valuation

According to Techtimes, AI model evaluation company Vals AI completed a $40 million Series A funding round with a valuation of $400 million, led by a16z, with participation from 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, as well as new investors HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures.Vals AI uses an independent system to evaluate cutting-edge models launched by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, rather than using traditional public benchmark tests. The new funding will be used to expand evaluation infrastructure and launch testing tools for creating programming benchmarks based on enterprise GitHub code repositories.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents show that NVIDIA holds 122.8 million shares of SpaceX Class A common stock, valued at approximately $21 billion.

According to Techcrunch, acquisition negotiations between payment giant PayPal and Stripe, along with private equity firm Advent Global Opportunities, are heating up, and a deal may be reached in the coming weeks.In July, Stripe and Advent proposed to acquire PayPal for $60.50 per share, with a total transaction valuation of approximately $53 billion, but PayPal did not accept the offer at that time. However, insiders revealed that the negotiations have not been interrupted and are still ongoing.Neither PayPal nor Stripe has confirmed the related news. PayPal declined to comment, while Stripe stated that it would not respond to market rumors or speculation.This potential sale comes as PayPal seeks to reverse its growth challenges. After taking office in March this year, PayPal CEO Enrique Lores launched a restructuring plan that splits the business into three main areas: payment checkout and PayPal business, consumer financial services (including Venmo), and payment services and cryptocurrency business.Lores previously stated that PayPal would return to its identity as a technology company and strengthen its core payment capabilities. At the same time, the company plans to improve efficiency by cutting costs, with layoffs expected to reach 20% over the next two to three years.Founded in 1998, PayPal's founding team includes well-known Silicon Valley figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Max Levchin. The company experienced rapid growth during the e-commerce boom during the pandemic but has faced challenges such as slowing growth and pressure on its stock price in recent years. If the deal is finalized, it will become one of the largest acquisitions in the fintech industry in recent years.

Duan Yongping responded on Xueqiu regarding the recent changes in his holdings of Pop Mart, stating that he has "never directly sold a single share of Pop Mart." The changes in his holdings mainly come from options trading and expiration exercises, and do not indicate a long-term bearish view on Pop Mart.Duan Yongping mentioned that when the position of selling puts approaches the limit, he will adopt the strategy of "buying stocks + selling calls." After expiration, if the stocks are called away, it is essentially a similar trading strategy to selling puts that are exercised at expiration. Currently, the options premium for Pop Mart is about 5% per month, and this strategy may continue to be used for a longer period in the future.Regarding the valuation of Pop Mart, Duan Yongping stated, "Currently, I believe the price of Pop Mart is not expensive in the long term, but I don't know about the short term." He emphasized that there is no specific time or price set for selling Pop Mart, and it may be a long time before that happens.

According to Finsmes, AI architecture development company Pathway announced the completion of a $30 million seed round financing, with participation from Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, Red Bridge Ventures, Kadmos Capital, and WS Investment, an investment institution under Wilson Sonsini. Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle also joined as an angel investor.Pathway is developing the "Post-Transformer" architecture called BDH (Biologically-inspired Dynamic Hierarchy), aiming to address the limitations of current Transformer models that continuously rely on more data, GPUs, energy, and capital expansion. Unlike traditional large models that require periodic retraining, BDH can continuously learn with less data and achieve ongoing adaptation.It is reported that the company has appointed former Google DeepMind Gemini product head Adam Kurzrok as Chief Product Officer, responsible for the product direction based on the BDH model, including model packaging, evaluation systems, and commercial deployment.

Citigroup expects that as technology companies seek to increase their valuations, more Asian companies will issue stocks in the United States. So far this year, Asian companies have issued approximately $28 billion in American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), setting a new high since 2020.SK Hynix's $26.5 billion listing accounted for the majority, while PayPay's initial offering contributed $1 billion.

Some existing investors expect that Anthropic's valuation could exceed $2 trillion when it goes public as early as October this year. Six interviewed investors believe that the demand for Claude and the rapid growth of the company's revenue could drive Anthropic's valuation to double from $965 billion in May this year.In May, Anthropic disclosed that its annualized revenue had surpassed $47 billion, and some investors expect it could reach $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of the year. One investor calculated that, based on a revenue multiple of about 30 times, Anthropic's valuation could potentially reach $3 trillion. However, the aforementioned valuations are all investor predictions. Multiple investors have stated that Anthropic's management has not yet determined the IPO valuation target. Competition from low-cost AI models in China, relations with the U.S. government, and corporate control of AI spending are still seen as potential risks.

According to informed sources, AI startup Discovery Loop, founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, is in talks to raise $1 billion, corresponding to a valuation of approximately $10 billion, with specific financing terms still subject to change.Discovery Loop aims to accelerate discoveries in the fields of science and engineering through automated machine learning, science and engineering, and the parallel execution of thousands of experiments. Its initial funding is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital, while Alphabet serves as the founding investor and cloud services partner. The founding team of Discovery Loop also includes former core researchers from Google such as Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals.

According to ChianCatcher news, reported by The Information journalist Yueqi Yang, the annual revenue of the prediction market platform Kalshi has exceeded $4 billion, doubling from two months ago, and is currently seeking to raise a new round of financing at a valuation of $40 billion, a significant increase of 82% from its valuation of $22 billion during the Series F financing in May.In addition, the company has recently invested heavily in marketing, with reports indicating that Kalshi's operating expenses in June reached $300 million, mainly related to marketing promotions.

According to Bloomberg, the AI code review platform CodeRabbit announced the completion of a $143 million financing round, with a valuation of $1.5 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital, with participation from institutions such as BMW i Ventures and Datadog. So far, CodeRabbit has raised over $200 million in total financing.CodeRabbit primarily utilizes artificial intelligence to automatically review software code, helping developers identify code defects, security risks, and potential issues. Its product can automatically review both AI-generated and manually written code during the development process, providing developers with feedback on problems and suggestions for improvement.

