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Monzo is courting private equity investors after takeover talks with Nubank collapsed over the UK neobank's £10 billion asking price, the FT reports. The digital bank has held early-stage discussions with CVC and Advent International about selling a stake of up to 15%. Nubank, valued at about $65 billion, said it would instead focus on growing in its home market and the US.
Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery company, is in early talks to raise funds at a valuation of at least $40 billion - and potentially as much as $50 billion, Bloomberg reports. The DeepMind spinout raised $2.1 billion in Series B funding five months ago and has partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis focused on treating cancer and immune disorders.
Nous Research, the startup behind the open source Hermes Agent, has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital. Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and drives an estimated 2.5% of global AI token usage; the new capital will fund an enterprise push with "Hermes for Businesses."
Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, a one-trillion-parameter multimodal model code-named "Le Chonk," with weights due for release on October 27. The model has 49 billion active parameters and was trained in roughly two months on 4,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's own European data centres. The Paris-based company pitches it as the strongest open-weight model built outside China, aimed at enterprises and governments running AI on sovereign infrastructure.
Lambda, the Nvidia-backed neocloud, is raising up to $4 billion in a final round before its planned 2027 IPO at a $14.5 billion valuation, the WSJ reports. The round is led by Blackstone and Coatue. Lambda's backlog jumped from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September, driven primarily by a $35 billion commitment from Anthropic to rent Nvidia chips.
DeepSeek is close to securing at least $12 billion in its latest funding round, exceeding its own target ahead of a landmark IPO planned for early 2027. Tencent and battery maker CATL committed among the largest amounts; the round values the Chinese AI lab at roughly $75 billion. DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei accelerators at a new data centre in Inner Mongolia.
Moonshot AI has closed its final private fundraising round at a valuation of about $50 billion and is heading toward a Hong Kong IPO in the first quarter of 2027, Bloomberg reports. The maker of the Kimi K3 open model is considering raising up to $5 billion in the listing. Its annual recurring revenue is expected to double to $2 billion by December.
Tech billionaires account for all of the $845 billion in wealth gains on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index this year, while non-tech billionaires lost a combined $62 billion. Nine of the index's top 10 names owe their fortunes to firms earning at least some revenue from AI. A backlash is building: a 5% tax on billionaires will be on the ballot in California in November, with similar measures proposed in other states.
OpenAI told investors it hit roughly $50 billion in annualised revenue at the end of September - about $20 billion below the widely reported $68 billion figure, which included gross revenue from partners. Shares of Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave fell 3-8% on the news. OpenAI, under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation ahead of an expected 2027 IPO, is also in early talks about a new funding round of around $30 billion.
Masayoshi Son is seeking to raise up to $100 billion from Gulf investors to scale up SoftBank's AI bets, the FT reports. The money would seed a fund that buys companies and uses AI to improve their operations, with SoftBank's robotics business Roze playing a key role. The effort comes as OpenAI's delayed IPO and fears over SoftBank's AI exposure weigh on the group's shares, down more than 30% since June's peak.
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