SoftBank Sells $11B in Bonds for OpenAI, Anthropic and Accenture Commit $2B to Safety, Anduril Lands $85M Air Force Deal

Private tech is drawing capital at scale this week. SoftBank raises $11B in bonds for OpenAI, Anthropic names Accenture its first embedded evaluator under a $2B safety commitment, and Anduril wins an Air Force contract worth up to $85M. Let's dive in…

THIS WEEK’S BREAKING NEWS

SoftBank launches $11B bond sale to fund OpenAI

SoftBank launched a $10B and €1B ($1.15B) bond sale, the largest Asia Pacific and Japan non-financial corporate bond deal on record, to refinance its original $10B OpenAI bridge loan after earlier upsizing a separate syndicated loan to $11.87B. Proceeds will fund SoftBank's $10B payment for its OpenAI investment closing October 1, as the company works toward investing close to $65B in OpenAI overall, with the notes carrying a BB+ Fitch rating. (1)

STABLETON NEWS

Our Q2 2026 report is here

Q2 2026 was one of the biggest quarters we have seen in years.

We saw public market activity picking up significantly, with SpaceX completing the largest IPO in history and Cerebras going public in the same quarter. (2,3) Behind them, both OpenAI and Anthropic have now filed confidentially for their own listings. (4,5) Beyond the IPOs, we also saw a shift in deployment, from Figure AI’s robots entering commercial logistics to the Pentagon expanding classified AI contracts to eight top tech firms. (6,7)

Our latest Private Blue-Chip Tech Navigator breaks down what these new developments mean and where the market is moving next. Inside, we cover the quarter's largest funding rounds, secondary pricing trends, the upcoming IPO calendar, and more.

Download the full report here below.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Anduril lands $85M Air Force contract for digital design

Anduril won a US Air Force VOLARE contract worth up to $85M, an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity ceiling with only $50,000 obligated so far, to build digital aircraft-design tools, including vehicle systems modeling and thermal-management software. The 10-year agreement, awarded by the Air Force Research Laboratory after eight companies competed, will be carried out in Dayton, Ohio. (8)

Anduril's DHS protest wins both tracks of $1.5B DHS deal

DHS added Anduril to track one of its $1.5B counter-drone contract after the company's protest led to a re-evaluation, making Anduril one of only two companies (alongside Leidos, with BAE Systems' U.S. subsidiary) competing across both tracks of the five-year vehicle. The GAO dismissed Anduril's protest three weeks after filing, but DHS still finalized the addition, following 57 product-track and 47 services-track proposals. (9)

Anthropic, Accenture pledge $2B for AI safety evaluation

Anthropic selected Accenture as its first embedded evaluator, marking the initial step toward CEO Dario Amodei's proposal to slow AI development, with both companies committing a total of $2B over five years, though Anthropic will fund the work directly for now. Accenture's Faculty unit will embed employees to red-team models and test safeguards, as Anthropic also discusses similar arrangements with research nonprofit METR ahead of its planned IPO. (10)

Anthropic's IPO timeline slips again, now November

Anthropic shifted its planned IPO to November from an expected October debut, giving it time to showcase strong Q3 financials after rival OpenAI launched its Astra model, even as CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow AI development stirs industry debate. Investors expect a roughly $2T valuation and up to $100B raised, with current backers projecting over $110B in annualized revenue by year-end, as OpenAI separately weighs a pre-IPO round exceeding $1.2T. (11)

Anthropic expands into drug research with new biology lab

Anthropic quietly built a physical wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area to advance drug discovery for rare diseases, confirmed by life sciences head Eric Kauderer-Abrams, while explicitly not running clinical trials to avoid competing with pharma partners. The effort follows Anthropic's ~$400M acquisition of Coefficient Bio, its Model Hardware Standard launch for lab automation, and comes as the company navigates safety scrutiny ahead of its planned $2T IPO. (12)

Applied Intuition opens Riyadh office with Echelon deal

Echelon and Applied Intuition formed a business development partnership to deploy physical AI at national scale across Saudi Arabia, spanning robotaxis, ports, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and trucking. Applied Intuition established a regional Riyadh office and is hiring locally, while Echelon embeds forward-deployed engineers to build local engineering capability, positioning the Kingdom as a potential global hub for autonomous logistics research. (13)

