AI lab funding tracker: valuations, rounds and backers, October 2026

The tracker: latest rounds, marks and backers

The table lists the most recent priced, closed primary round for each lab, with the post-money valuation where it was disclosed. Rounds that were only reported as being in talks at the end of September are noted separately in the next section and are not used as the valuation of record.

Capital raised: 2025 versus 2026 to date

Summing only closed primary equity rounds with disclosed amounts, the nine labs raised $70.9B in calendar 2025. The largest items were OpenAI’s $40B round led by SoftBank (March 31, 2025, $300B post-money), Anthropic’s $13B Series F (September 2025, $183B) and $3.5B Series E (March 2025, $61.5B), and xAI’s $5B equity raise in June 2025. Mistral’s EUR 1.7B Series C, SSI’s $2B, Thinking Machines’ $2B seed and Reflection’s $2B Series B filled out the middle; Perplexity ($0.8B across three tranches) and Cohere ($0.6B across two closes) were the smallest.

In the first nine months of 2026 the same group closed $240.6B: OpenAI $122B, Anthropic $95B across two rounds, xAI $20B and Mistral about $3.58B. OpenAI alone accounted for 50.7% of the total and the top two together for 90.2%. The concentration is the defining feature of this cycle. Capital is not spreading down the stack; it is pooling in the two labs with the largest revenue bases.

Several deals in motion at the end of the quarter would lift the 2026 figure materially if they close: OpenAI is reported to be raising at least $30B at about $1.4T (Bloomberg, September 29, 2026); Cohere is in advanced talks for $2B to $3B at $20B; Thinking Machines is in talks for $1B at no less than $40B with Accel; and Nvidia is reported to be in talks to invest in Perplexity above $30B.

Revenue run-rates and valuation multiples

Run-rate revenue is the metric the market is pricing, but labs define it differently and most figures come from press reports rather than audited statements. The multiples below divide the post-money valuation by the closest reported run-rate and should be read as indicative.

Two points stand out. First, Anthropic’s revenue has grown faster than its valuation: the mark rose 2.5 times from $380B to $965B between February and May 2026, while reported run-rate rose from $14B in February to $65B by July. Its leaked prospectus (reported September 29, 2026) shows quarterly revenue of $4.73B in Q1 2026 and $11.5B in Q2 2026, against $4.6B for all of 2025. Second, the further from the top two, the more the valuation rests on future capability rather than current sales, with SSI and Reflection carrying $25B to $32B marks without disclosed revenue.

Circular and strategic financing

A large share of 2026 capital comes from companies that sell compute, chips or memory to the labs they fund. That creates linked flows in which equity dollars return to the investor as revenue.

• Amazon and OpenAI. Amazon’s $50B commitment (announced March 1, 2026) is $15B of preferred stock plus $35B contingent on triggers that include an OpenAI IPO, and the commitment is contractually tied to a collaboration under which OpenAI committed to 2 GW of Trainium capacity on AWS. If that agreement ends, the $35B obligation ends with it.
• Nvidia and OpenAI. Nvidia’s letter of intent (September 22, 2025) envisaged up to $100B invested progressively as at least 10 GW of Nvidia systems are deployed, with the first gigawatt targeted for the second half of 2026. Nvidia then committed $30B to the 2026 round.
• AMD and OpenAI. AMD granted OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million AMD shares that vests as OpenAI deploys up to 6 GW of AMD GPUs and as AMD hits share price targets (October 6, 2025).
• Microsoft, Nvidia and Anthropic. Microsoft committed up to $5B and Nvidia up to $10B (November 2025), alongside an Anthropic commitment to buy $30B of Azure compute; portions were funded through the Series G.
• Compute providers as funders of smaller labs. Nvidia appears among the backers of all nine labs in this tracker and often pairs equity with compute access, as with its 1 GW agreement with Thinking Machines and its reported $5B plan for SSI. Memory suppliers Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix joined Anthropic’s Series H.

The analytical issue is not that these deals are improper but that they blur price discovery. A strategic investor that expects to recover part of its outlay through supply contracts can rationally pay more than a financial investor would, so the headline valuation partly reflects the value of the supply relationship.

