AI
🔥 DeepSeek Asked for $7 Billion. The Checks Came Back at $12 Billion.
DeepSeek went out for about $7 billion and investors came back with at least $12 billion, in a Tencent- and CATL-led round ahead of a planned 2027 IPO.
Mergers & Acquisitions
🔥 Schneider Electric Just Dropped $22.6 Billion on PTC — Its Biggest Bet Ever, and the Market Flinched
Schneider Electric agreed to buy PTC for $22.6 billion in cash — a 42.3% premium and its largest acquisition ever. Then its own stock fell 9%. Inside the industrial-software megabet.
Robotics
🔥 FieldAI Builds Brains for Robots It Doesn't Make — and Just Hit a $10 Billion Valuation
FieldAI signed a term sheet for $700M at a $10 billion valuation, up 5x from $2 billion in just over a year. The twist: it builds software for robots it doesn't make.
Semiconductors
🔥 Micron Made $54 Billion in 90 Days — and Still Can't Make Enough Memory
Micron just booked $54.23 billion in a single quarter, up 379% year over year, as AI's hunger for high-bandwidth memory turns a commodity-chip maker into one of the most profitable hardware businesses on Earth.
Privacy
🔥 A Santa Fe Jury Just Handed Meta a $219.5 Billion Math Problem
A New Mexico jury found Meta liable for 43.9 million privacy violations. At $5,000 apiece, that's a $219.5 billion ceiling — here's the wild math, and why a judge may trim it.
AI
🔥 Google Flew Four AI Chips to Orbit. They Only Run 15 Minutes at a Time.
Google flew four Trillium TPUs into orbit on October 1 for Project Suncatcher. The chips survived radiation, but the real wall is an 18x launch-cost gap and 15-minute compute bursts.
Cybersecurity
🔥 Kevin Mandia Points 26,000 AI Hackers at Your Network — and Just Raised $255.5 Million to Do It
Kevin Mandia sold Mandiant to Google for $5.4B. His new startup Armadin just raised $255.5M at a $2.5B valuation to point swarms of AI agents at your own network, before real attackers do.
AI
🔥 Instinct Quadrupled to $10 Billion in a Month — No App, No User Count
Instinct, a 23-year-old founder's invite-only AI assistant, raised $1B at a $10B valuation — 4x its price from a month earlier, with no app and no public user numbers.
Defense Tech
🔥 Tekever Logged 50,000 Hours Over Ukraine. Now It's Worth $6.4 Billion.
Portugal's Tekever just raised $580 million at a $6.4 billion valuation, co-led by the University of California's endowment, on the strength of 50,000 flight hours over Ukraine.
AI
🔥 One in Six U.S. Apartments Already Runs This AI — and It Just Hit $4 Billion
EliseAI's software already runs one in six U.S. apartments. Its new $350M round at a $4B valuation, led by a16z and Bessemer, is a bet that the biggest AI money hides in the admin work of housing and healthcare.
Fintech
🔥 Y'all Street Just Pulled $155 Million — and Its First Listings Off Nasdaq
Dallas-based Texas Stock Exchange raised $155M, pushing total funding to $430M, after pulling its first listings off Nasdaq and giving the NYSE-Nasdaq duopoly a credible third rival.
AI
🔥 The $6.2 Billion Bet That Your Game Clips Can Teach Robots to Move
General Intuition just closed $220M at a $6.2B valuation, betting that billions of gameplay clips a year can teach robots and self-driving cars how to move.