All posts tagged: valuation

Sources: Cursor in talks to raise B+ at B valuation as enterprise growth surges

Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges

AI coding startup Cursor is nearing new funding in which the four-year-old company would raise at least $2 billion in fresh capital, according to four sources familiar with the matter. Returning investors Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to lead the financing at a $50 billion valuation, prior to the new capital injection, the people said. Battery Ventures, a new investor, may also participate in the financing, according to two sources. Strategic investor Nvidia is also expected to write a check, one person said. Although the round is already oversubscribed, the deal terms are not final and may still change. The financing, if completed, would nearly double Cursor’s previous $29.3 billion post-money valuation, achieved six months ago. Despite fierce competition from other AI-coding offerings, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s revamped Codex, Cursor’s revenue continues to climb rapidly. Cursor forecasts ending 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of more than $6 billion, two people said. This trajectory implies the company expects to at least triple its annualized revenue over the next 10 months. …

Factory hits .5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises

Factory hits $1.5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises

More than three years after the emergence of generative AI, AI-assisted coding remains by far the most popular and lucrative use case for the technology. Although multiple companies — including Anthropic, maker of Claude Code, as well as Cursor and Cognition — are already vying for dominance, investors believe there is room for at least one more player. On Wednesday, Factory, a startup developing AI agents for enterprise engineering teams, announced it had raised $150 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, joined the startup’s board. Factory founder Matan Grinberg told the Wall Street Journal that the company’s key differentiator is its ability to switch between different foundation models, such as Anthropic’s Claude or Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. However, startups like Cursor also don’t rely on a single model to generate code. Factory’s customers include engineering teams at Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks. The startup was founded in …

Upscale AI in talks to raise at B valuation, says report

Upscale AI in talks to raise at $2B valuation, says report

AI infrastructure company Upscale AI is reportedly in talks to nab its third funding round since launching just seven months ago, according to Bloomberg. This latest round — which aims to raise around $180 million to $200 million — would value the company at about $2 billion. The company announced a $200 million Series A in January and a $100 million seed round in September, when it first launched. Investors in the company include Tiger Global Management, Xora Innovation, and Premji Invest. Notably, Upscale AI has yet to release a product. However, it’s said to focus on building custom chips and on the infrastructure to enable them to communicate effectively. The company is betting on a full-stack solution and open standards as being the future of scalable AI infrastructure. The rumored valuation and raise are part of the startup playbook in this age of AI, where companies grow fast and valuations grow faster, but the hope for the next big thing outpaces it all. Source link

AI data center startup Fluidstack in talks for B round at B valuation months after hitting .5B, says report

AI data center startup Fluidstack in talks for $1B round at $18B valuation months after hitting $7.5B, says report

Fluidstack, a startup that builds specialized data centers for AI companies, is in talks to raise a $1 billion round at an $18 billion valuation, potentially led by Jane Street, Bloomberg reports. Should this deal come to fruition, it would more than double Fluidstack’s valuation in a matter of months. In December, the company was reportedly raising around $700 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, sources told Bloomberg at the time, although it didn’t formally announce the close of that round. That round was said to be led by Situational Awareness, an AGI-focused fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, and backed by Stripe’s Collison brothers, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and the AI investor and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. Talks were apparently still ongoing for this round in February, at least with Google, which was considering kicking in $100 million to the round, The Wall Street Journal reported. There’s good reason for the hype over Fluidstack. In November, Anthropic announced that it had signed a $50 billion deal with the startup to build data …

Nvidia-backed SiFive hits .65 billion valuation for open AI chips

Nvidia-backed SiFive hits $3.65 billion valuation for open AI chips

SiFive, a company founded in 2015 by the UC Berkeley engineers who created an open source chip design, has landed a $400 million oversubscribed round that values the company at $3.65 billion. This deal is interesting for a bunch of reasons. For one, SiFive’s RISC-V open chip design is based on the RISC processor, not Intel’s x86 or ARM, the two major types of CPUs that currently feed Nvidia’s GPU computer system AI empire. Also, Nvidia was investor in this round, alongside a long list of VCs, private equity, and hedge funds. The round was led by Atreides Management, founded by former Fidelity investor bigwig Gavin Baker. (Atreides was also an investor in Cerebras Systems $1 billion round). Other investors in the round include Apollo Global Management, D1 Capital Partners, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Sutter Hill Ventures, and others. SiFive’s business model is like Arm’s was in years gone by — it licenses its chip designs to those who modify them for their own needs and does not sell the chips themselves. (In March, Arm …

