Private market news feed.

On September 18, 2026 Payward, Kraken's parent, said it was filing the required rules and product terms with the CFTC and SEC through Bitnomial, its US-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, to offer single-stock perpetual futures to eligible US traders. The launch set is 10 US equities including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft and Amazon, trading 24/5 with no expiry or rollovers. Coinbase Derivatives and Kalshi lodged competing applications dated the same day, so the filing stakes Kraken's claim to a new US equity-derivatives revenue line built on the Bitnomial licences.

Source: Crypto Briefing

Lucid Group and Bolt announced on 17 September 2026 a partnership under which Bolt aims to deploy at least 25,000 autonomous Lucid vehicles across major European cities, using the NVIDIA Hyperion autonomous-driving platform. The announcement came via Lucid's investor-relations newsroom and was covered the same day by the FT. For Bolt, a ride-hailing operator across 50+ countries, it is a step-change in fleet strategy and future unit economics in its core European markets.

Source: Lucid Group (investor relations)

Alchemy announced on 2026-09-17 that its AgentCard product will issue one-time-use Mastercard credentials, letting AI agents transact anywhere Mastercard is accepted online, with Mastercard rolling the option out the same week. AgentCard, which Alchemy introduced in March 2026, supplies agents with identity, a wallet and payment credentials. Putting the product on a global card network extends Alchemy beyond onchain rails into mainstream agentic commerce distribution.

Source: PYMNTS

Figure AI published Helix 2.5 on 17 September 2026, reporting zero-shot whole-body autonomy across 30 previously unseen Bay Area homes with no data collected, fine-tuning or adaptation in those environments. Across three long-horizon behaviours - tidying living rooms, folding towels and making beds, scored all-or-nothing with no partial credit - a policy trained from scratch succeeded on 9% of zero-shot trials while the Index-pretrained policy succeeded on 56%, and behaviour specification used half the task-specific data for 30x the scope. Helix is the robotics foundation model underpinning Figure's home-deployment roadmap, so a disclosed generalisation result at this scope is the core technical evidence behind its valuation.

Source: Figure

On 17 September 2026 Neuralink published a clip of a participant in its VOICE study, a man with ALS, converting imagined speech into words through the wireless N1 implant, with his first words reported as 'I love you' to his wife; Elon Musk called the result a 'beautiful surprise'. VOICE (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07224256) is Neuralink's early-feasibility study of the N1 implant for people with severe, irreversible speech-production impairment, distinct from its cursor and robotic-arm work. A first public demonstration of speech decoding widens Neuralink's addressable indications beyond motor control and de-risks a second clinical programme.

Source: news.com.au

Crusoe announced on 2026-09-17 the initial closing of an oversubscribed $3.9B Series F at a $30.9B post-money valuation, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, with Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG among roughly 29 further investors. Alongside the round the company disclosed more than $140B in total contracted value, more than 6GW of gross contracted capacity of which 1GW is operational, and cloud bookings up more than 20x year over year. The round is a fresh primary mark that resets Crusoe's secondary-market reference price and funds its AI factory buildout.

Source: Crusoe

Bloomberg reported on 17 September 2026 that the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund - a roughly EUR50bn vehicle managed by EQT and set up earlier in 2026 - is in talks to invest in UK-based ElevenLabs, which is seeking to raise more than $500 million. Talks are ongoing and no deal is guaranteed; the raise would follow ElevenLabs' $500M Series D at an $11B valuation earlier in the year. A sovereign-backed round of this size would reset the valuation reference point for ElevenLabs secondary buyers.

Source: Bloomberg

Bloomberg reported on 17 September 2026 that Apollo Global Management is in talks to increase a loan to SoftBank to about $9 billion from $5.4 billion, money SoftBank would use to fund additional investment in OpenAI. It follows the separately reported $11.87 billion two-year bank loan SoftBank secured on 14 September and sits against SoftBank's roughly $64.6 billion OpenAI position. Deepening private-credit appetite behind SoftBank's stake signals that capital remains available to fund OpenAI's pre-IPO round.

Source: Bloomberg

On 17 September 2026 OpenAI released Astra for Law, a configuration of its GPT-6 Astra model for legal work with a dedicated legal search index and custom instructions for legal analysis and drafting. It ships with a Trusted Access Program targeted at Am Law 200 firms that adds zero data retention on the API and excludes ChatGPT Enterprise usage from human review; Latham & Watkins helped design permissions, ethical walls and firm oversight, while Sullivan & Cromwell, Ropes & Gray and Cooley built custom systems on it. The launch opens a dedicated vertical enterprise revenue line in the high-spend legal market, mirroring OpenAI's financial-services push a week earlier.

Source: OpenAI

On September 16, 2026 HubSpot and OpenAI expanded their partnership. Businesses can now build, manage and measure ChatGPT Ads campaigns inside HubSpot, and HubSpot's ChatGPT connector gets new features; HubSpot says the connector's weekly active users are up 250%. They also launched an AI Growth Bundle: up to 65% off HubSpot Starter, buy-one-get-one ChatGPT Business seats for a year, and a $750 ChatGPT Ads spend match for accounts opened by Sep 30. OpenAI named HubSpot its first CRM ads partner and Shopify its first e-commerce ads partner. The deals give OpenAI's new ads business ready-made channels to SMB advertisers.

Source: Business Wire (via Morningstar)

On Sept. 16, 2026, Polymarket launched its 2026 Midterms Hub, a dedicated destination for following the US midterm elections across its live markets. The hub maps live market odds across states and districts, highlights key races, tracks control of Congress and market movement, and will show real-time Election Day results. It targets Polymarket's election vertical, historically one of its highest-volume categories, ahead of November's midterms.

Source: PR Newswire (Polymarket)

On Sept. 16, 2026, Novo Nordisk and Anthropic expanded an existing relationship into a drug-discovery collaboration. The two will work on R&D problems picked by Novo's scientists and computational teams and build tools for 'biological reasoning', starting with a trial of Claude Science on specific R&D workflows. It gives Anthropic a top-10 global pharma reference customer for its life-sciences push weeks before its planned IPO.

Source: Reuters