Welcome to our last newsletter of 2025. OpenAI follows a Code Red year with a very public December. Big Tech and AI labs are entering open relationships, a new player breaks into the $100B+ club, politics is shaping tech outcomes, and the year closes with one last wave of major funding rounds.
OpenAI and the New Valuation Ceiling
OpenAI has been treating December like an Advent calendar, dropping news almost daily.
First came Disney. A $1 billion strategic investment that also turns Disney into a major OpenAI customer. Disney will use OpenAI’s APIs across new products and internal tools, deploy ChatGPT company-wide, and bring Sora-generated content to Disney+. This is less about branding and more about distribution at scale.
Then Amazon. Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest more than $10 billion. OpenAI is likely to be one of the defining winners of the AI cycle. Taking a stake offers Amazon financial upside, but the operational leverage matters more. OpenAI has already committed roughly $38 billion in spend on Amazon Web Services over the coming years. An equity relationship strengthens that lock-in, improves Amazon’s chances of pushing its Trainium chips, and opens the door to deeper collaboration — from agents to commerce to applied enterprise tools. And if this partnership weakens rivals like Google or Anthropic.
Only after that backdrop does the scale of OpenAI’s ambition fully land. The company is now aiming to raise up to $100 billion at an ~$850 billion valuation by early 2026, potentially bringing sovereign wealth funds into the round.
OpenAI released GPT-5.2, its new flagship model, as it pushes to defend ChatGPT’s lead against Google and Anthropic — not just in research benchmarks, but in enterprise contracts. ChatGPT also launched an app store.
OpenAI reported it’s compute margin — revenue left after paying for inference — jumped to roughly 70% in October, up from ~52% late last year and just ~35% in early 2024.
Waymo is back in fundraising mode
Waymo is in early talks with investors about a new round valuing the company at $100B+, with the raise expected to be several billions of dollars, and potentially north of $10B. If it lands, the valuation would more than double Waymo’s last round.
Just over a year ago, Waymo raised $5.6B at a $45B valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and Fidelity. The company remains controlled by Alphabet, but the funding signals growing external conviction.
What’s changed since then is traction. Last week, Waymo disclosed that its vehicles have already completed 14 million paid rides this year.
The Pentagon brings consumer AI inside the wire
The U.S. Department of Defense will add Grok, the model developed by xAI, to its internal AI platform early next year — making it available to both military and civilian employees.
The service, called genAI.mil, launched earlier this month with only Google’s Gemini model live. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI were listed as “coming soon.” Over the summer, the Pentagon awarded contracts to all four companies worth up to $200M each.
The Pentagon highlighted Grok’s “advanced capabilities” and emphasized that users would gain access to real-time global insights from the X platform.
Nvidia shows how to buy a rival without buying the company
Nvidia struck a deal to license technology from Groq — one of its best-funded challengers — while also hiring Groq’s leadership team, in a transaction valued at roughly $20B. Structurally, this is not an acquisition. It’s a non-exclusive licensing agreement, a format that conveniently sidesteps immediate antitrust scrutiny.
The deal gives Nvidia access to Groq’s intellectual property for chips optimized for high-speed AI inference, where workloads are narrower and latency matters more than flexibility. That opens the door for Nvidia to design server chips that are cheaper and more efficient than its current general-purpose GPUs — without rebuilding its stack from scratch.
Even with billions in venture funding, challenging Nvidia’s dominance remains close to impossible. Groq itself recently cut its 2025 revenue projections by roughly 75%, despite having been valued at $6.9B in its latest equity round. A company worth under $7B on paper effectively becomes a $20B strategic asset — not by winning the market, but by being absorbed into the leader’s roadmap.
A Fusion Bet Powered by Politics
Trump Media and Technology Group — which reported $1.0M in net sales in Q3 2025 — plans to merge with TAE Technologies, a fusion startup that has raised $1.3B since inception.
TMTG’s assets include Truth Social, a niche social network; Truth+, a streaming service with questionable demand; and Truth.fi, a fintech brand that hasn’t launched. TAE, meanwhile, is a hard-tech company trying to build a first-of-its-kind fusion reactor.
