Funding & Business

Stripe confirmed its OpenRouter deal on August 19 without disclosing terms. The NYT put it at $7.5 billion, close to six times the $1.3 billion valuation OpenRouter raised at in May.

AI accounting startup Rillet has raised a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. Iconiq led the round,

Starcloud added $250 million to its Series A at a $2.3 billion valuation, with Nvidia and Cisco joining as it races to book rocket launches before Falcon 9 winds down.

A round announcement gives you an amount and a valuation. It leaves out the terms, the share count and the revenue those numbers are priced against. Here is what is checkable, sourced from the AI Index, Epoch AI and SEC filings.

Adoption is close to universal and deployment is not. Four studies, from MIT Project NANDA to the US Census Bureau, on how much enterprise AI reaches production and why the rest stalls.

Etched raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation led by Jane Street, its first customer, a month after a $10.3 billion Series C.

One in five US businesses use AI. Here’s where the measured returns show up, what the seat licences cost, and where the evidence runs out.

Google won the bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines’ internal business data with a $10 million bid, outrunning Mercor at $7.5 million. The 14 August filing sets out what is in the haul, what is carved out, and who pays to scrub it.

Higgsfield raised a $400M Series B at a $5.4B valuation, four times its January mark. Annualized revenue is $700M, which is a run rate, not booked revenue.

Wispr raised $280 million at a $2 billion valuation, close to three times its November mark, and previewed Canto, a speech model built for noisy rooms.

Anthropic told investors its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and $9 billion at the end of 2025. Here is what the figure rests on, and what the IPO filing would have to confirm.

Groq closed a $350 million Series A at a $3.5 billion valuation, roughly half what it carried last September. Here’s what the primary announcement says, and where the coverage disagrees.