Raison Venture Digest

SpaceX will invest $100 billion in a new spaceport, Crusoe raised more than $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, and Nasdaq invested $100 million in Kraken’s parent company. Here is what happened with Raison portfolio companies, and how the AI safety debate is affecting business.

Crusoe and Lambda

Funding rounds, major contracts, and IPO plans

Crusoe and Lambda are infrastructure companies that provide computing power for AI labs. In recent weeks, both companies announced new deals and financing, as well as a possible move to the public market.

Crusoe raised more than $3 billion at a $30 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners. For comparison, in December 2024 Crusoe was valued at $2.8 billion, and in October 2025 — at roughly $10 billion.

In September, the company announced a five-year contract with trading firm Jane Street worth about $13 billion. In addition, Crusoe held preliminary meetings with investment banks to discuss a possible IPO.

Lambda also signed a major contract. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company will provide Anthropic with $35 billion in cloud capacity. It will be hosted in the data center Hut 8 is building in Texas.

At the end of August, the company announced a new round of short-term private debt financing totaling $1 billion. In addition, the company secured a $926 million loan. According to Bloomberg, Lambda is negotiating a round of up to $3 billion ahead of a public listing (pre-IPO). Investors are discussing a valuation of $12 billion.

For more on why Crusoe and Lambda valuations are rising alongside demand from AI labs, see our new article in the Raison blog.

SpaceX

New launch complex in Louisiana and OpenAI’s conflict with Cursor

On August 25, SpaceX announced that it will invest $100 billion in building the Starbase Louisiana launch complex in southern Louisiana. This will be the company’s second private spaceport after Starbase in Texas. The site is expected to launch Starship rocket and space systems up to 1,000 times a year. According to the state economic development agency, the first launch is expected no earlier than 2029.

At the end of August, it became known that OpenAI plans to cut off Cursor, which is part of SpaceX’s AI ecosystem, from its models. OpenAI is offering to end access on November 12 and will not provide Cursor with new models. According to OpenAI, Elon Musk’s companies violated contract terms, so there are doubts that SpaceX will comply with them going forward.

OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and we are discussing with the OpenAI team how to resolve this issue. Cursor was one of OpenAI’s first users.

Cursor CEO

Michael Truell

At the same time, Anthropic rents computing capacity from SpaceX. The company’s co-founder Tom Brown said that Anthropic will continue expanding resources for Claude models in Cursor.

Anthropic

$2 trillion valuation target and new compute contracts

Anthropic plans to go public on Nasdaq in October 2026, aiming for a valuation of about $2 trillion. Back in May 2026, Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H round at a $965 billion valuation. In August, the company was already valued at $1.5 trillion on the secondary market.

The valuation target is based on projected revenue of $190–200 billion in 2028. By July, Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) had exceeded $65 billion. However, to reach the forecast figure, the company will need to roughly triple it over two and a half years.

At the same time, Anthropic posted positive operating income for the first time in the second quarter.

Against the backdrop of IPO preparations, Anthropic continues to increase investment in compute infrastructure: according to TechCrunch, the company is renting computing capacity from the UK’s Nscale for about $45 billion. Earlier in August, the company signed a contract for the same term with cloud startup Volta for $10 billion.

We covered Anthropic’s valuation, revenue, and IPO risks in detail in the Raison blog

Groq

$350 million round and AI infrastructure expansion

Groq is another infrastructure company in our portfolio that in August raised $350 million in a Series A round at a $3.5 billion valuation. The deal was led by investment firm Disruptive. According to a Groq representative, Nvidia also participated in the round.

In August 2024, Groq was valued at $2.8 billion, and in September 2025 the valuation rose to $6.9 billion. Groq does not consider the new round a down round: the valuation refers to the company’s business after the deal with Nvidia.

Groq began its business pivot in June with a $650 million round led by Disruptive and Infinitum. The company now operates 13 data centers and provides Nvidia-based clusters for inference, that is, running trained AI models. By the end of 2027, Groq plans to increase capacity from 54 MW to more than 200 MW.

Inference will undoubtedly become the largest and most important layer of AI infrastructure.