The official logic goes like this: TMTG has cash. TAE needs cash. And both companies — cue the hand-waving — want to support “American AI dominance.” The investor deck cites TMTG’s “experience with large capital raises and complex regulatory processes” as a strategic advantage, while framing fusion as a pillar of “energy independence” needed to power the next wave of data centers.
When regulatory approval is existential — as it is for a fusion company targeting a utility-scale reactor — proximity to political power becomes part of the business plan.
Cerebras Tries Again — This Time With a Clean Cap Table
Cerebras Systems is preparing to file for a U.S. IPO as early as this week, targeting a Q2 2026 listing.
Cerebras first filed confidential paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024, then postponed and ultimately withdrew the filing in October. That withdrawal came just days after the company raised $1B+ at an $8B valuation, a round that reset expectations but didn’t clear the path to public markets.
Reuters previously reported that the delay followed a U.S. national security review tied to a minority investment from G42, a UAE-based tech group. Earlier this year, Cerebras confirmed it had received clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. G42 no longer appears on the investor list.
Revenue Up, Losses Too — Motive Heads for IPO
Motive Technologies, which sells software to manage physical operations across logistics, construction, and field services, reported 22% revenue growth to $327M in the nine months ended September 30, according to a securities filing ahead of its planned IPO.
The cost of that growth is rising. Motive posted a $139M loss over the same period — wider than last year — as operating expenses continued to climb.
What stands out is adoption. Motive ended September with roughly 100,000 corporate customers, a meaningful footprint in industries that tend to adopt software slowly and churn reluctantly.
Fintech stops renting banks
Mercury has applied for a national bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, joining a growing wave of fintechs moving to become banks outright as the regulatory climate loosens under the Donald Trump administration.
The neobank serves 200,000+ customers, primarily businesses, and generates roughly $650M in annualized revenue. A national charter would let Mercury cut out sponsor banks, lower unit costs, expand product scope, and operate with far more autonomy. In other words: fewer intermediaries, more margin, more power.
Funding Updates, Product Launches, and Financial Signals
Databricks raised $4B+ at a $134B valuation, up 34% in just three months, enabling employee liquidity while staying private. The company expects $4B+ in revenue this year and positive cash generation.
In healthcare AI, OpenEvidence is raising $250M at a $12B valuation, doubling its valuation just two months after its previous round. Its pitch is simple and resonant: a ChatGPT-like interface for doctors, grounded in peer-reviewed medical literature.
Mature AI incumbents are starting to look IPO-ready again. Notion is reportedly planning a tender offer at an $11B valuation, up from its 2021 mark, with $600M+ ARR and positive cash flow — half of revenue now driven by AI products. Forbes reports the company is actively lining up financing rounds ahead of a potential IPO.
On the M&A front, ServiceNow is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity firm Armis for around $7B. Armis crossed $300M ARR in August, up from $200M less than a year earlier, and already serves blue-chip customers like United Airlines and Colgate-Palmolive. If completed, this would mark ServiceNow’s second multi-billion-dollar acquisition this year, following its $2.85B purchase of Moveworks.
Livestream shopping platform Whatnot is targeting nearly $1B in 2025 revenue, after raising $500M+ this year and reaching an $11.5B valuation. What began with collectibles has quietly expanded into apparel, beauty, and broader retail.
And in data security, Israeli startup Cyera is raising $400M at a $9B valuation.
Stockholm-based Lovable raised $330M at a $6.6B valuation, underpinned by $200M ARR, one of the fastest growth curves on record.
Harness raised $240M in Series E funding, valuing the eight-year-old developer platform at $5.5B, up from $3.7B three years ago. Harness sits squarely in the infrastructure layer for AI-native software, helping teams manage deployments and security as complexity rises.
Runway unveiled GWM-1, its first family of “general world models,” pushing beyond video generation toward realistic physics and robotics training.
In biotech, Chai Discovery raised $130M at a $1.3B valuation, backed by OpenAI and led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT, as AI-driven drug discovery keeps attracting crossover capital.