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OpenAI and Perplexity muscled into AI-shopping, just as Google and Accel launched a hunt for India’s next breakout AI giants, AWS dropped a US$50 billion hammer, Waymo secured green lights, and a sweeping Gainsight-linked breach exposed data from 200+ companies.

Meanwhile, this week’s mega-rounds injected fresh heat into AI infrastructure and autonomy plays, setting the tone for another capital-intensive sprint across the tech landscape.

Plus: 5 AI tools for VCs, 37 VC jobs, and Boardy AI decides to launch its own fund!

As always, thank you for subscribing and engaging week-in week out with this newsletter, it is still a work in progress but I appreciate all 1,485 of you ♥️

With Love,
Kev

THIS WEEK IN VENTURE CAPITAL & TECH

  1. OpenAI and Perplexity are integrating AI shopping-assistants into their flagship chatbots to assist holiday-shoppers, but niche startups believe they remain competitive because their domain-specific data sets offer more tailored recommendations than general-purpose models.

  2. Google has teamed up with Accel to co-invest up to US$2 million per startup in India’s AI ecosystem via Accel’s Atoms programme, with a focus on founders building AI products for billions of users in India and beyond.

  3. Amazon Web Services is committing up to US$50 billion to build high-performance computing and AI infrastructure for U.S. federal agencies, aimed at accelerating critical missions from cybersecurity to drug discovery and bolstering America’s AI leadership.

  4. Waymo has obtained regulatory approvals to expand its autonomous vehicle operations across wide swaths of the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, including East Bay, North Bay and a corridor from Santa Clarita to San Diego—marking a major footprint growth in U.S. robotaxi deployment.

  5. Google has confirmed that hackers stole data from more than 200 companies through a supply-chain breach tied to Gainsight-published applications inside Salesforce, underscoring growing systemic risk in SaaS integrations and enterprise ecosystems.

  6. Kalshi & Polymarket are racing to expand their event contract trading platforms as they compete directly with traditional gambling platforms. They have secured major funding and strategic partnerships, including a bidding war with the NHL for access to sports audiences and a large investment commitment from Intercontinental Exchange toward Polymarket. The firms argue their offerings serve not just leisure betting but also corporate hedging of real-world risks, blurring the line between financial markets and gambling.

FUNDRAISING CORNER
The largest deals that you should know about

This week’s fundraising blitz easily cleared the US$ 5billion mark, a signal that investor appetite for category-defining infrastructure is heating up rather than cooling down. The capital flowed into AI compute backbones, regulated prediction markets, next-gen creative engines, institutional-grade crypto rails and the world’s fastest-scaling neobank, a lineup that reads less like opportunistic investing and more like a coordinated bet on the foundational layers of tomorrow’s economy.

1. Revolut | Undisclosed | Share Sale

Revolut, the London-born global neobank, executed a strategic share sale that elevated its valuation to $75 billion, backed by a leading investor syndicate featuring Coatue, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and Fidelity Investments. The round also saw participation from NVentures (via NVIDIA), Andreessen Horowitz, and Franklin Templeton (via advisors at T. Rowe Price Associates). According to publicly available data, Revolut has previously amassed around $2.89 billion in venture funding, and is doubling down on its mission to become the first truly global bank, targeting 100 million customers across 100 countries.

2. Lambda | $1.5B | Series E

Lambda pulled in a massive $1.5 billion Series E to fuel the next era of AI compute, with TWG Global (Thomas Tull + Mark Walter) anchoring the round alongside a deep bench of institutional backers. The San Francisco startup, now sitting on $3.2 billion in total funding, is doubling down on purpose-built GPU cloud infrastructure as demand for model training outstrips traditional data-center capacity.

3. Kalshi | $1B | Growth Round

Kalshi scored a headline-grabbing $1 billion raise led by Sequoia Capital and CapitalG, cementing its position as the most aggressively scaled prediction-market operator in the US. The New York platform, now valued at $11 billion, is pushing regulated event-contracts into the financial mainstream as top-tier investors bet that markets for “future outcomes” become a core asset class.

4. Luma AI | $900M | Series C

Luma AI landed a transformative $900 million Series C led by Saudi’s HUMAIN, with AMD stepping in as a major strategic investor, marking one of the year’s biggest bets on generative media. The Silicon Valley company is racing to define the next standard in AI-generated video and 3D imagery, building the creative engine that could sit underneath future entertainment, gaming, and digital-commerce experiences.

5. Kraken | $800M | Multi-Tranche Financing

Kraken closed an $800 million financing split across two tranches, with Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital, HSG, Oppenheimer, and Tribe Capital leading the primary raise. Citadel Securities added a heavyweight $200 million strategic investment at a $20 billion valuation, signaling renewed institutional conviction in regulated crypto exchanges as the sector enters its post-winter rebuild phase.

If there’s a message between the lines, it’s this: capital is rotating hard into platforms with defensibility, distribution and deep technical moats. The kind of moves that only happen when investors believe the next decade has already begun, and they’re racing to secure their seats before the market fully wakes up.

AI SPOTLIGHT: TOOLS FOR VCs

🤖 OVI: AI-powered CV screening and interviews
🧠 Perplexity Workspace: Instant deep research answers.
📊 Quid: Visualise complex data to identify patters
🔍 Tech Scout: Discover and evaluate tech startups
📁 Finta: AI powered fundraising CRM.

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OPEN VENTURE CAPITAL JOBS
The latest jobs curated just for you

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That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed this as much as I did curating it, see you next week!
-Kev

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