Databricks plans to invest $1B across Asia, doubling Singapore team

Databricks plans to invest more than $1B across Asia over three years, including over $350M in Singapore, doubling its Singapore headcount to over 500, after regional business more than doubled in Q2. The $190B-valued company reported a $7B revenue run rate, up from $5.4B in February, and recently launched Unity Gateway and Genie One to help customers manage AI spending and automate tasks. (14)

Figure's $1B Index bet triples robot chore success

Figure's Index platform, part of its $1B, 12-month human-data investment, drove a 6X jump in humanoid robot chore success, from 9% to 56% zero-shot completion across 30 unfamiliar Bay Area homes, with 237 of 420 trials succeeding. The result comes as Index has logged 264,000+ downloads, 44,000+ weekly contributors, and 16M+ videos, backed by a $3.5B Nscale compute deal for up to 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. (15)

Kraken parent moves to bring Hyperliquid to U.S. traders

Kraken parent Payward proposed deploying regulated onchain perpetual futures for U.S. clients on Hyperliquid via the HIP-3 framework, with CFTC-regulated Bitnomial administering and clearing contracts and NinjaTrader Clearing carrying accounts. The proposal remains subject to regulatory approval with no launch date set, coming after the Senate rejected the CLARITY Act 49-50, leaving agency discretion as the operative path for U.S. crypto derivatives regulation. (16)

OpenAI calls for standards on global AI self-improvement

OpenAI proposed global safety standards for frontier AI, focusing on alignment research and recursive self-improvement (RSI), warning that "fully autonomous RSI is not happening today" and shouldn't be pursued until it can be done safely. The proposal follows Anthropic's own safety framework and CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow AI development, part of an industry-wide response to warnings from researchers, including one who resigned citing companies "gambling with our lives." (17)

OpenAI eyes $1.2T pre-IPO round after model launches

OpenAI is in early talks with investors about a private funding round at a $1.2T valuation, up from $852B in March, aiming to capitalize on demand following its GPT-5.6 and Astra model launches. CEO Sam Altman said an IPO is unlikely before 2027, as OpenAI's annualized revenue passed $40B last month after a 20% jump, while rival Anthropic is expected to go public as soon as October near a $2T valuation. (18)

OpenAI, Anthropic shift toward smaller AI data centers

OpenAI and Anthropic are pursuing smaller 20-30 MW data center deals for "speed to usable capacity," according to Structure Research's Jabez Tan, as the industry shifts toward inference workloads that JLL projects will use 37% of data center capacity by 2030, up from 9% in 2025. Crusoe, which built OpenAI's largest data center, is now investing in smaller facilities after raising $3.9B at a $30.9B valuation. (19)

Ramp enters UK market with regulated payments

Ramp officially launched in the UK, its first major move outside North America, gaining regulated payments capability through its March 2026 acquisition of Billhop. The expansion follows Ramp's Canada launch in July and comes as AI token spending across its customers has grown roughly 21x since June 2025, with UK customers including ElevenLabs and Attio already onboarded via a beta phase. (20)

Revolut applies for Swiss banking license, to invest $183M in Swiss expansion

Revolut applied for a Swiss banking license with FINMA and plans to invest more than 150M Swiss francs ($183M) over five years, aiming to make it the fintech's fourth standalone European bank after Britain, Lithuania, and France. Revolut currently serves 1.3M Swiss customers, about 24% market penetration, and targets surpassing 40% within two to three years, while tripling its roughly 30-person Swiss workforce by end of next year. (21)

Revolut eyes Nasdaq, London for eventual IPO push

Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky confirmed for the first time that the fintech is planning a dual listing on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, though he said any offering would prefer the US market for its greater liquidity and institutional investor base. At its recent $115B private valuation, a London listing would rank Revolut among the UK's largest public companies, surpassing Barclays, BP, and GSK, with no listing expected before 2028. (22)

Revolut wins Colombia banking license for 2027 launch

Revolut secured a Colombia banking license, planning to launch in 2027 with deposit accounts, credit cards, and consumer loans, backed by a doubled $62M investment in local infrastructure. Country head Diego Caicedo said Revolut aims to become Colombia's third- or fourth-largest bank within five years, extending a Latin America push that includes a pending Argentina bank acquisition, alongside existing licenses in France, Australia, and the UK. (23)