Firmus, the ‘Southgate’ AI data center builder backed by Nvidia, hits .5B valuation

Firmus, the ‘Southgate’ AI data center builder backed by Nvidia, hits $5.5B valuation

Asia AI data center provider Firmus on Monday announced a fresh $505 million raise led by Coatue at a $5.5 billion post-money valuation. With this round, Firmus has raised $1.35 billion in six months, it says. The Singapore-based data center company previously raised AU$330 million (approximately $215 million) at an AU$1.85 billion ($1.2 billion) valuation from investors, including Nvidia. Firmus is developing an energy-efficient “AI factory” network of data centers in Australia and Tasmania, a project it dubs Project Southgate. It is using Nvidia’s reference designs for building these efficient data centers. These new data centers will use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform — the chip giant’s next-gen AI computing system succeeding its Blackwell architecture, expected to ship in the second half of 2026. Firmus originally provided cooling technologies for Bitcoin mining and has become yet another crypto-roots-turned-AI provider company that investors love. Source link

Can orbital data centers help justify a massive valuation for SpaceX?

Can orbital data centers help justify a massive valuation for SpaceX?

SpaceX has reportedly filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering in which the company would raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. And according to CEO Elon Musk, orbital data centers will be a big part of SpaceX’s future. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed Musk’s vision, as well as other companies that are pursuing similar goals. It will take significant tech development and massive capital spending to make orbital data centers a reality, but as Sean noted, with “opposition happening around the country to data centers in general,” executives like Musk and Jeff Bezos may be thinking, “The engineering challenge may be less than the social challenge back here” on Earth. Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. Sean: This has been a trend — I would say a rapidly forming trend — over the last half year to a year, and we have different examples of it. We have SpaceX; I feel like in some ways, Elon …

Kalshi reportedly raises B at B valuation in funding amid regulatory pressure

Kalshi reportedly raises $1B at $22B valuation in funding amid regulatory pressure

Kalshi is said to have pulled in more than $1 billion in a fresh funding round, pushing its valuation up to about $22 billion, according to sources cited by The Wall Street Journal. This appears to be a sharp jump from just a couple of months ago. In December, we reported that the prediction market platform raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, meaning its worth has effectively doubled in a short span. The earlier round included backing from Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and ARK Invest. This latest raise appears to have been led by Coatue Management, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because the details have not been made public. Kalshi raises $1 billion in latest funding round amid regulatory uncertainty What stands out is the timing. Investors seem to be leaning in even as legal and regulatory pressures build rather than fade. Kalshi is currently dealing with challenges at the state level, including criminal charges in Arizona, while also operating under the oversight of the Commodity …

Sales automation startup Rox AI hits .2B valuation, sources say

Sales automation startup Rox AI hits $1.2B valuation, sources say

Rox, a startup developing autonomous AI agents to boost sales productivity, has raised a new funding round valuing the company at $1.2 billion, according to multiple sources. The funding included a lead investment from returning backer General Catalyst, two of the people said. Rox and General Catalyst did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. At the time of the fundraise, which closed last year, Rox was projected to close 2025 with $8 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to two people familiar with the deal. In November 2024, Rox announced it had raised a total of $50 million, including a seed round led by Sequoia and a Series A round led by General Catalyst, with participation from GV. Rox was founded in 2024 by the former chief growth officer of New Relic, Ishan Mukherjee. Mukherjee joined New Relic following its 2020 acquisition of Pixie, a software monitoring startup he co-founded. The startup positions itself as an intelligent revenue operating system that plugs into a company’s current software setup — from Salesforce to Zendesk …