Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at $6.2B valuation, Ramp raises $1.85B, and more - AI Funding Brief #87

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Until now, our newsletters were assembled automatically: the news assigned to each newsletter went into a simple template. From this edition, our small team, Maiko, Rene and Stefan, edits every edition so it reads as one storyline: related news together, the important stories explained, the rest kept short. We still use AI tooling throughout, and we decide what goes in and how it is told.

In this edition, covering 13 to 19 October:

• Tenstorrent closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post money valuation.
• Anthropic reportedly told investors its third quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, while some investors reportedly now value it at about $1.5 trillion.
• Ramp raised $1.85 billion at a $60 billion valuation, with annualized revenue past $2 billion.

Tenstorrent and chips

Tenstorrent closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post money valuation, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. The money goes to deploying its Galaxy servers at scale and to the RISC-V CPU and AI core IP it licenses to chip designers such as Samsung and LG. Tenstorrent

Salience Labs raised $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures and Intel Capital among the investors, for its all optical circuit switching technology for AI data centers. It recently demonstrated a 64 port photonic switch at ECOC 2026. Mueon raised a $65 million Series A led by Maverick Silicon, with Intel Capital participating, to bring its Cubelets modular compute and memory platform toward production. Salience Labs · Mueon

ASML reported €11.7 billion in third quarter sales, €5.0 billion in net income and a 57.5% gross margin. It expects 2026 sales of €44 billion to €45 billion and is reviewing ways to expand 2028 capacity as customers order more equipment linked to AI investment. ASML

Anthropic

Anthropic reportedly told investors that third quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter. People familiar with the matter said the company was also profitable on an adjusted basis and cash flow positive as it prepares for a possible November IPO. Q3 revenue

Some investors now reportedly value Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion, after earlier discussions of a valuation of up to $2 trillion. The reassessment follows a slowdown in quarterly revenue growth to 45% and concerns about operating losses and long term cloud and AI infrastructure spending. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, who represents city pension funds with more than $325 billion in assets, urged CEO Dario Amodei to pause the offering until the company addresses concerns about AI safety, governance, development speed and investor disclosures. Valuation · NYC Comptroller

It also emerged this week that KBRA assigned Anthropic a BB+ issuer rating in June, the highest speculative grade and one level below investment grade. The rating supported a $35 billion chip financing led by Apollo, including about $4.4 billion in junior debt exposed to Anthropic's credit risk. KBRA rating

AI infrastructure debt and listings

Investors sharply sold CoreWeave bonds and raised concerns about debt linked to Oracle's delayed US data center projects and SoftBank's large investment in OpenAI. The moves could raise borrowing costs for AI infrastructure companies. CoreWeave

A global market selloff and higher borrowing costs are pushing AI data center companies to delay fundraising or accept more expensive capital. Listings linked to AirTrunk, Firmus and SB Energy were pulled or paused, while Asian data center mergers and acquisitions and debt financing remain strong. Investors are looking harder at valuations, debt levels, customer contracts and execution risks. Data center deals

Investors are reportedly urging AI cloud company Nscale to lower its planned IPO valuation from about $30 billion to between $16 billion and $19 billion. Nscale is also dealing with Microsoft ending a data center agreement, the collapse of Firmus's IPO plans and continuing comments from the US Securities and Exchange Commission on its filing. Nscale

Ramp and fintech

Ramp raised $1.85 billion in a round led by Dragoneer Investment Group at a $60 billion valuation, bringing its total equity funding to about $5 billion. Ramp says its annualized revenue has passed $2 billion, it is cash flow positive and more than 85,000 companies use its platform. The money goes to AI tools and financial operations products. Ramp

Intuit agreed to acquire Sequence, a London and New York based AI revenue management startup that automates billing, payments and revenue recognition. Financial terms were not disclosed. Sequence CEO Riya Grover and the team will join Intuit's mid market product organisation. Mexico based Kapital agreed to acquire San Francisco AI startup Woz for $30 million in cash and stock, and Woz cofounders Ben Collins and Brad Eckert join as Head of AI and Chief Technology Officer. Intuit · Kapital