SpaceX's NASA contract grows to $5.92B through 2030

NASA awarded SpaceX a $946M contract for three additional astronaut missions to the ISS, extending crewed flights through 2030 and raising SpaceX's total contract value to $5.92B across 17 missions. The expansion comes as NASA continues relying on SpaceX's Crew Dragon as its primary crew-rotation provider, following Boeing's Starliner setbacks that forced astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams into a nine-month ISS stay after a planned 10-day mission. (24)

SpaceX's index weight doubles in Nasdaq 100 rebalance

SpaceX's Nasdaq 100 weighting will jump to 2.82% from about 1.28% when the quarterly rebalance takes effect Monday, driven by more shares becoming publicly tradable after lockup expirations. Despite ranking as the index's seventh-largest company by market value at over $2T, SpaceX's prior weighting hadn't placed it in the top 20, a gap that will force adjustments across more than 200 tracking funds managing over $800B in assets. (25)

xAI launches Grok 4.7, still trails on benchmarks

xAI launched Grok 4.7 after multiple delays since late July, packing 2.1 trillion parameters (up 40% from Grok 4.6) with supplemental SpaceX engineering data, priced at $2/$6 per million input/output tokens. The model scored second to Claude Fable 5.1 on GDPval (1695 vs. 1735) and AA-Briefcase, and second to GPT-6 Astra on EEBench, continuing xAI's pattern of trailing frontier rivals while undercutting them on price. (26)

OTHER NEWS

ByteDance's AI drug unit raises $290M at $1.5B

ByteDance completed a $290M fundraising for its spun-off AI drug discovery unit, Anew Labs, valuing it at $1.5B in its inaugural external round led by HSG, IDG Capital, and GL Ventures. ByteDance will retain a 56% stake, as Shanghai-based Anew Labs, which also operates offices in San Francisco and Singapore, advances a pipeline including small molecule drugs and two undisclosed targets. (27)

Crusoe's $3.9B round funds modular AI factories, hits $30.9B valuation

Crusoe raised $3.9B in a Series F round co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, pushing its valuation to $30.9B, up from $10B just 10 months earlier. The funding will finance both large sites like Abilene, Texas and smaller, truck-transportable "Spark" AI factories, as Crusoe added three new board members and explores a potential IPO following its $13B Jane Street cloud deal. (28)

Harmattan AI expands Middle East reach with Iraq LOI

France and Iraq signed a joint declaration including a Letter of Intent for Iraq to acquire counter-UAS systems from Harmattan AI, expanding the French defense AI company's Middle East presence following its June Morocco agreement and UAE office. Harmattan AI's Gobi and Gobi Tempest interceptors use kinetic energy at speeds up to 350km/h, building on the company's $200M Series B led by Dassault Aviation in January 2026. (29)

Isar Aerospace scales up after historic orbital launch, cites $11.6B pipeline

Isar Aerospace reached orbit and deployed satellites on its second test flight, with CCO Stella Guillen saying the company's commercial pipeline exceeds €10B ($11.6B) amid "desperate" industry demand for launch capacity. The Munich-based startup, backed by Porsche, Lakestar, HV Capital, and the NATO Innovation Fund, raised €270M in June and is now focused on scaling production toward launching hundreds of rockets annually. (30)

Lightmatter joins Open CPX with new optical engine

Lightmatter joined the Open CPX Multi-Source Agreement and launched the Passage L20 CPX, the industry's first Open CPX module with bidirectional optical link technology, delivering 6.4 terabits per second while halving fiber requirements. In a 512-GPU pod, the company says customers would save over 200 miles of fiber and roughly 16,000 connectors, cutting scale-up interconnect costs by about 15%, with evaluation kits shipping in Q1 2027. (31)

Lovable acquires Sutro to boost software reliability

Lovable acquired Sutro, whose five-year-old language, compiler, and backend platform makes application behavior and rules explicit for security and reliability. Sutro founder Tomas Halgas and three engineers join Lovable, with Halgas leading technical evangelism to help users understand how the underlying technology works as they build and ship software. (32)

