Private equity buys companies, strips out costs, and flips them. A two-year-old startup called Beacon has raised hundreds of millions to do almost the opposite, and to let AI do the heavy lifting. Beacon, an “AI-native” holding company based in Toronto…
A Shahed attack drone costs tens of thousands of euros. The missiles traditionally fired to shoot one down can cost a million or more. A French startup has raised €50mn to fix that maths. Alta Ares, a Paris-based defence-technology company founded in 2…
AI is running out of power, and out of places to put it, on Earth. A Los Angeles startup wants to solve both problems by leaving the planet. Orbital, a space-infrastructure company building AI data centres in low Earth orbit, has raised a $5mn oversubs…
America wants to build robots, not just import them. A New York startup has just raised $200mn to do exactly that. Standard Bots has closed a $200mn round that values the company at $1bn, minting a fresh robotics unicorn. The financing was led by Gener…
Most startups raise money because they need it. NinjaOne has just raised more than $400m to make the opposite point. The Austin-based IT-operations company said on Tuesday that a fresh round of Series C extensions has more than doubled its valuation to…
Six months ago, ICEYE was worth €2.4bn. Today it is worth more than €10bn. Few numbers capture Europe’s defence-tech boom as bluntly as that. The Finnish satellite company has raised €450mn in a Series F round led by General Atlantic, valuing it at ove…
Europe has the ambition to reach space on its own. What it lacks is rockets that work. Isar Aerospace has just raised €270mn to fix the first problem, and in less than a week it gets another chance to fix the second. The Munich startup, one of Europe’s…
Databricks is in talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation of between $165 billion and $175 billion, The Information reported on Monday. The round could begin as soon as next month and would represent a 23% to 31% increase from the $134 billion…
Perplexity AI plans to go public in 2028, and CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC that timeline has not changed because OpenAI and Anthropic are now filing for IPOs. “Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028, so that still rem…
OpenAI submitted confidential IPO paperwork to the SEC on Monday, the company confirmed. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are advising on a potential listing that could come as soon as the autumn, according to people familiar with the matter. The filin…