Funding & Deals - SiliconNoon (Page 27)

The Arena

xAI co-founder's River AI raises $1B for home AI computers

A year after leaving the lab he co-founded with Elon Musk, Igor Babuschkin is back with a billion-dollar war chest and a contrarian thesis: the next big AI platform shouldn't live in a data center. It should live in your house. xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin's new startup River AI has raised $1 billion — a round led by General Catalyst, per a Techmeme report on a New York Times story — to build computers for homes and small businesses that run AI locally, owned and controlled by the user…

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Anthropic courts investors ahead of a blockbuster fall IPO

Anthropic owns the news cycle this morning: the lab is on a pre-IPO roadshow that could produce the biggest listing in history, and it just switched on invisible watermarks for every new Claude model — transparency work aimed squarely at the scrutiny a public debut will bring. Anthropic is meeting with potential investors to shore up confidence ahead of a planned IPO that could launch in September or early October — what the Wall Street Journal describes as potentially the biggest IPO ever.

The Arena

OpenAI closes $7B tender offer at $852B valuation

Money and governance dominated the AI news cycle overnight: OpenAI handed employees $7 billion in liquidity at a flat $852 billion valuation, Anthropic canceled a planned price hike on its workhorse model, and OpenAI's head of ethics walked out the door. OpenAI completed a roughly $7 billion tender offer, buying shares from current and former employees at a valuation of $852 billion — unchanged from its most recent funding round.

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ChatGPT Business gets $125 Premium seats with 5x usage

OpenAI is putting a price on uninterrupted work: Premium seats for ChatGPT Business cost five times the standard rate, but they remove the usage ceiling that power users keep slamming into. OpenAI is adding Premium seats to ChatGPT Business — $125 per user per month ($100 on annual billing) for 5x more usage than the standard $25 seat, with the five-hour usage limit removed entirely.

The Arena

Lambda sells $917M loan to fund Nvidia GPU fleet

Money and machines drove the AI news cycle today: the buildout's financing is shifting from equity to debt, a sanctioned hacking unit is assembling a private AI stack, and China's most-used consumer assistant started charging for referrals. Lambda, the Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider, is selling a $917 million leveraged loan to finance a chip purchase tied to Nvidia — the strongest signal yet that the AI buildout is now fueled by debt, not just equity.

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Intel raises $15B in stock offering to fund AI buildout

Intel is cashing in on its 2026 comeback: the chipmaker announced a $15 billion common stock offering Monday to fund its AI manufacturing buildout, turning a nearly-tripled share price into cash for the foundry ramp. It is the clearest signal yet that Intel's turnaround is now a capital-hungry growth story — and that the AI capex cycle is still demanding more chips than anyone can make. Intel announced a $15 billion underwritten public offering of common stock on Monday, using its surging…

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Corma raises $60M for defensive cyber AI

The AI-vs-AI security race just got its first dedicated funding play: a fresh lab with Sequoia's backing is betting that defenders need frontier models of their own, not better tools bolted onto the old ones. Corma, a Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based startup building foundation models for defensive cybersecurity, emerged from stealth with a $60 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with Khosla Ventures and Coatue participating.

The Arena

Nvidia invests up to $3B in power firm behind Stargate

The AI buildout's newest bottleneck is the grid, and the industry's biggest players are moving accordingly: Nvidia is buying into the electricity developer behind Stargate, Microsoft is fast-tracking its next in-house chip, and an AI notetaker left more than 181,000 meetings exposed. Nvidia has agreed to invest up to $3 billion in Lancium, the Texas power-infrastructure developer behind the Stargate AI campus, according to three people familiar with the deal reported by The Information.

The Arena

Ex-Huawei team raises $70M for fold-up home robot

China's consumer-robotics capital keeps compounding — a Shenzhen home-robot startup banked a half-billion yuan from blue-chip investors this week — while Docker is betting that isolation, not permission prompts, is how coding agents should run free. Knowin, a Shenzhen startup founded by a former Huawei generative-AI lead, has raised 500 million yuan (about $70 million) in an early-stage angel++ round led by Matrix Partners China, with Redpoint Ventures, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, Huadeng…

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MagicShape's token factory lands a second round in three months

Chinese AI-infrastructure startup MagicShape (魔形智能) has closed its A-round just three months after its Pre-A, a sign of how fast capital is consolidating around the "token factory" model that powers much of the current open-model boom. "Token super-factory" MagicShape announced an A-round led by Yida Capital, with several strategic backers joining and existing shareholders adding over-subscribed follow-on investment — barely three months after its multi-hundred-million-yuan Pre-A round in May.

The Arena

Unitree prices $9B humanoid IPO, first in mainland China

The humanoid robot industry gets its first public-market scorecard: Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou maker of the backflipping G1 and the robot dog that became a meme, has priced a Shanghai IPO that makes it the first humanoid company to list in mainland China. Unitree Robotics priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at 150.80 yuan ($22.34) per share, setting up a roughly $900 million raise that values the company at about $9 billion — the first humanoid robotics listing in mainland China.

The Frontier

Zhipu confirms GLM-5.3 launch as Goldman raises outlook 35%

China's model race is shifting from benchmarks to balance sheets: Zhipu's founder confirmed a new flagship, GLM-5.3, is coming, and Goldman Sachs just raised the company's full-year revenue forecast by 35 percent. Zhipu's founder has confirmed that GLM-5.3, the next flagship in the GLM-5 line, is about to launch — and the market is already pricing it as China's shot at the global frontier.

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