🤯 Everything You Need to Know Today

1. Airtable sold for $1.28B — 89% below its $11B peak. Bending Spoons is buying the fallen software darling at roughly 2.7x ARR, setting the definitive comp for every 2021-era SaaS company still holding onto inflated marks. The rollup playbook is now public: buy distressed brands, cut costs, raise prices, run for cash. Every late-stage board just got their wake-up call.

2. Visa dropped $2.4B on BioCatch, and P&G paid $3.8B for Thorne — AI M&A is now a Fortune 500 sport. Incumbents aren't waiting to build; they're buying defenses against AI fraud and positioning in personalized wellness. The message to founders: your acquirer might be the company that makes toothpaste, not just the usual tech suspects.

3. Polymarket wants $1B at a $20B+ valuation — more than double its October mark. Prediction markets as "truth infrastructure" in an AI-skeptical world is a hell of a narrative. But that's a massive multiple for a platform still navigating regulatory minefields. This is either the smartest bet on cultural adoption or the most aggressive valuation ask of the year.

🤩 Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1. Anthropic, $10 billion, signed a six-year compute deal with Nvidia-backed startup Volta Infra for a Norway data center running Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips.

2. Procter & Gamble, $3.8 billion, agreed to acquire supplements maker Thorne from L Catterton to widen its lead in premium wellness.

   

3. Visa, $2.4 billion, agreed to buy Israeli behavioral biometrics firm BioCatch to stop account takeovers and AI-driven scams before a payment clears.

   

😇 Dopamine Dealflow

Series B+ & Growth

• HappyRobot | $150 million | Series C | San Francisco, United States
  HappyRobot builds AI agents that handle the phone calls, emails, and documents moving between fragmented logistics systems. Prysm Capital led the round and Eurazeo co-led, with a16z, Base10, Y Combinator, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and Orange joining at a $1.2 billion valuation.
  

• Convex | $57 million | Series B | San Francisco, United States
  Convex offers an application backend tuned for AI agents that cuts the hallucination errors creeping into agent-written code, and its platform now powers nearly two million apps for customers including OpenAI and Zapier. Insight Partners led the round and were joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Etna Labs.
  

• Ambrook | $30 million | Series B | New York, United States
  Ambrook builds accounting and financial software made for farmers and ranchers, handling the many revenue streams and livestock cycles that general tools miss. Lachy Groom led the round.

Seed & Early Rounds

• Decade | $85 million | Seed | São Paulo, Brazil
  Decade is an AI wealth adviser from former Nubank chief technology officer Vitor Olivier and Hyperplane founder Felipe Meneses, promising to bring advice once reserved for the rich to a far wider base. Greenoaks led the round and were joined by Benchmark and Diffusion, the largest seed ever raised by a Latin American startup.

Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• Procter & Gamble | $3.8 billion | Acquisition | Cincinnati, United States
  The consumer goods maker is buying supplements brand Thorne from L Catterton to deepen its move into premium wellness and personalized health.
  

• Visa | $2.4 billion | Acquisition | Foster City, United States
  The payments network is buying behavioral biometrics firm BioCatch to catch account takeovers and AI-driven scams across its fraud and security suite.
  

• Bending Spoons | $1.28 billion | Acquisition | Milan, Italy
  The owner of Evernote and WeTransfer is buying Airtable in its first deal since its Nasdaq listing, extending a playbook of acquiring and reviving well-known software brands.

Founders: Want to be featured on @tradedvc? → traded.co/submit/vc

🤑 Read of the Day

Bending Spoons Buys Airtable for $1.28 Billion

The software darling that once touched an $11 billion valuation just sold for a fraction of it.

Milan-based Bending Spoons, fresh off its July Nasdaq debut, agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash, its first deal as a public company. Airtable, founded in 2013, raised more than $1.4 billion and peaked above $11 billion during the 2021 boom before its secondary shares slid to around $4 billion earlier this year.

The Strategy
Bending Spoons runs a rollup model: buy well-known software brands, cut costs, raise prices, and run them for cash. It has done this with Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, and Meetup. Airtable, with annual recurring revenue near $480 million and 80% of the Fortune 100 as customers, fits the pattern of a widely used product whose valuation ran far ahead of its business.

The Backstory
The fall from $11 billion to a $1.28 billion sale, with cash on the books valuing the whole company near $2.25 billion, tracks the wider reset in cloud software, where 2021-era prices met slower growth and higher rates.

Why It Matters
This sets a public benchmark for what late-stage software companies are actually worth in 2026, and it hands the reset market a serial buyer with fresh public currency to keep hunting. Every board sitting on a 2021 markup now has a comparable, and it is well below the last round.

Read The Whole Story Here

Other News You Don’t Want To Miss

• Polymarket Seeks More Than $20 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round
  The prediction market is in early talks to raise about $1 billion, which would more than double the $9 billion valuation it carried last October and top the $15 billion valuation from an April round.
  

• Former OpenAI Exec Fidji Simo Details Her POTS Battle and ChronicleBio's Plan to Cure Chronic Disease With AI
  In her first interview since leaving OpenAI, Simo said ChronicleBio has drawn blood from 709 patients and banked more than 3,500 samples to train AI models on the biology of conditions like the one she has.
  

• Palantir Posts 93% Revenue Growth and Raises Its 2026 Guidance
  Second-quarter revenue reached $1.935 billion, well ahead of estimates, and the company raised full-year guidance to about $8.15 billion as U.S. commercial revenue jumped 149%.