Public markets are flashing early warnings about an AI slowdown. Peter Thiel’s hedge fund dumped its Nvidia stake last quarter, just as the chipmaker erased its monthly gains in a 7% weekly drop — a slide that wiped out hundreds of billions in market cap. The Nasdaq is now more than 6% off its recent peak. Crypto isn’t faring better: with midterm elections approaching, bitcoin is selling off as investors brace for policy uncertainty.
Meanwhile, frontier AI labs are locking themselves into deeper partnerships. Capital-intensive players are racing into new funding rounds. And crypto companies are sprinting toward IPOs before the window tightens.
Anthropic just locked in a three-way pact with Microsoft and Nvidia — the last major AI players that hadn’t fully linked up yet
The deal is enormous: Anthropic will spend $30B on Azure compute and reserve up to 1 GW of additional capacity built on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia and Anthropic will co-engineer future model and chip designs, tuning both Anthropic’s models and Nvidia’s architectures for maximum performance and efficiency.
On the distribution side, Microsoft Foundry customers will now get access to Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5 — making Claude the only frontier model available across all three major clouds. Microsoft will also keep Claude plugged into its Copilot family, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365, and Copilot Studio.
Microsoft and Nvidia will also invest up to $5B and $10B respectively. CNBC reports the round values Anthropic at ~$350B, almost double the $183B valuation from September.
Strategically, each player gets what they want:
- Nvidia tightens its grip on a top frontier AI lab, lowering the odds that Anthropic experiments seriously with non-Nvidia hardware.
- Microsoft signals it won’t remain dependent on OpenAI alone — it wants to be the universal platform where every major model is accessible.
- Anthropic secures fresh capital and long-term compute guarantees — and most of that capital will flow straight back to Azure and Nvidia.
A new secondary block in ByteDance just cleared at a valuation of ~US$480B
Capital Today, one of China’s most prominent tech investors, purchased a $300M stake previously held by Bank of China Group Investment. The auction drew interest from as many as seven bidders, signaling that demand for ByteDance remains strong even as geopolitical pressure and regulatory uncertainty persist.
Databricks is preparing another major raise
The company is now in talks to price the next round at $130–134B, with a total haul expected between $3B and $5B. It’s an aggressive step-up, especially in a quarter where public-market sentiment around AI has turned choppier.
Databricks has spent the year pushing deeper into applied AI: tools that let enterprises query and analyze their data with models, and new agent frameworks built to automate white-collar workflows. That positioning is paying off. OpenAI, a long-time Databricks customer, has accelerated demand for the company’s data infrastructure stack.
Operationally, the numbers are strong. Databricks grew its revenue run-rate 50% YoY in the July quarter—outpacing almost every public software company—and recently flipped cash-flow positive. That combination of scale, AI leverage, and profitability is what’s giving Databricks confidence to charge toward a valuation north of $130B.
The xAI funding saga
It started at Tesla’s annual meeting earlier this month, where Musk pushed a proposal for Tesla to invest in xAI. Shareholders weren’t convinced. The vote showed little enthusiasm for sending Tesla’s cash reserves into another Musk startup, especially as the company faces its own rising AI and robotics spend.
Then Musk shifted the narrative. At the same meeting, he revealed that Tesla was considering building its own chip-fabrication plant — a move that would immediately tie the two companies together in a different way. If Tesla builds chips, xAI would almost certainly buy them. Musk also hinted that SpaceX could eventually use Tesla-designed chips for space-based data centers. Even without a Tesla equity investment, the three companies could end up tightly integrated through compute.
Despite the lukewarm Tesla vote, xAI told its shareholders it plans to raise $15 billion at a $230 billion valuation. We still don’t know who the investors are.
A Pre-Election Stampede: Crypto Companies Rush Into IPOs
Kraken raised a $200M strategic round from Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities at a $20B valuation — and within 24 hours, it filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO. The timing isn’t accidental. With midterms less than a year away, crypto firms see a narrowing window to go public before political and regulatory uncertainty resets the landscape. Historically, the presidential party loses ground in midterms, and a shift in Congress could reshape crypto policy overnight.
Earlier this year, crypto IPOs traded well, but the recent sell-off in bitcoin and crypto-linked equities has dulled investor appetite.
Kraken isn’t alone. Blockchain.com is also preparing to list next year, aiming to come public after several volatile cycles. Unlike Coinbase or Kraken — which operate exchanges — Blockchain.com runs a crypto brokerage model, executing trades using inventory from exchanges or its own balance sheet. It’s quietly become one of the sector’s most durable operators: $5B in revenue in 2024, even higher this year, and profitable for three straight years.
The business mix is telling. Roughly 60% of revenue now comes from institutional prime brokerage and market-structure services, including liquidity for token launches. The remaining 40% comes from retail users — an audience of 39 million verified wallets.
Ramp just exploded to a $32B valuation — only three months after clearing $22.5B
In a year dominated by AI megadeals, the one non-AI vertical that still pulls in serious capital is expense-management fintech — and Ramp is the standout. The company keeps stacking major rounds at ever-higher prices. In 2025 alone, Ramp vaulted from $13B to $32B, an almost surreal jump for a fintech already deep into scale.
The fundamentals help explain the enthusiasm. In October, Ramp crossed $1B in annualized revenue, a milestone it’s using to frame a new narrative: “The Age of Thinking Money.” Ramp is positioning itself as the financial operating system of that new era.
But the valuation gap inside the category raises a real question.
On secondaries, Brex trades at $4.3B. In August 2025, Brex hit $700M in annualized revenue, growing ~50% year-over-year.
That leaves us with a striking comparison:
- Ramp: 32× revenue
- Brex: 6× revenue
So if Brex goes public next year, its IPO will effectively reset the benchmark. And given this spread, that might be the real thinking money moment.
The capital wave hasn’t slowed
Humanoids, frontier labs, stealth engineering plays and chipmakers all pulled in fresh capital this week.
Apptronik is raising $400M at a $5B valuation, tripling its price from earlier this year. Google — already supplying DeepMind AI to power Apptronik’s Apollo robot — will join the round. Apollo is a full two-legged, two-armed humanoid built for warehouse and industrial work, and the funding puts Apptronik alongside the most aggressively financed robotics startups this year.
Tenstorrent is in talks to raise $800M+ at a $3.2B valuation, a 60% step-up from last year, with Fidelity poised to lead.
In Japan, Sakana AI raised $135M at a $2.5B valuation, despite excluding the new capital — a strong signal for a company still early in model development.
And the “vibe-coding” startup Lovable is reportedly raising at a $6B valuation.
Function Health secured a $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation, pitching itself as the platform that unifies health data across wearables, labs, and EHRs into a single actionable layer.
Legally embattled AI-music startup Suno raised at a $2.45B valuation on $200M in revenue — proof that even regulatory heat isn’t slowing investor demand for high-growth generative-media models.
Not every late-stage company is going up. Faire launched an employee tender at a $5.2B valuation, almost 60% below its 2022 mark of $12.6B. Even so, the company says it is now at $500M+ in annualized revenue and will facilitate nearly $3B in GMV this year — showing traction even as valuations normalize.