Secondary sales, tender offers and IPO talk

Employee liquidity programs have become routine. OpenAI completed a roughly $7B tender at its $852B valuation (August 10, 2026), following an October 2025 tender. Anthropic ran a tender at a $350B pre-money valuation that closed in late April 2026 below its $5B to $6B target as employees chose to hold ahead of a listing.

The listing path is now concrete. SpaceX, which absorbed xAI in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $250B (February 2, 2026), listed on Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, making it the first public vehicle for a US frontier lab; its prospectus showed xAI revenue of $3.2B and a $6.4B loss in 2025. Anthropic has filed confidentially and a draft prospectus was reported on September 28, 2026, with a reported valuation target around $2T. OpenAI filed confidentially in June 2026 but has pushed its listing beyond 2026 and is raising a bridge round instead. In China, MiniMax and Zhipu listed in Hong Kong in January 2026, raising $619M and $558M respectively.

Risks

• Compute obligations. Anthropic’s prospectus reportedly cites $518B in planned cloud and data center spending, and xAI’s AI segment capex ran at $7.7B in Q1 2026 alone. Fixed commitments of this size assume revenue keeps compounding.
• Losses. Anthropic reported a $42B net loss for 2025 in the leaked draft, though it describes operating profitability in Q2 2026; xAI lost $6.4B in 2025.
• Customer concentration. A quarter of Anthropic’s revenue reportedly comes from two clients.
• Conditional capital. Headline round sizes include contingent tranches, such as Amazon’s $35B, that may never fund.
• Public market repricing. SpaceX shares were reported to have fallen about 50% from their peak by late July 2026, a reminder that private marks do not guarantee public ones.
• Metric quality. Run-rates are largely self-reported, annualize short windows and differ in definition across labs.

Methodology

The tracker covers nine foundation model developers: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral AI, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, Reflection AI, Perplexity and Cohere. Data was gathered from company announcements, law firm deal notices and press reports between January 1, 2025 and October 6, 2026; the latest data point is dated September 30, 2026. Valuation of record is the post-money valuation of the latest closed, priced primary round, except xAI (price in the SpaceX acquisition) and Reflection (reported pre-money; post-money not disclosed). Rounds in talks are reported but not used as valuations of record.

Capital raised totals were computed in Python as the sum of closed primary equity rounds with disclosed amounts, by announcement or closing date. They exclude debt (including xAI’s $5B of debt in June 2025), secondary sales and tender offers, strategic commitments not yet funded as equity (including the Microsoft and Nvidia November 2025 Anthropic commitment, to avoid double counting with the Series G), Reflection’s undisclosed 2026 amount, Nvidia’s undisclosed Thinking Machines investment and its reported SSI plan, and Cohere’s Schwarz Group commitment. OpenAI’s $122B is counted in full although $35B of Amazon’s commitment is contingent. Euro amounts were converted at the 1.193 USD per EUR rate implied by TechCrunch’s conversion of Mistral’s EUR 3B Series D; this rate was also applied to the EUR 1.7B Series C (about $2.03B). Multiples were computed in Python as valuation divided by reported run-rate. OpenAI’s March 2026 run-rate (about $24B) was annualized from reported monthly revenue of about $2B, and xAI’s (about $3.3B) from Q1 2026 revenue of $818M. Limitations: several figures, including Anthropic’s prospectus data, come from press reporting of documents not publicly filed, and some secondary aggregators were used to cross-check round histories.

Sources

• Anthropic: Series G at $380B post-money (as of February 12, 2026)
• Orrick: Anthropic $65B Series H at $965B (as of May 29, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Anthropic annualized revenue reaches $65B (as of August 17, 2026)
• Fortune: Anthropic draft prospectus financials (as of September 29, 2026)
• Yahoo Finance: OpenAI closes $122B round at $852B (as of April 1, 2026)
• Yahoo Finance: OpenAI in talks for $30B at $1.4T (as of September 29, 2026)
• GeekWire: structure of Amazon’s $50B OpenAI deal (as of March 2026)
• TechCrunch: xAI financials in SpaceX IPO filing (as of May 20, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Mistral raises EUR 3B Series D (as of September 8, 2026)
• Revenue Memo: Cohere round history and ARR (as of September 2026)