Raison Venture Digest

Mercury

A $200M round and the launch of Command, an AI assistant

Fintech platform Mercury raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation, 49% above its previous round in March 2025. TCV led the financing, with participation from a16z, Sequoia, Coatue, and Spark Capital. More than 300,000 companies use Mercury; annual revenue has reached $650 million, and the company has been profitable for four consecutive years.

Alongside the round, Mercury launched Command, an AI assistant that handles financial tasks within your account via simple text commands, with the user approving every action.

AI is collapsing the friction between an idea and a company faster than anything I have seen in my career. We are going to see more founders in the next five years than in the last twenty. But legacy banking in 2026 still works the way it did when I started my first company in 2006

Immad Akhund

co-founder and CEO of Mercury

In addition, the US banking regulator (OCC) has granted conditional approval for Mercury to establish its own bank. Most fintechs operate through partner banks, so a license of one’s own is both a rarity and a serious step forward. We covered Mercury’s banking ambitions in this article.

Anthropic

Fable 5: release, ban, comeback

On June 9, Anthropic released Fable 5, the production version of its Mythos model. The model is known for its ability to autonomously identify vulnerabilities in software and produce both fixes and hacking tools to exploit them.

Three days later, the White House demanded that access to the model be restricted outside the United States. Since enforcing this proved technically impossible, Anthropic temporarily shut the model down entirely. The trigger was a report from AWS that the model’s safety guardrails could be bypassed.

After joint testing with government agencies, Anthropic hardened the model’s safeguards. The restrictions were lifted on June 30, and on July 1 the model became available to users again. That said, some of them report that its performance has declined since the update.

The episode sent an important signal to the entire industry. Other developers, including OpenAI, have begun delaying the release of their most powerful models. For the first time, artificial intelligence has so explicitly landed at the center of national security policy.

Apptronik

A giant robot park and the Apollo 3 announcement

Apptronik has opened Robot Park, a 90,000-square-foot site in Austin where Apollo 2 robots perform real tasks drawn from logistics, manufacturing, and retail. The goal is to collect the data that physical AI models learn from. As CEO Jeff Cardenas puts it, the company now runs two factories: one builds robots, the other produces data. Similar sites are already operating at the company’s partners, including Google DeepMind and Mercedes-Benz.

Cardenas also announced Apollo 3, the next-generation robot due in 2027. If today’s humanoids, by his own admission, remain prototypes, Apollo 3 will become the company’s first true commercial product.

My view is that modern robotics is the space race of our time. Whoever wins it will be a big part of the future, both for national competitiveness and national security.

Jeff Cardenas

Apptronik press release | Forbes

SpaceXAI

A rebrand and the $60B Cursor acquisition

xAI has officially rebranded as SpaceXAI. At the same time, the company agreed to acquire Cursor, the maker of the world’s most popular AI coding environment. The deal is worth $60 billion and is expected to close in the third quarter. For the market, it signals that SpaceXAI intends to compete seriously in the race for AI developer tools.

Since the IPO, SPCX shares have shown solid momentum. The offering was priced at $135, the stock opened at $150, and within a week it reached $229. It later corrected to $160 and has held around that level for the past week. Following the rally, Elon Musk briefly became the first trillionaire in history.

The company has also joined the Nasdaq 100. Funds that passively track the index will now automatically add SPCX to their portfolios, supporting the stock at least until the next earnings report.

Neuralink

The first implant placed without opening the dura

Neuralink has performed the world’s first surgery implanting a neurochip through the dura mater, the protective membrane that covers the brain. Until now, surgeons had to cut a coin-sized opening in it, adding trauma and raising the risk of complications. Now the R1 robot inserts electrodes straight through the membrane, spending about 1.5 seconds on each.

The results are striking: the surgery has shrunk from the traditional 8 hours to under an hour, and the target cost has dropped to $5,000. The method is easier to standardize, which means the implantation can be replicated in regular neurosurgery rather than relying on a single unique team. The first patient was controlling a cursor with their thoughts on the day of the operation.

From day one, we’ve been working to make the surgery faster and less invasive. Preserving the dura mater instead of removing it is a huge step in that direction

A Neuralink engineer says

The company remains on track with its 2026 trial plan: the 1,024-channel N1 implant has been placed in 21 patients, while the Blindsight vision-restoration trials continue in parallel.

Kraken

Sponsorship, reputation, and access to pre-IPO assets

Kraken has several updates at once. The exchange became the official crypto sponsor of the FIFA World Cup and made the Fortune Crypto 100 list. Kraken also partnered with xStocks, a platform for trading tokenized assets, meaning digital versions of traditional securities. As a result, users gained access to pre-IPO and IPO deals at the offering price, including the recent SPCX listing. For retail investors, this kind of access is a new phenomenon.

Separately, the company launched perpetual futures trading. These are contracts with no expiry date that allow trading with leverage. Importantly, the product is subject to oversight by the CFTC, the US regulator. The company’s geography is expanding too: a license from VARA, Dubai’s virtual asset regulator, has opened official access to the UAE market for Kraken.

Cohere

Major enterprise clients and a London office

Cohere, which builds AI for enterprises and the public sector, has notably expanded its roster of major clients. S&P Global is integrating its financial data into North, Cohere’s secure AI platform, enabling banks and financial institutions to build workflows on it with verifiable data and source citations. Meanwhile, TKMS, a major marine technology manufacturer, has signed an eight-figure contract with Cohere to deploy North across the entire group.

For a relatively small AI lab, clients of this caliber are a serious achievement. Both deals rest on the same idea: regulated industries need AI that runs inside their own infrastructure and keeps sensitive data from leaving it. This approach is known as sovereign AI, and Cohere is making it its core bet.

To support the strategy, the company is moving into a new London office three times the size of its current one, up to 14,000 square feet (about 1,300 sq m), with room for 100 employees.

Ramp

A Series F round at a $44B valuation

Fintech platform Ramp raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation. The round was led by ICONIQ, GIC, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, with Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Morgan Stanley Investment Management among the new investors.

The company is growing at its fastest pace in three years: payment volume in March rose about 170% year over year. One driver is a new business line, AI spend management, where companies are spending ever more while legacy systems have no way to keep those costs under control.

For 500 years, business ran on two pillars of spend: people and vendors. In the last 24 months, a third arrived — intelligence, paid by the token and invisible to every system we’ve built to manage cost. Ramp is the infrastructure for the third pillar

Eric Glyman

co-founder and CEO of Ramp

We took a closer look at the round in this article.

Signal of the Period

Governments step into technology

Government intervention in the technology sector is intensifying worldwide, regardless of a country’s political system. Trade and political tensions are pushing countries to act more aggressively against one another, leaving businesses to adapt.

The Fable 5 story from this issue is a fresh example, but far from the only one. In recent years we have watched a supply chain for key components, such as rare earth metals, collapse within a week, and a single administration’s decision put a company and its products at risk overnight.

In such an unpredictable era, diversification means more than spreading investments across companies and industries. Spreading them across jurisdictions matters just as much.

Raison helps investors build exactly this kind of portfolio: access to private companies from different countries and sectors in a single app. To discuss your portfolio with the Raison team, leave a request via our Telegram bot or fill in a short form, and our managers will get in touch with you.