This Week's Opportunities
Baseten and Physical Intelligence are both negotiating at valuations above $20B; four early-stage community projects are raising.
Baseten is in talks to raise about $2B in two tranches, at $26B and then up to $30B
Physical Intelligence is in talks on a round of at least $1B at about $20B
Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 on October 26 for a Nasdaq listing
A mining robotics project (raising) builds autonomous cleanup robots for underground mines and already has large mining customers
A chip process project (raising) uses AI models that understand fab physics to run process experiments, shortening the path from lab to volume production
Want an intro to any of them, or want your project featured here? Just reply.
Our Take
Inference chips had their biggest week in six months. Fractile, FuriosaAI and NanoCoreChip raised $1.53B between them, all for inference-only chips; since May, the previous single-week high for inference chip companies was about $1.05B.
Holding companies that rebuild old businesses with AI are now buying public companies. Thrive Holdings, backed by Thrive Capital, signed a deal to buy home security company ADT at $10 a share, an enterprise value of about $15.3B.
Industry software leaders are paying business prices for AI-native peers. Guidewire is buying insurance AI underwriting company hyperexponential for $1.7B in cash, and Itaú Unibanco is buying NeoSpace AI for BRL 2.925B.
Canada Puts Up to C$1.6 Billion Into Cohere: State Anchoring Moves From Chips to Models (Signal)
After 21 VCs Turned Down Anthropic, Spark Bought In at SBF's Price (Thesis)
The Ledger of 158,000 Startups: 88% of Founders Walk Away With Nothing (Thesis)
Market Signals
This week's largest round went to manufacturing. Re:Build Manufacturing raised $2.1B, co-led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase; event contracts exchange Kalshi raised a $1B Series G at a $40B post-money valuation.
Upcoming Events
SVTR Spring 2027 Global Venture Camp · CES × Silicon Valley: second round closes November 30.
1:1 with execs from OpenAI, NVIDIA, NEA, Cisco (November 14, Berkeley, paid, approval required): main-stage talks for pre-seed and seed founders, followed by small roundtables.
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