The Dealflow by Founders Capital - Edition 37

Key News and Trends

Nvidia Continues to Defy Expectations

Nvidia posted a record $57B in quarterly revenue, up 62% YoY, with $51.2B coming from data-center sales alone. Net income hit $32B, and demand for its Blackwell GPUs remains “off the charts,” with cloud GPUs effectively sold out. Despite geopolitical pressure affecting H20 shipments to China, Nvidia is guiding $65B for next quarter. CEO Jensen Huang dismissed bubble talk entirely: “AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once.” Read more here

Anthropic Hits $350B: Microsoft and Nvidia Write the Next Big AI Cheque

Anthropic’s valuation has jumped to $350B after Microsoft committed up to $5B and Nvidia up to $10B in fresh investment. Alongside the funding, Anthropic has agreed to purchase $30B of Azure compute and up to 1GW of Nvidia GB/Vera Rubin capacity. The deal cements Anthropic as one of the most heavily backed AI labs. Read more here

Databricks Eyes a $130B+ Raise: AI Agents Are Rewriting the Database Market

Databricks is already in talks to raise new capital at a $130B+ valuation, up at least 30% from its September round. CEO Ali Ghodsi says the shift is driven by a major inflection: 80% of all new databases this year were created by AI agents, up from 30% a year earlier. The company is doubling down on its agent platform and AI-native database strategy after its $1B acquisition of Neon. Read more here

xAI Targets $230B: Musk’s AI Lab Races to Close a $15B Round

Elon Musk’s xAI is in advanced talks to raise $15B in new equity at a staggering $230B valuation, more than doubling its March figure of $113B following the X acquisition. The terms were shared with investors by Musk’s wealth manager, as the company accelerates spend to improve its Grok chatbot and keep pace with Anthropic and OpenAI. Read more here

Founders’ Take: All Roads in AI Lead Through the Hardware Layer

In what is starting to become the litmus test for the quarter to come, Nvidia’s $57B quarter reinforces what the market already knows - the centre of gravity in AI continues to shift toward the hardware layer. Data-centre revenue hit $51B, with guidance of $65B next quarter -numbers that show just how central GPU capacity has become to every major AI rollout.

What stands out isn’t just the scale but the consistency: Blackwell demand still exceeds supply, cloud inventory is effectively sold out, and every major AI lab, enterprise, and cloud provider is competing for the same hardware pipeline. Nvidia is now operating at a level where its quarterly results function as a proxy for the entire AI infrastructure cycle. Nvidia’s quarter shows exactly where the bottleneck, and the value chain, currently sit.

Top Venture Deals

Cursor -  $2.3B Round at $29.3B Valuation (Accel, Thrive, a16z, DST, Coatue, Nvidia, Google)

• AI coding platform Cursor raised $2.3B at a $29.3B valuation, almost tripling its worth since June. Now past $1B in annualised revenue and 300+ employees, Cursor has become the dominant player in AI-assisted software creation. With backing from Nvidia and Google, it joins the small group of private AI companies valued above $10B. Read more here

Lovable -  Raising at ~$6B Valuation (Valor Equity Partners, 8VC, Accel)

• “Vibe-coding” startup Lovable is in talks to raise at a $6B valuation, up from $2B in July. The company hit 8M users and $100M ARR in under a year, making it one of the fastest-scaling dev-tools companies on record. Lovable now sits alongside Cursor, Replit, and Cognition as a frontrunner in AI-built application tooling. Read more here

Luma AI -  $900M Raise at $4B+ Valuation (Humain, a16z, AMD Ventures, Matrix, Amplify)

• AI video-generation startup Luma AI secured $900M at a $4B+ valuation, led by PIF-backed Humain with support from a16z, AMD Ventures, and others. The round includes a partnership on Project Halo, a planned 2GW GPU supercluster in Saudi Arabia. Luma’s latest model, Ray3, now outperforms OpenAI’s Sora 2 on several benchmarks. Read more here

Upcoming Public Offerings

Kraken

• Crypto exchange Kraken has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, following a new round valuing the firm at $20B with backing from Jane Street and Citadel Securities. The company is targeting a Q1 2026 listing as it expands into equities, futures, and payments, aiming to benefit from a potentially friendlier U.S. regulatory climate under the Genius Act. Read more here

Grayscale

• Crypto asset manager Grayscale has filed for a U.S. IPO, posting $318.7M revenue and $203.3M net income for the first nine months of 2025. With $35B AUM across 45+ token products, Grayscale will remain under DCGvoting control post-listing. Despite GBTC outflows, the firm is positioning itself as a diversified, lower-cost crypto investment platform. Read more here

See you in the next edition,
The Founders Capital Team

Founders Capital is the trading name of FC Group Holding Ltd. FC Group Holding Ltd is an Appointed Representative of 8point8 Capital Ltd which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (reg. no. 936586). 

This communication is being sent confidentially on a restricted basis for information and discussion purposes only. It does not constitute a financial promotion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Membership of Founders Capital is restricted to recipients who are eligible to receive exempt financial promotions under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005.