Rakuten priced ¥400B ($2.5B) of yen bonds on Friday, its largest yen bond sale, with ¥360B going to retail investors. The 5.5-year debt carries a 4.37% coupon. Japanese companies have sold about ¥3.2T of retail bonds this year, already above 2025’s rec…
Matters, a Stockholm startup building an AI-powered consumer bank, has raised $5m in pre-seed funding as it comes out of stealth. Swedish angel investor Jakob Johansson led the round. Per Österström founded the company in April. He founded Sambla, a No…
CarbonAI has raised $12M led by Cowboy Ventures for AI agents that handle underwriting, due diligence and post-close monitoring on commercial real estate loans. The EU AI Act treats consumer credit decisions as high-risk but not corporate lending, a li…
Modal, a cloud company that runs AI models and code for developers, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $750 million in a Series D round at a $15.75 billion valuation. Accel led the round, and Kleiner Perkins joined. All of Modal’s existing inves…
Siemens has bought into Skeleton Technologies, an Estonian maker of energy storage systems. With this, the deal values Skeleton at more than $1 billion, its CEO Taavi Madiberk told Bloomberg. The deal closed this month and was worth more than $100 mill…
Uvi, a startup that feeds company knowledge to AI agents, has emerged from stealth with $7.5 million in seed funding. CT Innovations and Cardumen led the funding round, with Mana VC, 91 Ventures, and Gaingles VC also participating. Uvi plans to use the…
Tallinn startup Cachet, which sells insurance to ride-hailing, scooter, and gig-work apps, has closed a funding round led by Spintop Ventures. The deal raises its total capital to about €11 million. Moreover, Truffle Capital and Icebreaker.vc, both ear…
DeepSeek has agreed to lead the first funding round for Winverse AI, a start-up building AI for robots, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The seed round is worth tens of millions of dollars and would value Winverse at about $4…
Pay, a Nigerian payments and lending app, has filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange, Yinka Adegoke reported for Semafor. Earlier reports put its likely valuation at about $4bn. The company filed on 9 October, bne IntelliNews reported. It will tr…
Nvidia is in talks to buy Reflection AI or invest more in the US open-weight model developer, the Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. TNW has not independently verified the report. The talks are at a…