E252: Vast Data $30B valuation, +229%; Kalshi $22B valuation, +2x; Mastercard buys BVNK; Canva signals 2027 IPO; + more

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon is closing five pre-IPo stock funds on April 21st, 2026. andrew together ai harvey glean and one x technologies use these single stock funds to build bespoke pre-ipo stock portfolios you select the pre-ipo stock company exposures and weight allocations to each pre-ipo stock to express your unique investment thesis available for purchase at charles schwab fidelity and directly at ag dylan funds two thousand five hundred dollar minimum investment financial advisors only email aaron.dylan at agdylan.com to invest again That's A-A-R-O-N dot D-I-L-L-O-N at A-G-D-I-L-L-O-N dot com to invest.

0:44Here is the pre-IPO stock update for March 20, 2026. Vast data and AI storage, data storage and infrastructure software company raised$1 billion in a Series F round at a$30 billion valuation, bringing total funding to$1.38 billion. That marks a sharp step up from its 11,$118 million Series E in 2023 when it was valued at$9.1 billion, applying a 3.3x valuation increase in roughly just two years. At the time of the prior round, vast annual recurring revenue run rate was$200 million. The latest valuation implies a much larger business with AR above$600 million and potentially above$2 billion, given the single$1.17 billion CoreWeb deal.

1:30The company is benefiting from AI infrastructure demand and sales to consumers, customers such as X, CoreWeave and Lambda. Vast also paired the primary raise with a concurrent secondary tender for employees and early investors with more than half of the$1 billion going back to stockholders and early backers. Calci, the prediction markets exchange, has raised more than a billion dollars at a$22 billion valuation, roughly doubling its value from$11 billion in December. The company's annualized revenue is$1.5 billion, while February trading volume exceeded$10 billion, or 12x, the level from six months earlier.

2:08Founded in 2018, Calci gained momentum after a court allowed it to offer trading on the outcome of the 2024 election. And sports betting has since become the dominant activity on the platform. The latest financing was led by KOTU, followed by prior rounds backed by Paradigm, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and ARK Invest. Regulatory risk remains high. Arizona filed criminal charges this week, alleging Calci is operating an illegal gambling business, while Calci has rejected that claim and won support from the new FCFTC chair. Wall Street participation is growing, with Susquehanna and Jump acting as market makers and trade webs, striking a February data deal that included an equity stake.

2:51stake. FAL, an AI inference and model hosting platform for media, that's video, audio, and images, is raising$300 million in an evaluation of around$8 billion, nearly double the$4.5 billion valuation it received just three months ago in a Sequoia-led round. The fundraising reflects rapid growth in inference demand with FAL's annualized revenue reaching$400 million, up from$200 million in October. That's a 100 % increase in a matter of months. The company raised $314 million across three rounds last year, and the new financing is structured in two installments with the higher price tranche, valuing the company at$8 billion.

3:30Founded in 2021, FAL serves 3 million developers, including Adobe, Canva, and Shopify, and charges on a usage basis, such as per second of video output. Yoda Data Services, the Indian AI data center company, is seeking fresh capital at evaluation of about$4 billion ahead of the IPO filing in India. The company is targeting$500 million in a pre-IPO round and plans to raise another, a similar amount in the public offering, applying a potential combined capital raise of roughly a billion dollars. The company previously targeted$1.2 billion in pre-IPO funding. Yoda currently operates around 10 ,000 NVIDIA H100 chips and plans to add thousands of NVIDIA B200 units by May, followed by more than 20 ,000 NVIDIA B300 processors by August.

4:22Those deployments are part of a$2 billion investment announced last month. Yoda is positioning itself as the sovereign computing platform for India. Yoda's listing timing is tied directly to this hardware expansion as it seeks to build one of Asia's largest AI-accelerating clusters. MasterCard agreed to acquire a bank, it's BVNK, the stablecoin payments infrastructure company for up to$1.8 billion, including$300 million in contingent payments tied to performance targets. The earnout represents roughly 16.7 % of the total headline value. A bank founded in 2021 has a valuation above$750 million last year, implying MasterCard is paying a premium to that mark.

5:07The company supports transactions across major blockchain networks in more than 130 countries, giving MasterCard additional reach in stablecoin and tokenized deposit infrastructure. The acquisition is MasterCard's clearest push yet into digital currency rails and its biggest bet so far on stablecoins becoming part of mainstream payments. The transaction also reflects strong M &A demand in crypto infrastructure following a more favorable regulatory environment since late 2024. Canva, the graphic design SaaS company, is planning to go public next year and enters that window with the$47 billion secondary market valuation.

5:46That's equal to 11.8x. It's$4 billion revenue, annualized revenue at the end of 2025. Revenue rose more than 40 % last year to more than$3 billion, and the company has now delivered eight consecutive positive free cash flow years. Excuse me, eight consecutive years of positive free cash flow. Canva ended 2025 with 265 million monthly active users up 20 % year over year with about 12 % of those users paying for the service. That implies roughly 31.8 million paying users. The company's profitability profile also looks increasingly relevant for IPO investors with about$150 million of EBITDA and roughly$175 million of free cash flow in the first quarter of last year.

6:32Canva's AI adoption is strong, including a Vibe coding product with more than 10 million monthly users and surveyed data showing 77 % of more than 400 Adobe Creative Cloud users are also using Canva. Unitree Robotics, the Chinese humanoid robotics company, has filed for a Shanghai IPO and plans to raise$610 million. The company reported$248 million of revenue last year and$41.7 million of net profit, with profit more than doubling from 2024. Humanoid robots contributed more than 51 % of revenue in the first nine months of 2025, highlighting the growing mix shift towards higher profile robotic products.

