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Nous Research, maker of the open-source Hermes Agent, confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital participating, TechCrunch reported. Total funding is $158 million. The money backs Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise product for deploying customised agents. Usage figures are the company's own estimates or OpenRouter-based, and the revenue figures come from The Wall Street Journal, as reported by TechCrunch.

Butterfly Effect, the parent of AI agent maker Manus, said on Oct. 8 it raised more than $500 million in a round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (HongShan) and ZhenFund following on. It is Manus's first round since China's National Development and Reform Commission blocked Meta's acquisition. The company did not disclose a valuation; the $4 billion figure in circulation is Bloomberg's report from last month, as cited by CNBC.

Nvidia-backed neocloud Lambda is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation in what would be its final private round before a planned 2027 IPO, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar and an LP letter. Blackstone and Coatue are leading. The letter puts Lambda's backlog at $50 billion in September, up from $15 billion in June. TechCrunch infers much of that jump from Anthropic's reported $35 billion commitment. Single-origin WSJ reporting; figures attributed accordingly — the round is not confirmed closed.

Palo Alto startup Vinci announced a $250 million Series B on Oct. 6 valuing it at $1.5 billion, co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora, with AMD Ventures, Eclipse, Khosla Ventures, Madrona and others participating. Vinci sells Continuous Physics Reasoning for thermal and related simulation in chip and hardware design; CEO Hardik Kabaria told Reuters the 70-person company aims to grow from two pilot deployments to 20. Speed and accuracy claims are company-stated and, per TNW, not independently verified. Prior raise: $46 million (seed plus Series A) in December 2025.

SAP and TechWolf announced on Oct. 6 an agreement for SAP to acquire the Ghent-based AI work-intelligence company whose platform maps tasks, skills and labour-market context into a "context graph for work." TechWolf is expected to become an intelligent core of SAP SuccessFactors; closing is expected in Q4 2026 subject to regulatory approval. Terms were not disclosed. SAP's Manoj Swaminathan framed the graph as a grounding layer that makes token usage more efficient and lowers the cost of deploying workforce agents. Both public accounts trace to SAP's announcement.

Bloomberg reported on Oct. 6, citing unnamed people, that DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan (~$12 billion) in its latest round, with CATL and Tencent among the largest commitments, and that Moonshot AI has closed its final private round at about $50 billion ahead of a Hong Kong IPO targeted for Q1 2027. DeepSeek’s round has not closed; it had targeted a valuation of about 500 billion yuan. Every figure traces to Bloomberg, and none of the companies has confirmed.

Over the weekend Elon Musk replied on X to a Culpium note that TSMC is exploring ways to help operate Terafab — the planned Tesla/SpaceX semiconductor plant in Texas where Intel is the only named process partner — saying “Just discussions, but something may come of it.” Business Insider reports Intel fell about 3% at Monday’s open (low $115.31). No deal has been announced. Price figures here are intraday/premarket as reported; the session close was not re-checked.

In an Oct. 5 post, OpenAI said it will test a new visual ad format in ChatGPT during image generation with an initial group of U.S. advertisers later this month. Ads are labeled and kept separate from the generated image; OpenAI says they do not influence answers. The same update expands conversion, attribution and geo-incrementality partners, and starts brand-suitability pilots with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science in a controlled test environment without access to private conversations. Partner case studies — not audits — include WeightWatchers’ attributed CPA 15.3% below its paid-search blend per DV Rockerbox.

The Information reports that Microsoft has cut a projected ≥$1 billion 2026 internal Anthropic spend by more than a third, and that Meta has reduced Claude Code users from about 60,000 to about 30,000 by pushing Muse Code and MetaCode. A Microsoft spokesperson said staff are being steered to GitHub Copilot, though engineers can still choose other models. Meta did not comment. Figures are unnamed sources in one paywalled report; Azure and Bedrock customer spend are not covered.

Second Vice Minister of Science and ICT Ryu Je-myung said at a Friday (Oct. 2) briefing that Korea will start a state-backed frontier AI project next year, aimed at competing with leading Chinese open-source models and funded by government equity rather than grants. The Korea Times (Oct. 5) reports a 4.7 trillion won ($3.48 billion) earmark — 3.9 trillion for 10,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs and 800 billion for training data — with participating companies required to match the state’s stake. Structure, anchor firms and governance are still open; the project needs next year’s budget.

Updated Oct. 9, afternoon: Bloomberg reports that Firmus is exploring a private funding round to raise as much as US$3 billion after withdrawing its ASX listing. Separately, Bloomberg reports that DayOne Data Centers, Firmus's partner on its first data centre project in Batam, Indonesia, has been in preliminary talks with banks for weeks on a potential US$500 million bond and intends to push on. Reuters reports, citing people involved, that orders began to be pulled after CDC Data Centres' chief executive said their 1.6 GW plan was no longer underway, and that a person involved says a Nasdaq listing would follow the private round; Firmus declined to comment on Nasdaq. Earlier on Oct. 9: Firmus withdrew its ASX listing application, citing market volatility.