Tether Capital invested in AIsa, whose platform lets AI agents pay for data, software, APIs, models and computing in fiat or stablecoins. AIsa says more than 250,000 agents use it. In early rounds, Homa raised a $5 million seed led by Quiet Capital and started mortgage lending as it expands into California, Stockholm's Matters raised $5 million in pre seed funding led by angel investor Jakob Johansson for a subscription bank with AI financial guidance, and Mumbai's RevRag AI raised a $2.5 million seed led by Accion Ventures and Cedar Hill Capital for multilingual AI agents for financial services. Tether · Homa · Matters · RevRag AI

AI labs buying companies and teams

Cohere agreed to acquire AISLE, whose autonomous systems find, validate and help patch unknown vulnerabilities in critical software. AISLE identified more than 500 vulnerabilities in its first year, and Cohere plans to add its security capabilities to its sovereign AI platform. OpenAI is in early talks to acquire Trail of Bits, a New York security firm that finds and fixes vulnerabilities in open source software. The deal value is unknown. The two companies worked together on Patch the Planet, which found bugs in projects including cURL, Python and Go. Cohere · OpenAI

Mistral acquired New Material and will set up a Solutions Design team that combines design, engineering and AI to develop solutions together with customers. Prime Intellect acquired Moondream. Its founders Vik Korrapati and Jay Allen will lead inference and multimodal model development, and Moondream's Photon inference engine will be integrated into Prime Intellect's platform. Mistral · Prime Intellect

Disney plans to pay $60 million a year to hire 66 employees from Character.AI, as part of the chatbot company's Chapter 11 asset sale. Disney has also agreed to pay $20 million for selected assets and set aside $30 million for employee retention. Disney

Software and services acquisitions

Rocket Software acquired Israeli startup Geniez AI, which builds AI agents for managing and modernizing mainframe systems, in a deal estimated at up to $100 million. Boomi is acquiring Israeli data observability startup Elementary Data for about $40 million to $45 million in cash and stock, and Elementary's 17 employees will join Boomi. Rocket Software · Boomi

Persistent Systems reported $487.6 million in revenue for the quarter ended 30 September, up 20.0% year over year. It has secured about 94.04% of Nagarro's share capital and voting rights and received approval for an equity raise of up to $450 million. Persistent Systems

Robots & Pencils acquired marketing automation platform Tiger Pistol, which becomes its customer experience transformation studio practice. Navara Technologies acquired PieQ and its FLOW agentic AI platform to expand into biosecurity, government agencies and insurance. Humanly acquired CareerArc to add recruitment marketing tools to its AI recruiting platform, and FormativGroup, backed by Rockbridge Growth Equity, acquired Saige Consulting for AI implementation and data engineering. Sunbound completed its acquisition of Richter Healthcare Consultants, which serves senior living, skilled nursing, home health and hospice operators, and closed a $24 million Series A led by TTV Capital, bringing its total funding to $36 million. Robots & Pencils · Navara · Humanly · FormativGroup · Sunbound

Enterprise AI and security rounds

Labelbox raised more than $100 million in Series E financing, including equity and a credit facility, led by Infinitum Partners with Wipro Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and B Capital among the participants. The money supports Horizon, for frontier AI model training and evaluation, and Recursion Managed Agents for enterprise workflows. North.cloud raised a $60 million Series B led by PeakSpan Capital for automated cloud and AI spend optimization. It says it manages nearly $2 billion in cloud spending. Labelbox · North.cloud

Zenzap raised $44 million from Bessemer, Lightspeed, The Garage and individual investors for its workplace messaging app with AI search and workflow automation, used by businesses including FedEx, Dollar General, Taco Bell and Starbucks. Pluto Security raised $42 million across seed and Series A funding to monitor and control employee use of AI tools and agents. It says it has more than 30 enterprise customers and over $2 million in annual recurring revenue. Zenzap · Pluto Security