Mistral expands to consumers via Firefox partnership

Mistral will power Mozilla's Firefox Smart Window AI assistant in the U.S., Canada, and France, with the U.K. and Germany to follow later this year, becoming Firefox's recommended AI model over existing options like ChatGPT and Claude. The partnership gives Mistral direct exposure to Firefox's roughly 200M monthly users, extending its reach beyond enterprise customers as both companies emphasize open-weight models and user privacy. (33)

Mistral buys ad-tech startup Pimento after €3B raise

Mistral AI acquired Pimento, a Paris-based AI advertising startup, less than two weeks after raising €3B, marking its third acquisition following Koyeb (infrastructure) and Emmi AI (industrial engineering). Founded in 2022, Pimento generates ad creative from briefs, brand identity, and performance data, extending Mistral's push from foundation models toward business-ready applications and workflows. (34)

Plaid, ID.me team up to fight $5.6B in fraud

Plaid and ID.me partnered to combine digital identity verification with real-time bank account verification, helping government agencies confirm both a benefit claimant's identity and their destination account before disbursing funds. The move addresses $5.6B in improper unemployment insurance payments in fiscal 2025, a 14.9% error rate marking the fourth consecutive year exceeding federal standards, letting eligible claimants enroll in direct deposit within minutes instead of weeks. (35)

CHART OF THE WEEK

AI is pulling secondary market capital away from other sectors

Investors are paying up just to get near AI. Capital raised for secondary SPVs is concentrating fast, and AI is capturing most of it, with aerospace and defense a distant second and every other sector further behind. This means that secondary buyers are increasingly paying above the company's last primary round just to get exposure.

That's one reason interest within AI itself is starting to shift. Brokers are seeing demand rotate away from foundation models and toward the infrastructure, compute, and energy layer underneath, areas investors see as less crowded and less exposed to the next model release resetting the picture.

This trend sits at the center of the Stableton Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 strategy, built around the private blue-chip technology leaders across AI and the infrastructure powering it, where investor demand remains strong and secondary market activity continues to deepen.

THE UNTOLD UNICORN STORY

Ramp: Automating the financial engine of modern business

Ramp Co-founders Karim Atiyeh, Eric Glyman, and Gene Lee. (36)

Founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, and Gene Lee, Ramp set out to fix a universal problem in the financial world: finance teams overloaded with manual expense reports and fragmented tools. Their vision was to build an automated platform that makes company finances faster, smarter, and more transparent. Ramp delivers that through a single system combining corporate cards, bill payments, expense management, procurement, travel, and accounting automation.

As of June, Ramp serves more than 70,000 companies and handles around $200bn in annualized purchase volume. (37) Backed by investors including ICONIQ, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and General Catalyst, Ramp reached a $44bn valuation in its June 2026 Series F, nearly tripling in a year, placing it among the most valuable private fintechs in the world. (38)

Fun Fact: Ramp's first big investor breakthrough started on a Fortnite server. Co-founder Karim Atiyeh played to unwind and kept running into Delian Asparouhov, then at Founders Fund alongside former PayPal executive Keith Rabois. Atiyeh mentioned he was building something, Asparouhov set up a meeting, and Founders Fund became Ramp's first outside investor. (39)

Did you know? Ramp is one of the 20 companies in our Stableton Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 strategy, a systematic, index-based approach that aims to outperform public benchmarks with low-cost fees, and without a performance fee. Click below for more information.

SOURCES

1 - Reuters, 2 - NPR, 3 - CNBC, 4 - The Guardian, 5 - Bloomberg, 6 - Figure AI, 7 - The Guardian, 8 - Dealroom, 9 - Washington Technology, 10 - Reuters, 11 - The Wall Street Journal, 12 - Reuters, 13 - Business Wire, 14 - The Wall Street Journal, 15 - Forbes, 16 - BigGo Finance, 17 - CNBC, 18 - Financial Times, 19 - CNBC, 20 - PR Newswire, 21 - Reuters, 22 - Financial Times, 23 - Reuters, 24 - Reuters, 25 - Bloomberg, 26 - Decrypt, 27 - Reuters, 28 - TechCrunch, 29 - Calibre Defence, 30 - CNBC, 31 - HPCwire, 32 - Lovable, 33 - The Wall Street Journal, 34 - Dealroom, 35 - FFNews, 36 - TechCrunch, 37 - Fintech Global, 38 - TechCrunch, 39 - Fortune