TechCrunch reported on Oct. 5, citing people familiar with the company, that inference-chip startup Etched is reviewing unsolicited bids valuing it at $40 billion (from top-tier investors) to $50 billion (from lesser-known backers), a couple of months after raising $700 million at $21 billion. The talks are early and no deal has been agreed; Etched declined to comment. This is a single-outlet report.

Trade press briefed by Cohere report that North 2, launched Oct. 5, adds a redesigned orchestration harness with human sign-off steps, cross-session agent memory, shared libraries and reusable skills, plus North Admin controls that track token use per user and agent and set org-wide caps. The platform is model-agnostic and runs in cloud, on-prem or fully air-gapped. Cohere published no benchmarks and no list pricing. Coverage notes the launch comes less than three weeks after Cohere agreed to merge with Aleph Alpha — a signed agreement, not a closed deal, as reported.

Four months after a $500 million Series F, Supabase announced $150 million led by GIC — with CapitalG, IronArc, and SquarePeg — plus acquisition of Turso to provision on-demand low-cost databases for agentic workloads (public cloud and BYOC). Company-reported usage: more than 1 million users and 4 million databases added per month, with ~70% of new databases created by agents or AI tools; Turso founder Glauber Costa joins as Head of Agentic Services. Turso deal price and this round’s valuation undisclosed.

Business Insider reports, citing a person familiar with the deal, that robotics startup FieldAI has signed a term sheet to raise $700 million at a $10 billion valuation, up from a $2 billion valuation after raising more than $400 million last year. The same person says the round may not have formally closed and that the lead investor is unclear. FieldAI did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. The $700 million should not be read as capital already raised.

Quartz, citing Bloomberg, reports Broadcom’s banks are preparing syndication letters for a $42 billion Class A senior-secured tranche while Blackstone leads an $18 billion Class B junior tranche and puts up $9 billion — a ~$60 billion package aimed at helping Anthropic and others access AI chips and infrastructure. Letters being prepared; deal not announced; Broadcom declined to comment. Distinct from the already disclosed Broadcom–Anthropic loan commitment.

SoftBank Group executed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its February-announced OpenAI follow-on via Vision Fund 2 on October 1 (Japan time), completing $30 billion and bringing cumulative OpenAI investment to $64.6 billion (~13% ownership). Funded from September 24 foreign-currency senior notes — not bridge debt — SoftBank also canceled the remaining $10 billion undrawn under its March $40 billion bridge as of September 30.

Nasdaq-listed Nebius acquired Inferize, a ~10-month-old Israeli inference-optimization startup, to cut Token Factory cold-start and idle-GPU cost. Official terms are undisclosed; Ctech reports a market estimate of roughly $100–150 million — wire estimate only, not a confirmed price.

Nine-person San Francisco startup Halluminate announced a $30 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT — with Y Combinator, Orange Collective, FT Partners, and Heavybit participating — bringing total raised to $38.5 million. The lab builds benchmarks and RL environments for financial knowledge work and claims four of five top closed-source U.S. AI labs as paying customers, mid–eight-figure ARR, and profitability. Customer counts, ARR, and Westworld Due Diligence scores are company-reported.

Dynatrace (NYSE: DT) announced it completed its acquisition of Arize, an AI observability and evaluation platform for continual learning on agents. Arize continues Phoenix (open source) and AX (enterprise); capabilities are expected to integrate into Dynatrace over time. Closing news for a deal announced August 13 — completion release does not restate purchase price; prior IR had cited roughly $915 million cash/stock.

Kevin Mandia’s Armadin raised a $255.5 million Series B co-led by a16z and Accel at a valuation over $2.5 billion — about $445 million total funding roughly seven months after public launch — to scale autonomous offensive-security swarms for Fortune 500 and government customers.

Barclays is expanding its Anthropic collaboration to integrate Claude across global operations, with Claude Code expected to reach 50% of developers by end-2026 and a majority of software engineers in 2027 — atop a live Knowledge Assistant (>16k UK colleagues, >1M searches) and Global Markets email routing (~120k/day). No new model SKU or disclosed contract dollars.

ZoomInfo acquired DoubleO.ai, an agentic orchestration layer for reliable multi-agent go-to-market motions. Terms undisclosed. The bet is that B2B context plus orchestration — not another demo chatbot — is the bottleneck for revenue automation enterprises will trust.

San Francisco’s Flow Engineering closed a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation, co-led by Antonio Gracias (Valor Equity Partners) and Gavin Baker (Atreides Management), with Sequoia returning and Roelof Botha joining the board as an independent director. The bet: AI agents that keep CAD, requirements, simulation, and test aligned so hardware iteration compresses toward software cadence — with Rivian, Anduril, and Joby among named customers.