, explicitly pitching itself as a replacement for services disrupted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

11:55Its backers include Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, its 8VC Ilya Gid Founders Fund, and the bank is linked to tech founders, including Palmer, Lucky, and Joe Lonsdale. Erebor said it was open on Sunday, an unusual move meant to signal its always-on operating model tied to blockchain-based settlement. The FDIC approved deposit insurance in December, and regulators are requiring the bank to maintain capital equal to 12 % of its balance sheet. Erebor plans to lend out no more than 50 % of deposits and aims to offer products like lines of credit, backed on crypto or private securities and loans for advanced AI chips, while also indicating it will sell many loans onward to other banks and investment firms.

12:39Investor expectations in the text are usually high for a new bank. Beast Industries YouTube creator Jimmy Donaldson's company is buying Step, a teen-focused fintech app with 7 million plus users. Steps backers include venture firms General Catalyst and Co2. Acquisition price was not disclosed. Donaldson has 466 million YouTube subscribers and 5 million monthly views across channels as of early 2026, giving Beast Industries an unusually large funnel for a consumer fintech product. Beast Industries has also been financing, fundraising, excuse me, including a$200 million investment from Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of Ethereum and chaired by Fundstrats' Tom Lee.

13:26Step is not a bank and relies on a bank partner, citing Evolve Bank & Trust for banking services and offering a Step Visa card with no monthly fees, positioning the product as an all-in-one spending and saving experience for teens and young adults. SpaceX, the space payload and satellite internet company, has shifted near-term settlement strategy towards building a self-growing city on the moon, citing a timeline of under 10 years versus 20 plus years for Mars. Founder Elon Musk said Mars travel is constrained by a 26-month alignment cycle and involves a six-month trip, while the moon can be reached on a two-day trip with launch opportunities every 10 days, allowing faster iteration.

14:08The moon focus is framed as catastrophe resilience. Musk said that he worries about a natural or man-made event that could disrupt resupply from Earth and cause a colony failure. And he views a moon city as achievable sooner and therefore safer to prove out. Musk also pointed to Starship's lunar cargo potential and described an industrial loop involving lunar manufacturing, an electromagnetic mass driver, and the ability to deploy 500 to 1 ,000 terawatts per year of AI satellites into deep space, which he linked to ascending the Kardashev scale or how much of a sun's energy a civilization is able to capture.

14:49The plan is still positioned as paralyzed with Mars. Musk wrote that Mars work could start in five to six years and floated a crude Mars flight in 2031. SpaceX has a$1.47 trillion secondary market valuation. That's up 17.9 % versus its February 2026 merger with XAI. Monaco, the AI application company focused on sales teams launched publicly after operating in private beta and disclosed$35 million raised across$10 million seed and$25 million Series A, both led by Founders Fund with participation from Human Capital. The company also disclosed a notable angel roster, including Stripe founders Patrick and John Colson, YC CEO Gary Tan and Greenoats founder Neil Mehta, which functions as early investors value for otherwise crowded category.

15:41Monaco is pitching an AI plus service model in sales, pairing AI agents with experienced human salespeople who monitor output, prevent hallucinations and run customer meetings. The product suite also includes an AI native CRM, a built from scratch prospecting database outreach and follow up automation and a meeting note taker. Monaco is positioning against incumbents like HubSpot and Salesforce with pricing described as flat fee and discounted during beta. The company employs around 40 people and is explicitly rejecting avatar-based selling, leaning into a structure where AI autonomously automates workflows, excuse me, and humans remain the face of closing and relationship building.

16:26XAI, the AI large language model company, is reorganizing into four core areas, Rock, Chatbot, Voice, Coding, Imagine Video, and MicroHard, which is a play on Microsoft, or the opposite of Microsoft, a digital agent software company concept. The changes follow the departures of co-founders Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu, with Elon Musk framing the exits as a natural outcome of scaling and fit for different company stages. The reorgalance just days after reported merger with SpaceX that valued XAI at$250 billion and combined in any at$1.25 trillion. We estimate that Ba and Wu are both billionaires now post-merger, which could also contribute to their motivation to exit.

17:16XAI's Colossus Data Center site in Memphis is expanding and will bring capacity to almost two gigawatts with investment north of$20 billion and a requirement of 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 GB300 systems. This is equivalent to about 1 million H100s. It's a massive amount. compute. Product side, employees said that users are creating close to 50 million videos per day and using Imagine, that's the photo and video creation. And leadership emphasizes voice progress built from scratch in just about six months. X, the social media company hit$1 billion in annualized recurring revenue from subscriptions, according to Nikita Beer, X's head of product.

18:02subscription plans include basic premium and premium plus priced from$3 to$40 per month with benefits that include boost boosted posts check marks and access to rock models beer did not disclose ad revenue okay that's it for me this week thanks and see you guys next week