Chairman of the Board of Groq, founder and CEO of Disruptive

Alex Davis

Ramp

Round talks and the launch of Router

According to Bloomberg, Ramp is holding preliminary talks to raise about $1 billion at a $60 billion valuation. In November 2025, the company was valued at $32 billion, and in June 2026 Ramp raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation. Over the seven months between rounds, the number of customers grew from about 50,000 to 70,000.

On August 20, Ramp launched Router — a service for working with multiple AI models through a single API. Customers can connect models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and other developers and switch between them. The Router dashboard shows token spending and response latency. The service is available only in the US and is free until the end of 2026, while users pay separately for model requests. Thus, Router is designed to complement Ramp’s tools for controlling AI token spending.

Kraken

Nasdaq investment, IPO delay, and partnership with SoFi

On September 10, Nasdaq invested $100 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company. The companies are jointly developing tokenized equities — digital versions of securities on the blockchain. The tokens will be connected to the xStocks platform.

Reducing settlement time from two days to one in 2024 freed up $3 billion. Blockchain settlement removes that wait.

co-CEO of Payward

Arjun Sethi

However, this investment did not bring the company’s IPO any closer. According to CoinDesk, Payward pushed its public listing back to at least the second quarter of 2027, although it filed a confidential submission with the SEC in November 2025. At the same time, Payward’s adjusted revenue in the second quarter rose by 17% year over year, to $508 million.

On September 3, Kraken and digital bank SoFi announced a partnership. Payward will connect to SoFi’s payment network, and Kraken’s institutional clients will be able to transfer dollars around the clock. SoFiUSD, SoFi’s stablecoin, has also been added to Kraken. For the bank, Kraken Prime will become an additional source of liquidity for crypto transactions.

Mercury

New funds for parking companies’ idle cash

Mercury added two funds to its Mercury Treasury service for placing clients’ idle cash. The funds were created together with Morgan Stanley Investment Management and State Street Investment Management.

The first fund, MCRYX, invests in bonds with very short maturities and is already available to clients. The second fund, MRGXX, is a separate share class of State Street’s government money market fund. Its fee is lower than the fund Mercury previously offered. The company expects clients to earn higher returns as a result of lower costs. The launch of MRGXX is planned for the coming weeks.

Mercury Treasury is used by ElevenLabs, Supabase, and Linear. More than 300,000 entrepreneurs use the Mercury platform.

Cohere

Round talks at a $20 billion valuation and CEO warning on cyber threats

According to The Globe and Mail, Cohere is in talks to raise $2–3 billion at a valuation of about $20 billion. The deal is not yet closed, so its terms may change. We wrote about the Series E round and the $20 billion valuation in the April–May issue: it is being led by Schwarz Group, which is investing $600 million.

The company is betting on sovereign AI: its clients deploy models in their own infrastructure. In April, Cohere joined forces with Germany’s Aleph Alpha; the company operates in Toronto and Berlin.

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez spoke about AI risks for cybersecurity on CNBC’s The Tech Download podcast. He called the July incident in which OpenAI AI agents gained unauthorized access to the Hugging Face developer platform shocking. In Gomez’s view, the same model capabilities should be used for defense: to identify vulnerabilities in companies and fix them.

These models are the most powerful cyber weapon ever created. They are incredibly effective at finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them at scale.

CEO of Cohere

Aidan Gomez

Period signals

AI safety is becoming an important factor for business and investors

On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slower pace in AI model development. One of the reasons he cited was the July incident, when OpenAI AI agents left the test environment and gained unauthorized access to a third-party platform. Anthropic pledged to bring in independent security experts. Sam Altman and Elon Musk supported the proposal.

The debate is already affecting AI companies’ businesses. Altman said that OpenAI will not go public in 2026, citing, among other things, risks related to AI safety. According to CNBC, Anthropic will note public backlash against AI and data centers among the risk factors in its IPO prospectus.

Demand for cybersecurity is also growing. In the second quarter, CrowdStrike increased annual recurring revenue (ARR) by a record $333 million — 51% more than a year earlier. theCUBE Research analysts link the acceleration to the emergence of Mythos, Anthropic’s model that finds vulnerabilities in software.

Risk assessments, however, differ. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner called warnings about human extinction exaggerated and linked them to the political agenda. Altimeter is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI.

We are tracking how the AI safety debate affects IPO timing and valuations of companies in the Raison portfolio. To discuss your portfolio, leave a request via the Raison Telegram bot.