The Dealflow by Founders Capital - Edition 39

Key News and Trends

OpenAI Takes Stake in Thrive Holdings: AI Comes for Accounting & IT

OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, embedding researchers inside its accounting and IT subsidiaries to supercharge automation across thousands of employees. Thrive, backed by $1B in capital, is rolling up “unsexy but essential” service industries and re-architecting them with AI. For OpenAI, now valued at $500B with over $1T in compute commitments, this is a strategic attempt to prove real-world enterprise transformation and win the next wave of corporate adoption. Read more here

Anthropic Buys Bun as Claude Code Hits $1B Run Rate

Anthropic has acquired Bun (Y-Combinator S19 cohort), the high-speed JavaScript runtime, just as Claude Code crossed a staggering $1B run-rate only six months after launch. The move strengthens Anthropic’s control over the full coding stack, runtime, agents, and infrastructure, as enterprises like Netflix, Spotify, KPMG, and Salesforce adopt Claude for software engineering. Bun will remain open-source, but its integration will speed up Claude Code’s performance and cement Anthropic’s ambition to become the backbone of AI-native development. Read more here

Nvidia Drops $2B on Synopsys

Nvidia has taken a $2B stake in Synopsys to accelerate chip and systems design with AI. The partnership brings Nvidia’s accelerated-computing stack into Synopsys tools, cutting multi-week design cycles down to hours. It’s a strategic move that embeds Nvidia deeper into the global semiconductor toolchain. Read more here

Founders’ Take: The Next Phase of Enterprise AI

OpenAI’s stake in Thrive signals the next phase of AI adoption - embedding intelligence directly into operations. By placing researchers inside Thrive’s accounting and IT businesses, service companies themselves become AI-native from the inside out. 

Thrive’s roll-up of “unsexy but essential” back-office services is precisely where AI delivers the most durable value - high-volume workflows, structural cost takeout, and dramatic margin expansion. Thrive now becomes a live proving ground for what AI-run enterprises look like at scale.

If this model works, expect it to move quickly into legal, HR, logistics, and procurement. This is vertical integration for the intelligence age, and it’s only just beginning.

Top Venture Deals

Black Forest Labs Raises $300M

• Germany’s Black Forest Labs has secured $300M at a $3.25B valuation, backed by Salesforce Ventures, a16z, NVIDIA, General Catalyst and others. The former Stable Diffusion team is pushing forward with Flux 2, its new high-fidelity image model already powering platforms like Adobe, Picsart and Vercel. The raise cements BFL as Europe’s leading generative-imaging lab. Read more here

7AI: $130M Series A (Index Ventures, Blackstone, Greylock, CRV, Spark)

• Cybersecurity startup 7AI has secured $130M Series A, the largest in the sector’s history. Its autonomous agents have already processed 2.5M alerts and 650,000+ investigations, cutting false positives by up to 99%. Fortune 500 customers report major reductions in investigation time, and the new funding will scale engineering and go-to-market as demand for agentic security accelerates. Read more here

Kalshi raises $1B (Paradigm)

• Prediction market Kalshi, which allows people to bet on future events, has just locked in a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation, effectively doubling its value in under two months. The round was led by existing backer Paradigm, with continued support from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Capital G, and other returning investors. Read more here

Upcoming Public Offerings

Anthropic

• New reports suggest Anthropic is considering a 2026 IPO, but there’s no formal process and the timing appears speculative. The company is still deep in infrastructure expansion and long-term cloud commitments, making a listing feel unlikely in the near term. For now, this looks more like headline chatter than a real step toward going public. Read more here

Wealthfront

• Wealth-management platform Wealthfront has filed to raise up to $485M at a valuation of up to $2.05B, marking its return to IPO plans after the failed UBS acquisition. The offering, led by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup, positions Wealthfront to tap renewed fintech-market momentum under the ticker WLTH. Read more here

See you in the next edition,
The Founders Capital Team

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