7:13Unitry also ranked number one in humanoid robot shipments last year. Pricing is moving lower as the market scales. The average sales price of Unitree's humanoid robots fell to$24 ,300 in the first three quarters of 2025. That was down about 36 % from a year earlier. NVIDIA has invested billions of dollars in neocloud providers such as CoreWeave, Lambda, and Together AIs, InScale, and Nebius because of traditional cloud providers are unlikely to meet fast-rising AI demand. That's NVIDIA's take. This is a quote from their CEO. The reason why we know they're going to be home runs is because we already see the pipeline of businesses that are coming towards it.

7:59That's NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang said during a press conference at NVIDIA's annual GTC conference this week. Wang views the investment risk in these firms as extremely low and sees a strong business pipeline already forming around the sector. The dynamic matters because investors have questioned circular financing deals across the NeoCloud system, particularly after NVIDIA provided guarantees to CoreWeave and after CoreWeave stocks doubled since going public last year. NVIDIA's role as an ecosystem builder, backer, excuse me, underscores how central NeoCloud providers have become to incremental AI capacity growth.

8:37gecko robotics the industrial inspection robots and software company signed a five-year contract with the u.s navy and the gsa in the navy's largest robotics deal so far the agreement starts with an initial 54 million award and carries 71 million dollar ceiling the first phase will cover 18 ships in the u.s pacific fleet where gecko's robots and sensors will build digital twins to help monitor asset condition and reduce maintenance downtime the economic backdrop is large. Navy ship maintenance currently costs around an estimated$13 billion to$20 billion a year, and about 40 % of the fleet is unavailable at any given time due to long maintenance cycles.

9:17The program is intended to support the Navy's goal to reach 80 % ship readiness in 2027. GECCO has worked with the Navy for four years, and this contract represents a scale deployment of that relationship. Mistral, the French AI large language model company, is pushing deeper into enterprise AI with Forge. It's a platform that allows customers to train custom models on proprietary data. The move supports a business strategy that is already heavily enterprise focused, with the company on track to surpass 1 billion in ARR this year. Forge is designed to let companies build from scratch using Mistral's open weight models, rather than only fine tuning existing systems or layering retrieval on top.

9:59That approach offers better performance on domain-specific and non-English data and gives customers more control over model behavior. Earlier users include Ericsson, the European Space Agency, Reply, Singapore's DSO and HTX and ASML. ASML also led Minstrel Series C last September at a$13.8 billion valuation. The launch reinforces Minstrel's view that enterprise adoption will depend less on general purpose consumption traction, consumer traction, and more on customization compliance and deployment support. OpenAI, the AI large language model platform, plans to merge ChatGPT codecs and its browser into a single desktop super app as it shifts away from the product fragmentation that emerged last year.

10:45The strategy is aimed at simplifying the user experience and improving coordination across teams and focusing more tightly on high productivity and agentic use cases. Fiji SEMO will oversee the change with support from Greg Brockman. The move comes as OpenAI responds to Anthropics' traction with enterprise and coding customers and operates with heightened urgency. The reorganization follows a period in which OpenAI launched multiple standalone products, including Sora and a hardware device, without always gaining strong user resonance. Over the coming months, OpenAI plans to add broader agentic capabilities to Codex before eventually merging ChatGPT and the Atlas browser into the desktop app.

11:28The mobile ChatGPT app will remain unchanged. The company is also gearing up for a possible IPO as soon as this year. OpenAI has reorganized its infrastructure operation around three groups covering data center design, commercial partnerships, and physical site operations. The moon follows a strategic shift away from building its own data centers and towards renting more AI server capacity from cloud providers. The scale of planned spending remains massive. OpenAI has projected$665 billion of cloud server spending through 2030 as it tries to secure enough compute for its models and products. Under the new structure, Sachin Khati oversees the Stargate-related groups, while Peter Hoshiel leads commercial relationships that includes deals with Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon, as well as chip agreements such as a multi-year AMD arrangement for up to six gigawatts of chips in exchange for up to 10 % of AMD common stock.

12:27Another technical team is focused on cluster design and performance, while separate operations team manages timelines for facilities being built by partners such as Oracle. The reshuffle reflects how compute access has become a strategic bottleneck in the race against Anthropic and Google. Travis Kalanick, Uber's founder, is preparing to launch a new robotics and self-driving car company under the name Adams, with initial backing from Uber of around$100 million. Adams will be a robotics and autonomous transportation company. The investment could increase if technical milestones are met. The Kalanick was also discussing requiring Pronto AI, the startup founded by Anthony Lewandowski, as part of the effort.

13:17The move would reconnect Kalanick with Uber. Kalanick tied the strategy to automating both food production and delivery, effectively complying robotics with logistics. XAI, the AI large language model platform, is using a white glove enterprise strategy, sending engineers directly into prospective client offices to win accounts from OpenAI and Anthropic. That's for deployed engineers. The approach helped it sign Shift4 payments, which now plans to replace ChatGPT with Grok for some users while continuing to use Claude for coding. The contract is a multimillion-dollar deal, and Shift4 is using Grok for day-to-day work as well as customer sentiment analysis.

14:00XAI's parent company, SpaceX, has a$1.47 trillion valuation. That's up 17.9 % versus its February 2026 merger between SpaceX and XAI. Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks, and see you all next week.