⭐️ Everything You Need to Know Today

1. Amazon just broke Microsoft's grip on OpenAI's cloud. The final $35B tranche of its $50B investment makes AWS the exclusive third-party cloud for OpenAI Frontier, plus 2 gigawatts of Amazon's own Trainium chips. After six years of OpenAI running almost entirely on Azure, this is a real reshuffle of who owns the workloads — not just a check.

2. Amazon posted a $200 billion quarter the same day. Revenue hit $200.6B with AWS growing 37% — its fastest pace since 2021 — sending the stock up 13%. Pairing that with the OpenAI news in a single day shows Amazon using its own scale to both fund and capture the AI buildout at once.

3. A carbon-block battery startup just proved industrial heat is an AI story too. Antora Energy raised $550M at a $2.47B valuation to store renewable power as heat for round-the-clock industrial use. As data centers strain the grid, storage plays like this are becoming as fundable as the compute itself.

☄️ Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1. Amazon, with $50 billion in investment, completed its investment in OpenAI with a final $35 billion tranche, making AWS the exclusive third-party cloud for OpenAI Frontier.

   

2. Intercontinental Exchange, $6 billion, all-cash agreement to buy MarketAxess at $167 a share, a 33 percent premium, to unify fixed-income trading.

3. Antora Energy, $550 million Series C at a $2.47 billion valuation, to expand US thermal-battery manufacturing.

   

🌦️ Dopamine Dealflow

Series B+ & Growth

• Antora Energy | $550 million | Series C | Sunnyvale, United States
  Antora stores renewable electricity as high-temperature heat in carbon blocks, then delivers zero-emissions industrial heat and power on demand. G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the round and were joined by Ribbit Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Activate Capital, John Doerr, StepStone Group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital.
  

• DataBahn | $40 million | Series B | Dallas, United States
  DataBahn runs an agentic data control plane that lets enterprises collect, route, and govern the telemetry feeding their AI systems. Insight Partners led the round and were joined by Forgepoint, GTM Capital, and S3 Ventures.

Series A

• Arboreal Bioinnovations | $28 million | Series A | Lucknow, India
  Arboreal makes specialty food and nutraceutical ingredients, including next-generation proteins, sugar-reduction solutions, and cocoa actives, for more than 1,100 business customers. EAAA and Omnivore co-led the round and were joined by Rainmatter by Zerodha.

Seed & Early Rounds

• Intropy | $11 million | Seed | London, United Kingdom
  Intropy builds an AI-native operating system that automates inventory and pricing decisions across the spare-parts supply chain. Felix Capital led the round and was joined by Quiet Capital, General Catalyst, and Firstminute Capital.
  

• Ellis | $10 million | Seed | New York, United States
  Ellis, from Cadre founder Ryan Williams, runs an AI-native platform that automates the loan lifecycle for private credit managers. First Round Capital led the round and was joined by 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Josh Kushner, and Immad Akhund.

Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• Amazon | $50 billion | Strategic Investment | Seattle, United States
  The stake is tied to a $110 billion round alongside Nvidia and SoftBank, making AWS the exclusive third-party cloud for OpenAI Frontier, and expanding the pair's infrastructure agreement by $100 billion over eight years.
  

• Intercontinental Exchange | $6 billion | Acquisition | Atlanta, United States
  Folding in MarketAxess puts price discovery, electronic execution, and post-trade compliance for fixed income onto one platform.

IPOs / Direct Listings / Issuances / Block Trades

• Reformation | $210.9 million | IPO | Los Angeles, United States
  The Permira-backed sustainable womenswear brand priced at $15 a share and opened flat on the NYSE under the ticker REF, giving it an $886 million market value.

VC Funds Raised & Raising

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💰 Read of the Day

Amazon Closes Its $50 Billion Bet on OpenAI

The final tranche lands, and AWS becomes OpenAI's exclusive enterprise cloud.

Amazon has completed the $50 billion investment in OpenAI it first signaled at the start of the year, wiring the last $35 billion after OpenAI cleared agreed performance targets. The commitment is part of a $110 billion round that also drew Nvidia and SoftBank. It reorders a cloud pecking order Microsoft has led since 2019.

The Strategy
The money buys more than equity. AWS becomes the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform for building and governing teams of AI agents, and the two sides expanded an existing $38 billion cloud agreement by another $100 billion over eight years. OpenAI also committed to two gigawatts of Amazon's custom Trainium silicon.

Powered by Trainium and Bedrock
Beyond capacity, the pair will co-develop custom models for Amazon products including Alexa and build a stateful agent runtime on Amazon Bedrock, tying OpenAI's research more tightly to Amazon's own stack.

Why It Matters
For years OpenAI ran on Microsoft Azure. Routing its enterprise Frontier product and two gigawatts of training through AWS gives Amazon a direct claim on workloads Microsoft assumed were locked in, and it hands Trainium a marquee customer to prove itself against Nvidia GPUs.

Read The Whole Story Here

Other News You Don’t Want To Miss

• Amazon Posts First $200 Billion Quarter as AWS Growth Hits 37%
  Amazon's second-quarter revenue reached $200.6 billion and AWS grew 37 percent to $42.2 billion, its fastest pace since 2021, sending the stock up 13 percent.
  

• Apple Beats on Revenue but Its Stock Falls 7% on Services Weakness
  Apple posted $109.4 billion in revenue with iPhone unit sales up 22 percent, but softer services growth pushed shares down more than 7 percent.
  

• Eli Lilly and Resilience to Invest $750 Million in US Drug Manufacturing
  The partners will expand injectable production for diabetes and obesity drugs near Cincinnati, adding 400 jobs to Resilience's Ohio operations.