Swedish Stockholm AI programming startup Lovable announced the completion of a $400 million Series C funding round, bringing its post-funding valuation to $13.3 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Menlo Ventures and the EU-backed investment institution Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT AB), with several venture capital firms participating, as well as new investors from Latin America and Asia, including Tencent Holdings.Lovable is dedicated to the field of AI-assisted programming and is accelerating its expansion to compete with larger rivals such as Anthropic.

According to The Elec, Samsung Electro-Mechanics' investment schedule for semiconductor glass substrates has been delayed due to bottlenecks in the reliability assessment of customer prototypes. As a result, the construction schedule for the production line of GlaSSEM, the glass core joint venture between Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Dongyu Fine Chem, has also been postponed, and the timeline for ordering related equipment has become uncertain.The report states that GlaSSEM has failed to communicate the equipment order schedule to its partner manufacturers. Previous orders have been postponed from December last year to March and June this year, and this has happened more than three times. After June, no further schedule guidance has been provided. Industry insiders believe that the main reason is that global communication semiconductor customers have not passed the reliability assessment certification for glass substrate prototypes. Samsung Electro-Mechanics is still producing prototypes at its Sejong plant, and most of the suppliers for key processes required for building the mass production line, such as deposition, etching, laser drilling, and inspection, have already been selected.Since the prototypes need to be remade and resubmitted, the originally planned investment schedule will inevitably be further delayed. Samsung Electro-Mechanics had set a target for mass production in the second half of 2027 when establishing GlaSSEM earlier last month, but during last month's financial report meeting, this timeline was adjusted to 2028, and now the mass production time is expected to be further postponed.

PPP market prediction tool monitoring shows that in the Polymarket "Anthropic valuation reaches target within the year" prediction event, the probability of reaching $1.5 trillion within the year has risen to 76%, an increase of 13% in 24 hours. The probability of reaching $1.25 trillion has risen to 92%, an increase of 8% in 24 hours. According to the settlement rules, this market primarily relies on the valuation of Anthropic's private market as announced by the Nasdaq Private Market (NPM).If Anthropic completes its IPO or direct listing during this period, the official issue price corresponding to the valuation and the public market value after listing will also be included in the settlement basis. Currently, the NPM data referenced on the Polymarket page shows a valuation of approximately $1.13 trillion. Previously, according to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic plans to go public in September or early October, with specific issue prices and schedules yet to be announced. If successfully listed, it could become one of the largest IPOs in history.

Qianwen's former technical director Lin Junyang announced the establishment of a new company, Pragmatic Technology, in Shanghai, focusing on the research direction of next-generation intelligent agents that span the digital and physical worlds.He also revealed that Gao Rong Venture Capital and HSG (Sequoia China) jointly led this round of financing, with support from Tencent and the Shanghai Future Industry Fund. According to informed sources, the "this round of financing" mentioned by Lin Junyang refers to the angel round financing of Pragmatic Technology, with a valuation of 2 billion dollars.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. defense technology startup Neros has completed a $250 million equity financing, raising its post-money valuation to $2.5 billion, led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund, with participation from existing investors such as Thiel Capital.Neros plans to accelerate the research and development and mass production of the attack drone Archer and the interceptor drone Bandit, and promote localized manufacturing among allies. The company's current annual production capacity is about 14,000 units, with a goal to increase Archer's annual production capacity to 1 million units by 2028.This round of funding will also be used to expand the employee count from about 200 to 350 and upgrade the handheld terminals used to control the drones and the Archer AI model, enabling it to maintain target lock in GPS-denied environments and coordinate with other drones.

According to The Information, citing informed sources, the AI startup Applied Compute, founded by former OpenAI researchers, is discussing a new round of financing, with a valuation expected to reach around $3 billion, more than doubling the valuation announced four months ago during the last financing round. The company is dedicated to helping businesses utilize their own data to run and customize open-source models.This financing is taking place against the backdrop of the company's recent strong revenue growth. Informed sources indicate that Applied Compute's current annualized revenue is approximately $50 million, nearly quadrupling the revenue level disclosed by its CEO Yash Patil last November. According to the sources, investor Elad Gil is negotiating to lead this round of financing, with the expected amount reaching several hundred million dollars. It is still unclear whether this valuation includes the newly injected funds. This round of financing has not yet been finalized, and specific terms may still change.

According to exclusive reports from CTech (Calcalist), Israeli AI startup Decart is in deep negotiations with an international tech giant for a sale, with a valuation of about $6 to $7 billion, and the deal could be signed next week. Founded in 2023, Decart focuses on the development of real-time video generation AI models, employing around 100 people, and has raised approximately $450 million to date. The company just completed a $300 million funding round in May, with a valuation of $4 billion. Initial negotiations were with NVIDIA, and as they were nearing an agreement, another giant intervened, prompting the founder to shift focus to the new buyer. Industry speculation suggests the new buyer could be SpaceX, but Amazon and Nebius are also reportedly interested in participating.Decart's technological advantage lies in its ability to generate videos at a cost far lower than its competitors. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has maintained regular contact with co-founder Dean Leitersdorf since experiencing the game Oasis developed based on Decart's technology in 2024. Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire (who organized Musk's post-war trip to Israel) has been investing in the company since the seed round. If the buyer is SpaceX, it will establish its first R&D center in Israel. Previously, SpaceX had acquired AI programming startup Cursor for $60 billion after its IPO, and acquiring Decart would further strengthen its position in the AI infrastructure sector.