Indian enterprise AI startup RapidCanvas raised a $29 million Series B led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India, with Hitachi Ventures participating. Goodweek, founded in Strasbourg and headquartered in Los Angeles, raised a €10.69 million seed round led by Adara Ventures for a platform that lets SMBs manage AI models, users, company data and spending. TrustedRouter raised a $6 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures for model routing with encrypted and confidential computing options for some open weight models, in competition with OpenRouter. RapidCanvas · Goodweek · TrustedRouter

Town, founded by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, raised a $108 million Series B co led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, bringing its total funding to at least $160 million. It launched publicly four months ago and sells AI assistants for businesses called Townies. Town

Sales, marketing and media

Othello raised $8 million in seed funding from a16z speedrun, Owl Capital and Long Journey Ventures. Its Hamlet model gives sales representatives live suggestions in under 500 milliseconds. UK based Symbe raised a $5.7 million seed round led by Kfund for a platform that builds business cases and return on investment estimates for software purchases. Sonilo raised $11 million led by B Capital, with Redpoint participating, for AI models that generate music and sound effects from video or text. London based Obsero raised €1 million in seed funding led by SFC Capital for AI search visibility agents. Othello · Symbe · Sonilo · Obsero

Robots, construction and industry

SoftBank Group is considering acquiring US security services company Allied Universal in a deal that could value the company and its debt at about $30 billion. The preliminary discussions are linked to Masayoshi Son's plans to use AI powered robots in security operations. SoftBank

ICON raised a $200 million Series D co led by Baillie Gifford and funds managed by BlackRock, to manufacture its multistory Titan robotic printing system and build a large R&D facility in Austin. Origin raised $20 million from Accel and Zacua Ventures and plans to deploy 150 construction robots by the end of 2027. Oslo based Solvera raised a $6.3 million pre seed round led by Seedcamp for an MEP engineering firm that uses AI to automate tasks while engineers make the key decisions. ICON · Origin · Solvera

Scimplify raised $25 million in a round led by Hitachi Ventures, with Henkel and Teknor Apex participating, to expand its AI based production of specialty chemicals and critical materials into the United States and Japan. Helsinki based Ambio raised a €5.1 million seed round led by b2venture for an AI procurement platform that matches industrial buyers with recycled plastics suppliers. Kodama raised a $7 million seed round co led by Konvoy Ventures and Breakwater Ventures for remotely supervised machines in US commercial logging, which have moved more than 100,000 tons of timber in six months. Scimplify · Ambio · Kodama

Dream Labs raised $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital, with Kindred Ventures participating, and launched Dream API, which turns camera feeds and plain English instructions into motor commands for robots from different makers. Dream Labs

Space and defense

Israeli autonomous aviation software company High Lander says its total funding has reached $30 million, with additional investment from EDGE Group and participation from STEP, Protego and Kinetica. It will expand in the United States and other markets and develop its Vega, Orion and Andromeda platforms. High Lander

Polish spacetech company KP Labs raised €4.42 million from Momentum Capital Partners to start serial hardware production and scale AI systems that process satellite data in orbit. Satlyt, after its $8 million seed round, said its AI satellite software will launch on a SpaceX rocket aboard a TakeMe2Space spacecraft, with NASA among the organizations testing it. Colorado based WarpWare raised $1.2 million through SAFE agreements for its AI enabled platform for spacecraft flight software. KP Labs · Satlyt · WarpWare

Also

Stockholm based Vessla raised $3.3 million in pre seed funding led by Seedcamp for AI agents in property management. Czech company FLÆ Robotics raised more than €1 million from Purple Ventures and Garage Angels for BE-A, an AI hotel agent used by more than 60 hotels. HapWare raised a $1.5 million pre seed round led by Adaptation Ventures ahead of the 2027 launch of ALEYE, a wristband that turns facial expressions, gestures and body language into vibration patterns for blind, low vision and DeafBlind users. Vessla · FLÆ Robotics · HapWare