⭐️ Everything You Need to Know Today

1. Fusion just got its biggest single check in four years. Commonwealth Fusion raised another $1B, pushing its total to $4B — roughly a third of all money ever put into private fusion. This isn't typical venture money either: pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and industrial partners, the kind of patient capital that funds power plants, not software.

2. Meta beat on revenue and the stock still got crushed. Revenue rose 28% to $60.8B, but a $130-145B full-year capex guide sent free cash flow down to just $784M — and shares fell about 10%. After weeks of investors funding AI infrastructure without blinking, this is the clearest sign yet that the market's patience for "spend now, explain later" has limits.

3. A construction software company just bought its way into robotics data. Procore's $845M purchase of DroneDeploy folds jobsite drone mapping and reality capture into a platform already touching 3 million sites. Boring industries keep quietly becoming AI data plays — construction just got its version of the Ecolab-cooling story.

☄️ Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1. IG Group, up to $1.3 billion to acquire Underdog, the UK broker's move into US prediction markets and daily fantasy, Brooklyn.

   

2. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, $1 billion round lifting its total to $4 billion, the biggest bankroll in fusion, Devens.

   

3. Procore, $845 million in cash for DroneDeploy, folding reality capture and robotics into construction software, San Francisco.

   

🌦️ Dopamine Dealflow

Series B+ & Growth

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems | $1 billion | Growth | Devens, United States
  Commonwealth Fusion Systems builds compact tokamak reactors using high-temperature superconducting magnets, and the new money pushes its cumulative haul to $4 billion, about a third of all capital raised by fusion developers to date. The company did not name the backers, which it described as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and infrastructure and industrial partners.
  

• K2 Space | $500 million | Series D | Torrance, United States
  K2 Space builds large satellites with far more onboard power than standard platforms and was selected as the satellite bus provider for the US Space Force's Protected Tactical Satcom-Global program. Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ led the round at a $6.8 billion valuation and were joined by CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest, and T. Rowe Price.
  

• Simile | $200 million | Series B | Palo Alto, United States
  Simile builds agentic twins, AI stand-ins for real consumers that companies can survey instead of running focus groups, and counts CVS, Deloitte, and Wealthfront as clients. Greenoaks led the round at a $2 billion valuation and were joined by Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures.
  

• Onyx Security | $113 million | Series B | Tel Aviv, Israel
  Onyx Security builds a control plane that keeps humans in charge of enterprise AI agents, and quadrupled revenue in the four months since leaving stealth. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round at a $640 million valuation and was joined by Cyberstarts, TCV, Conviction, and FirstMark.

Seed & Early Rounds

• Cantina | $8 million | Seed | Miami, United States
  Cantina emerged from stealth with an agentic security platform that automates vulnerability triage and remediation for regulated enterprises. Framework Ventures led the round, bringing total funding to $16.5 million.

Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• IG Group | up to $1.3 billion | Acquisition | Brooklyn, United States
  The UK broker gets an instant foothold in US prediction markets and daily fantasy, where Underdog ranks third by regulated volume behind Kalshi and Robinhood.
  

• Procore | $845 million | Acquisition | San Francisco, United States
  The construction software maker folds in DroneDeploy's reality capture and jobsite robotics to feed its AI platform data from more than three million sites.
  

• Okta | about $200 million | Acquisition | United States
  The identity giant adds Permiso's AI-agent and machine-identity threat detection as enterprises race to secure non-human identities.

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💰 Read of the Day

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Now Has a $4 Billion War Chest

Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised another $1 billion, the largest single fusion round since its own $1.8 billion raise in 2021, and pushed its total funding to $4 billion. That is roughly a third of every dollar ever committed to a private fusion company. The MIT spinout is spending it to get from a working demonstration reactor to a plant that actually sells power.

The Strategy
The company's bet is magnets. Commonwealth Fusion Systems builds compact tokamaks around high-temperature superconducting tape, which allows it to replicate the physics of much larger reactors in a fraction of the footprint. SPARC, its demonstration machine in Devens, is designed to show net energy gain. ARC, the first commercial plant, is planned for Virginia and is intended to bring fusion electricity to the grid in the early 2030s.

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The round drew a different class of investor than a typical venture raise. Commonwealth Fusion Systems declined to name names but said the money came from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and infrastructure and industrial corporate partners, the kind of patient capital that funds power plants rather than software.

Why It Matters
Fusion has always been a science story that ran out of money before it ran out of physics. A $4 billion balance sheet changes that math: it gives Commonwealth Fusion Systems enough runway to finish SPARC and break ground on a revenue-generating plant without pausing to raise again, which pressures every other fusion developer to show a commercial path or watch the capital consolidate around the leader.

Read The Whole Story Here

Other News You Don’t Want To Miss

• Whatnot Is in Talks to Nearly Double Its Valuation to $20 Billion
  The live-shopping platform would jump from its $11.5 billion mark of late 2024, a rare consumer bet in a market that has funneled money almost entirely into AI.

• OpenAI's July Revenue Topped All of Q2, CFO Tells Staff
  CFO Sarah Friar told employees that annualized revenue in July alone exceeded the company's entire second quarter, with the run rate now near $24 billion.
  

• Meta Beats on Revenue but Its AI Spending Plan Sinks the Stock
  Revenue rose 28 percent to $60.8 billion, but a full-year capex guide of $130 billion to $145 billion and free cash flow that fell to $784 million sent shares down about 10 percent.
  

• LinkedIn Adds a Button to Report AI-Generated Slop
  The platform now lets users flag posts that "seem like AI slop" and says it will reduce the reach of content that reads as machine-written and lacks a clear point of view.