Top News | Anthropic, OpenAI raise billions for PE push: The world’s leading AI labs are raising billions ($4 billion for OpenAI, $1.5 billion for Anthropic) to help bring AI into private equity portcos. No, it’s not surprising that companies owned by the cost-conscious want to replace some (expensive) humans with (theoretically less expensive) AI. The two model giants are dueling for enterprise market share, and neither appears set to lose a single deal without a fight. Cerebras targets $115-$125 share price in upcoming IPO: AI chip company Cerebras’s IPO is making good progress, with a new SEC filing stating it intends to raise more than $3 billion at a price well over $100 per share. For recent investors, the price is a win. For investors who bought in even earlier, the price is an even bigger victory. European foundation models? SAP is on a buying spree. The software giant intends to snap up Dremio to help its customers prepare their data for AI agents, and is also buying Prior Labs, a German AI lab building tabular foundation models, or TFMs. Unlike LLMs, TFMs are aces at handling structured business data, which is right up SAP’s lane. Even better, SAP intends to invest “more than €1 billion over the next four years to scale [Prior] into a globally leading frontier AI lab for [structured] data.”
| TWiST 500 | TWiST500 company Sierra, a startup that made an early bet on agentic AI, has raised $950 million in new capital, raising its valuation to $15.8 billion on a post-money basis. The company was born with a focus on deploying agents to the enterprise, later focusing on the customer experience use case. | Quick growth followed. Seven quarters are launching, Sierra reached $100 million ARR. Then, when the company celebrated its second birthday, the figure had risen to $150 million. Adding a marginal $50 million ARR from November 2025 to February 2026 at a startup is impressive. | We can presume that the Sierra deal was a tough round to get into. How can we be sure? Sierra just raised at more than 100x its latest ARR; no investor wants to pay those prices without a peerless growth story. | It doesn’t hurt that Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor is on OpenAI’s board, of course. In terms of connections, Taylor’s status as a former Meta CTO and Salesforce co-CEO does not hurt, either. (Sierra’s quick growth in both revenue scale and private-market valuation should ensure that Benchmark will continue to post impressive returns.) | Back in my day, we called raising $1 billion in a single round an IPO. Today? It’s a small enough round that the new valuation the deal prints is still small enough for any major AI lab to snap the company up without indigestion. Wild times! — Alex | A message from Crowdhealth | CrowdHealth lets you ditch the bureaucracy with a peer-to-peer funding platform for your healthcare. Get started for $99 per month for your first three months by using the code TWIST at JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist. (CrowdHealth is not insurance; it's the superior way to pay for healthcare.) | This Week in Startups | E2283: An AI agent named Valerie is running a real vending machine in San Francisco — setting prices, ordering inventory, managing a bank account, and posting to Instagram. And it's not just a stunt. We’re getting an early look at the future of one-agent companies. Robert Myers, CEO of Manifold Labs, breaks down Targon, a confidential GPU compute marketplace running on Bittensor Subnet 4; Jason calls Bitcoin "played out;" Alex is impressed by Anthropic's stunning $900 billion upcoming valuation; and the guys discuss Big Tech's accelerating CapEx spend, Chinese AI models in Congress crosshairs, and the NBA Playoffs. | E2282: A beanie that reads your thoughts and turns them into text — no surgery required? Jason grills the Sabi co-founders on their noninvasive brain-computer interface, backed by Vinod Khosla, and calls a cap on the whole thing (until he doesn't). This episode of This Week in Startups covers a lot of ground: Jason's tactical tip of the day on making everyone the CEO of their domain, a deep dive into Sabi's thought-to-text beanie, a live demo of AI-powered podcast sidebars built by the TWiST audience, the announcement of a new $5K bounty for an annotation tool, and Jason's big five wellness framework. | E2281: Jason thinks the Chinese government blocking Meta’s acquisition of Manus might be the biggest AI story of the year. This was the deal that demonstrated that Chinese AI companies could move operations overseas (in this case, to Singapore) and start collaborating with Western companies. That loophole has apparently now closed. PLUS OpenAI and Microsoft changed the terms of their relationship, that viral video purportedly showing a Huawei self-driving vehicle hitting a young pedestrian, and Jason’s reaction to Russell Brand on Piers Morgan’s show. | TWiST Partner Offers | Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. Vanta: Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 reports fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at http://www.vanta.com/twist. Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.
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