Business & Startups

SpaceX alumni building remote-controlled construction equipment land $115 million fund round

TerraFirma on Tuesday said it raised $115 to support new hires and the building of a new factory and mission control center.

Chai Discovery Triples Its Valuation to $3.8 Billion in Seven Months

Chai Discovery, the two-year-old AI drug design startup founded by former OpenAI and Meta researchers, closed a $400 million Series C at a $3.8 billion valuation, tripling its price tag in seven months. The round, led by Index Ventures, includes repeat backing from OpenAI itself. Its models now design antibodies for Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Novartis.

Decentralized AI project Nous Research in talks to raise $75M at $1.5B valuation: report

Nous Research is raising at least $75 million led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, per TechCrunch.

1Password moves into AI cost management, betting that token spend is the next enterprise budget crisis

1Password on Tuesday launched AI Spend and Consumption Management, a new capability embedded in its SaaS Manager platform that gives IT and finance teams a unified, real-time view of how their organizations consume and spend on AI services from vendors including Anthropic, Cursor, and OpenAI. The move marks the latest strategic expansion for a company that built its reputation on password management for consumers and, over the past three years, has aggressively repositioned itself as a broader identity security and SaaS governance platform for enterprise buyers. With this release, 1Password is staking a claim in one of enterprise technology's newest and most chaotic budget categories: the consumption-based cost of large language models. "Executives want teams to build faster with AI, but that speed is creating a new kind of spending pressure," Greg Henry, 1Password's chief financial officer, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "Developers are consuming tokens at a pace that traditional budgets weren't built to manage, and IT and finance teams are being asked to forecast and justify AI investments without a clear view of what's actually driving costs." The product, now in public preview with broad availability planned for fall 2026, connects directly to vendor admin APIs to pull token-level consumption data daily. It normalizes that data across providers into a single dashboard and allows organizations to set vendor-level spend limits, configure threshold-based alerts via Slack and email, and break down usage by team, user, vendor, and model. Why traditional software budgets can't keep up with AI token pricing The core challenge 1Password is targeting is structural. Traditional SaaS pricing operates on a per-seat, per-year model that is easy to budget and reconcile. AI pricing does not. Every API call to Claude, GPT-5.6, or a Cursor-powered coding assistant consumes tokens, and the cost of those tokens varies by model, by input versus output, and by the

Chamath Palihapitiya Returns to Running a Company With a $135 Million AI Coding Bet

Chamath Palihapitiya has closed a $135 million Series A for 8090 Labs and taken the CEO title himself, his first operating role since leaving Facebook in 2011. The bet: regulated industries like healthcare, insurance and government need an AI coding platform built for compliance, not just autocomplete, and Palihapitiya's own SPAC record is the biggest question mark hanging over it.

Hut 8 price target hiked to $165 at Benchmark as AI pivot reshapes valuation

Mark Palmer said Hut 8's Beacon Point project transforms the company into an AI infrastructure platform with a long growth runway.

Hynix Isn't Selling Shares to Cash Out. It's Funding a $26.5 Billion Factory Bet.

The opportunity behind these recently raised funds is nothing less than amazing.

Flex, which offers AI-based payment tools, credit, and more to mid-sized companies, raised a $70M Series B1 led by Halo Fund, a source says at a $1.2B valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

Aditya Soni / Reuters: Flex, which offers AI-based payment tools, credit, and more to mid-sized companies, raised a $70M Series B1 led by Halo Fund, a source says at a $1.2B valuation — Flex, an AI startup pitching itself as a one-stop shop for the banking needs of mid-sized business owners …

LeapXpert raises $180 million to govern the texts Wall Street already sends

LeapXpert closed a $180 million growth round led by Riverwood Capital on June 30, with Portage Ventures also participating. The fintech, which archives regulated employees' WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal and WeChat messages, is now expanding beyond banking into compliance for sports franchises caught up in the prediction-market boom.

They Raised Hogs on an 89-Acre Farm and Couldn’t Get Out of Debt. Then a Data Center Made Them a $22 Million Offer.

The AI data-center gold rush is turning overlooked rural land into gold, minting an unlikely class of millionaires.

Where Will Nvidia Stock Be in 2030?

Can this AI chip giant step on the gas once again and deliver big gains to investors over the next five years?

Flex raises $70m from Ryan Smith’s Halo fund to take its AI private bank global

Six months ago, Flex raised $60m and called it a Series B. On Tuesday it said it had raised another $70m, and rather than move down the alphabet, it settled on a Series B1. The round was led by Halo, the investment firm set up last year by Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith, who owns the […] This story continues at The Next Web

Rupert Murdoch's estranged son is set to make more from his SpaceX investment than he gained from his father's empire

AI drug design startup Chai Discovery raised $400M led by Index at a $3.8B valuation, as it pitches its models as AI infrastructure for pharmaceutical companies (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times: AI drug design startup Chai Discovery raised $400M led by Index at a $3.8B valuation, as it pitches its models as AI infrastructure for pharmaceutical companies — The fund-raising values the company at $3.8 billion and underscores investor interest in using artificial intelligence to tackle problems like drug discovery.

IBM reports preliminary Q2 revenue of $17.2B, below $17.9B est., as CEO Arvind Krishna says customers are shifting spending to chips and servers; IBM falls 20%+ (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)

Amy Thomson / Bloomberg: IBM reports preliminary Q2 revenue of $17.2B, below $17.9B est., as CEO Arvind Krishna says customers are shifting spending to chips and servers; IBM falls 20%+ — International Business Machines Corp. shares slid after the company reported preliminary second-quarter sales that fell short of expectations …

So Far, 2026 Is A Solid Year For Cybersecurity Startup Funding

The first quarter of 2026 was a more robust period for funding than the second, with privacy and cybersecurity startups pulling in $4.4 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing in Q2. That marked a decline of around 30% from the prior quarter and year-ago levels.