🧑‍🚀 Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1. Sierra — $950 million Series E at $15.8 billion valuation led by Tiger Global and GV.

2. OpenAI — $10 billion The Deployment Company JV with TPG, Brookfield, Bain Capital, Advent, and 15 others promising 17.5% guaranteed annual returns.

3. Anthropic — $1.5 billion joint venture alongside Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs.

Dopamine Dealflow

Series B+ & Growth

• Sierra | $950M | Series E | San Francisco, CA

  Builds AI customer service agents and crossed $150 million ARR in eight quarters. Tiger Global and GV led the round and were joined by Benchmark, Sequoia, and Greenoaks.

• Reserv | $125M | Series C | New York, NY

  AI-native third-party administrator and claims platform for property and casualty insurance, processing claims for nearly 200 insurers, MGAs, and brokers. KKR led the round and were joined by Bain Capital Ventures and Flourish Ventures.

• ShopMy | $70M | Growth | New York, NY

  Influencer monetization and affiliate platform with over 50,000 creators and $1 billion in annual sales, now at a $1.5 billion valuation. Avenir led the round and were joined by Bain Capital Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Series A

• Featherless.ai | $20M | Series A | San Francisco, CA

  Serverless inference platform supporting over 30,000 open-source AI models on AMD ROCm hardware. AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures co-led the round and were joined by BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.

Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• GameStop / eBay | $56B | Acquisition Offer | Grapevine, TX

  The deal would marry GameStop's roughly 1,600 US stores with eBay's marketplace to create a national authentication, intake, and fulfillment network for resale commerce.

• OpenAI / The Deployment Company | $10B | Joint Venture | San Francisco, CA

  The vehicle embeds OpenAI engineers inside client organizations and gives the PE consortium access to over 2,000 portfolio companies, with OpenAI retaining super-voting control.

• Anthropic / Enterprise AI JV | $1.5B | Joint Venture | San Francisco, CA

  The new entity puts Anthropic in direct competition with the Big Four consultancies for AI transformation budgets, with applied AI engineers embedded alongside the JV's delivery teams.

• SAP / Prior Labs | €1B+ commitment | Acquisition | Freiburg, Germany

  The deal anchors SAP's tabular foundation model strategy and makes Prior Labs the core of a new European frontier AI lab focused on structured business data.

VC Funds Raised & Raising

• Haun Ventures | $1B | Two new funds | San Francisco, CA

  Split evenly between early and later-stage vehicles, with Katie Haun expanding the firm's mandate from crypto into AI agent infrastructure and regulated financial plumbing.

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Read of the Day

Anthropic and OpenAI Both Bet on Forward-Deployed Engineers to Win Enterprise AI

The same day OpenAI finalized its $10 billion Deployment Company with TPG and a 19-firm PE consortium, Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion enterprise services joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. Both vehicles use the Palantir playbook of embedding model-company engineers directly inside Fortune 500 clients, and both are positioned squarely at the consulting industry rather than at each other.

The Strategy

OpenAI's Deployment Company offers PE backers a 17.5% guaranteed annual return over five years, with OpenAI committing up to $1.5 billion of its own capital and the PE consortium contributing roughly $4 billion. Super-voting shares keep strategic control with OpenAI while financial sponsors take income-style economics. Anthropic's structure is similar in spirit. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Anthropic each commit $300 million, Goldman Sachs adds about $150 million, and Apollo, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia round out the cap table.

Why It Matters

Two of the most valuable AI labs in the world have decided that the path to durable enterprise revenue runs through implementation, not API calls. By bundling models with embedded engineers and PE-owned distribution, they capture the consulting margin that Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey have spent decades defending. For investors, the structure also signals that frontier model companies are moving from pure platform plays into vertically integrated services, with implications for how downstream AI startups price, distribute, and partner.

👉 Read The Whole Story Here

Other News You Don’t Want To Miss

• Shares in Japanese Toilet Maker Toto Soar on AI-Related Pivot

  Toto stock jumped 18% after the company's electrostatic chuck business, used to hold silicon wafers during chip processing, was revealed to drive over 40% of operating income on AI memory demand from SK Hynix, Samsung, and Kioxia.

• Amazon Opens Up Its Logistics Network to Other Businesses in Growth Push

  The shift turns Amazon's fulfillment infrastructure into a third-party service offering that competes directly with FedEx and UPS, expanding a margin opportunity already worth tens of billions in the existing Buy with Prime program.

• GameStop Stock Sinks After Surprise eBay Takeover Bid and Ryan Cohen's Combative CNBC Interview

  Investors are skeptical the unsolicited $125 per share offer will close, sending eBay shares to about $109 and GameStop down 10% as Cohen sparred with anchors over financing and strategy.

• Bret Taylor's Sierra Raises Nearly $1 Billion Months After Last Capital Push

  The OpenAI chairman's customer service agent startup is now valued at $15.8 billion, with Sierra positioning itself as the leading independent application layer built on top of frontier models.

• SAP to Acquire Prior Labs to Establish a Globally Leading Frontier AI Lab in Europe

  The German enterprise software giant is committing more than €1 billion over four years to build a tabular foundation model lab around the team behind Nature-published TabPFN.