Private market news feed.

Bloomberg reported on Sept. 23, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter, that Modal Labs is in discussions to raise new financing at a valuation of roughly $15B; Reuters carried the report the same day. Modal raised $355M in May 2026 at a $4.65B valuation, so the new round would more than triple its mark in about four months. Baseten was reported to be in parallel funding talks. The round would reset the reference price for Modal's shares.

Source: Bloomberg

Legora announced on 23 September 2026 a content partnership with The American Law Institute, licensing ALI's Restatements of the Law into Legora's legal research platform. The Restatements are authoritative secondary sources produced by leading judges, lawyers and academics and routinely cited by US courts. Licensed authoritative content is a scarce asset in legal AI, and securing it narrows Legora's gap with Thomson Reuters and Harvey in US research workflows days after reports of a $300M+ raise at an $8.5B pre-money valuation.

Source: Legora

Crusoe and Thinking Machines Lab announced a $65 million annual agreement on 2026-09-23 under which the lab will run production inference for its open models — its Inkling models plus GLM 5.2 and 5.3 — on a dedicated Crusoe Managed Inference deployment of NVIDIA HGX B200 systems. Crusoe said the customer takes Crusoe Managed Inference past $100 million in contracted ARR less than a year after launch, and the two are exploring batch inference for synthetic data generation. Coming six days after its $3.9B Series F at $30.9B, it is Crusoe's first named large inference contract and evidence of revenue beyond data-centre build-outs.

Source: Crusoe

The Information reported on September 23, 2026 that Anthropic is in early talks to lease up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity from Stream Data Centers, a 27-year-old US developer majority-owned by Apollo Global Management, signing on as a direct tenant of its sites. The report frames the move as part of an effort to reduce Anthropic's reliance on cloud providers. A direct gigawatt-scale lease would be a multi-billion-dollar compute commitment and a distinct counterparty from the AirTrunk Kurri Kurri talks reported a day earlier.

Source: The Information

Weekly volume data published September 22, 2026 show Kalshi traded $15.27 billion in contract volume during the week of Sept 14-20, its highest week of 2026, across 85.26 million trades and $3.53 billion of execution-price USD. The week included Kalshi's first $3 billion day, $3.17 billion on Sept 20 after $2.81 billion on Sept 19; sports contributed $3.24 billion and crypto $2.16 billion, versus $188 million of crypto volume at Polymarket Global. Kalshi and Polymarket Global combined for $16.43 billion, up 16.3% week over week, so the record week is a direct read on Kalshi's fee-based revenue run-rate.

Source: DeFi Rate

Impulse Space announced on 2026-09-22 that the United States Space Force awarded it a $28 million contract to supply a Mira orbital transfer vehicle for a future Space Development Agency surveillance mission. SpaceNews reported the same day that this is a repeat Mira order from the Space Force. The award extends the Redondo Beach company's defence revenue line days after its $308M Series D extension took its latest round to $808M at a reported $5.4B valuation.

Source: SpaceNews

Bloomberg reported on 2026-09-22 that Stockholm-based legal AI company Legora is in talks for a new funding round valuing it at around $8.5 billion. Follow-on coverage puts the raise at at least $300 million pre-money, up more than 50% from the $5.55 billion valuation of its $550M Series D co-led by Accel and Benchmark in March 2026 (extended by $50M in April). A step-up of that size within six months directly repriced the reference mark for Legora secondaries.

Source: Bloomberg

Ramp announced Ramp Accounts Receivable on 22 September 2026, a new product that automates invoicing and payment collection so customers can run both sides of corporate cash flow — money out and money in — on one platform. Ramp said the capability was a top customer request and is its first move onto the revenue side of finance operations. It opens a new product line and materially widens Ramp's addressable market beyond corporate cards and spend management.

Source: PR Newswire (Ramp)

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026, pricing input at $4 and output at $20 per million tokens against $5 and $25 for Opus 5, and cutting cache reads 60% to $0.20 per million. Anthropic says the model costs about 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads, generates output more than 30% faster, and matches or beats Fable 5.1 on key agentic benchmarks; five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans were also raised. A cheaper flagship weeks before Anthropic's planned November IPO changes its API price mix and gross-margin profile, and OpenAI answered the same day with cheaper GPT-6 models.

Source: Anthropic

Stoke Space said on 22 September 2026 that the first orbital flight of Nova Pathfinder is targeted for early 2027 from Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and named its customers: AstroForge's Autonomy-1, a demonstration of its Solo autonomous spacecraft system that will autonomously support NASA Goddard's COMPASS heliophysics payload, and a Celestis Infinite Flight payload. Stoke said hardware is in final integration in Washington ahead of delivery to SLC-14, with multiple Pathfinder missions planned across 2027 and 2028. It is Stoke's first disclosed customer manifest and launch date for its debut orbital vehicle, converting development-stage risk into named launch demand.

Source: Stoke Space

On 2026-09-22 OpenAI extended the GPT-6 generation below its Astra flagship with GPT-6 Sol, aimed at reasoning-heavy work, and GPT-6 Luna, aimed at high-volume clerical tasks. TechCrunch reported both ship at half the API cost of the 5.6-series Sol and Luna, a drop OpenAI attributes to caching and inference gains, alongside claimed improvements in factual accuracy and coding error rates; GitHub made both models available in Copilot the same day. A roughly 50% cut to frontier API pricing resets OpenAI's unit economics and intensifies price competition with rival labs.

Source: TechCrunch

Axios reported on September 22, 2026 that AI inference infrastructure company Baseten is in talks to raise at a $26 billion valuation. Baseten's prior rounds were reported this year at an $11 billion valuation in May and about $13 billion for its roughly $1.5 billion Series F, so the price under discussion would roughly double its most recent mark within months. A step-up of that size directly resets secondary-market pricing for Baseten shares.

Source: Axios