The Dealflow by Founders Capital - Edition 20

Welcome back to The Dealflow by Founders Capital - your inside track on the private markets. Each week, we cut through the noise to bring you the latest industry trends - along with our take.

Author

Sam Scott
July 11, 2025

AI challengers enter Google’s home turf. OpenAI is building an AI-native web browser powered by chat and autonomous agents, designed to rethink search itself, while notably using Google’s open-source Chromium as its foundation. Meanwhile, Perplexity has launched its own AI-powered browser, Comet, offering fast answers but still struggling with complex queries in early testing. Read more here.

More compute, more controversy. xAI has launched Grok 4 alongside a new $300/month premium subscription, as it continues refining moderation systems following recent controversy over antisemitic outputs. The company claims Grok 4 was trained using 100x more compute than Grok 2, and is built on its in-house Colossus supercomputer. Read more here.

$4T club: population one. Nvidia briefly became the world’s first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap, surpassing Microsoft and Apple. The milestone marks a staggering rise from $1T in mid-2023, driven by its dominance in AI chips and soaring demand from clients like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Read more here.

SpaceX’s valuation clears the tower. SpaceX is reportedly in talks to raise new capital at a $400B valuation, potentially via a secondary sale that would include a tender offer for employee shares, according to Bloomberg. Read more here.

This week, Perplexity launched its AI-powered browser Comet, and OpenAI unveiled plans for its own. Both are taking direct aim at Google’s search dominance.

Since ChatGPT’s launch, Google’s grip has loosened - its global share of search traffic recently slipped below 90% for the first time in over a decade. A small decline in percentage, but a meaningful crack in a once-unbreakable monopoly.

This is a rare platform shift. Whoever gets there first shapes the next decade of how we interact with the internet.

But Google isn’t standing still. It posted the highest net profit of any U.S. company in 2024 and is investing aggressively in AI-native features across Search, Android, and Workspace.

There’s always a leader, until there isn’t.

Revolut –  $1B  (Greenoaks)

  • Revolut is in talks to raise ~$1B in a new funding round, pushing its valuation to $65B. The nine-year-old neobank posted £3.1B in 2024 revenue and £1.1B in pre-tax profit, and now serves over 50M users globally. Read more here.

Groq  –  $300-500M  (N/A)

  • Groq, a seven-year-old AI chipmaker based in Mountain View, is reportedly raising $300-500M at a $6B valuation, more than double its $2.8B valuation from August 2024’s Series D. While specific lead investors haven’t been named, it’s clear this round is structured to support Groq’s $1.5B Saudi Arabia contract. Read more here.

Xpanceo –  $250M Series A (Opportunity Venture Asia)

  • Dubai-based Xpanceo, a four-year-old deeptech startup building smart contact lenses for immersive digital access, has raised a $250M Series A at a $1.35B post-money valuation. Read more here.

ReserveOne

  • New York-based ReserveOne is set to go public via SPAC just one year after launch. Backed by Kraken, Blockchain.com, and a roster of crypto and Wall Street heavyweights, the firm aims to raise over $1B to manage a crypto portfolio aligned with the U.S. strategic reserve. Read more here.

Joe & the Juice

  • General Atlantic is reportedly exploring an IPO for Joe & The Juice, the global juice and coffee chain founded in 2002. The company operates 363 locations worldwide and could be valued at around $2.4 billion. Read more here.

See you in the next edition,
Sam Scott and the Founders Capital Team

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