Series funding ($200M) (Arena)
Arena raises $200M at a $3.1B valuation, broken live on ThursdAI
AI Year in Review · Oct 10, 2025 – Oct 10, 2026
Funding & business
30 stories in this category.
Series B (Nous Research)
Nous Research raises a $90M Series B
World Labs acquisition (AMD)
AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2B in stock
Instinct assistant (Instinct)
Instinct reportedly in talks at a $10B valuation, ships Concierge phone calls and TOTP support
Acquisition of OpenRouter (Stripe)
Stripe acquires OpenRouter for a reported $8B+, its largest deal ever
Theseus Infrastructure
Anthropic, Macquarie Asset Management and GIC announced Theseus Infrastructure, a platform that will “develop, operate and lease data center infrastructure at scale to Anthropic under long-term agreements,” starting in
Google DeepMind leadership
In a post signed by Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis, Google said Hassabis will hand over day-to-day operations of Google DeepMind to become its Chair and Alphabet’s Chief Scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes Senior
Acquisition of The Interaction Company (Poke) (Cognition)
Devin-maker Cognition acquires Poke, the AI agent that texts inside Apple Messages
Series C (Together AI)
Together AI raises $800M Series C at an $8.3B valuation
Cursor acquisition (Cursor)
SpaceX/xAI reportedly acquires Cursor for $60B
Anthropic $65B Series H at $965B
Anthropic’s valuation surpasses OpenAI’s.
Anthropic x SpaceX compute deal (300 MW)
~220k NVIDIA GPUs; Claude Code limits doubled afterwards.
Cursor acquisition deal (xAI)
SpaceX/xAI and Cursor strike $10B collab with $60B acquisition clause
Monthly roundup: ThursdAI Apr 2026 ↗
Monthly roundup
NewBird AI pivot (Allbirds (NewBird AI))
Allbirds rebrands as NewBird AI, raises $50M to buy GPUs, stock up 600%+
$122B funding round (OpenAI)
OpenAI closes $122B funding round at $852B valuation
TBPN (OpenAI)
OpenAI acquires live tech media show TBPN
Monthly roundup: ThursdAI Apr 2026 ↗
Monthly roundup
OpenAI raises $122B at $852B
Largest private financing in AI history.
Astral (uv, Ruff, ty) (OpenAI)
OpenAI acquires Astral, makers of uv and Ruff, to join the Codex team
OpenClaw acqui-hire (OpenAI)
OpenAI acqui-hires OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger
Monthly roundup: ThursdAI Feb 2026 ↗
Monthly roundup
Entire Checkpoints (Entire)
Entire raises $60M seed, ships first OSS release 'Checkpoints'
SpaceX acquires xAI
Combined company valued ~ $1.25T.
Klein team acqui-hire (Codex) (OpenAI)
Klein team acqui-hired by OpenAI Codex
Monthly roundup: ThursdAI Jan 2026 ↗
Monthly roundup
Torch Health (OpenAI)
OpenAI acquires Torch Health to power GPT Health
Monthly roundup: ThursdAI Jan 2026 ↗
Monthly roundup
xAI Series E (xAI)
xAI raises $20B Series E at $230B valuation with NVIDIA backing
Zhipu AI IPO (Zhipu AI (GLM))
Zhipu AI becomes first major LLM company to IPO, raising $558M
Groq acquisition (NVIDIA)
NVIDIA acquires Groq team and licenses its tech for ~$20B
Monthly roundup: ThursdAI Jan 2026 ↗
Monthly roundup
Project Stargate (OpenAI (with SoftBank & Oracle))
Project Stargate: $500B AI infrastructure commitment announced
Thinking Machines Lab (Thinking Machines Lab)
Thinking Machines Lab launches with a billion-dollar round
Marimo (CoreWeave)
CoreWeave acquires Marimo, the reactive Python notebook company
OpenAI completes for-profit restructuring
Becomes OpenAI Group PBC under the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation.