Nvidia Eyes Perplexity Stake at $30B+ Valuation, Ripple Prime Closes $275M Notes Deal, Kraken Expands into U.S. Stocks

Private markets kept moving fast this week. Nvidia weighs a $30B-plus stake in Perplexity, Ripple Prime closes a $275M notes offering, and Kraken adds 7,000 U.S. stocks for EEA customers. Let's dive in…

THIS WEEK’S BREAKING NEWS

Nvidia discusses investment valuing Perplexity above $30B

Nvidia is discussing an equity investment in Perplexity that would value the startup at over $30B, up more than 50% from its last round a year ago, as annualized revenue climbed to over $750M from under $250M at the start of the year. The talks follow Nvidia's $6B licensing deal and $1B investment in Poolside at a $12B valuation, part of its broader push to strengthen Nemotron open-source AI models. (1)

STABLETON NEWS

Our Q2 2026 report is here

Q2 2026 was one of the biggest quarters we have seen in years.

We saw public market activity picking up significantly, with SpaceX completing the largest IPO in history and Cerebras going public in the same quarter. (2,3) Behind them, both OpenAI and Anthropic have now filed confidentially for their own listings. (4,5) Beyond the IPOs, we also saw a shift in deployment, from Figure AI’s robots entering commercial logistics to the Pentagon expanding classified AI contracts to eight top tech firms. (6,7)

Our latest Private Blue-Chip Tech Navigator breaks down what these new developments mean and where the market is moving next. Inside, we cover the quarter's largest funding rounds, secondary pricing trends, the upcoming IPO calendar, and more.

Download the full report here below.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Anthropic recruits TPU founder for hardware push

Anthropic hired Amir Salek, founder of Google's TPU program who delivered its first seven generations, to join its compute team and advance its push into custom semiconductors. The move follows Anthropic's recent chip and capacity deals, including a roughly $250M initial order with UK startup Fractile and agreements with Riot Platforms and Volta Infra, as rival OpenAI advances its own Broadcom-built Jalapeno chip. (8)

Anthropic to let enterprises retain their own data

Anthropic plans to let enterprise customers keep required 30-day retention data on their own cloud infrastructure rather than Anthropic's servers, developing the system with over 100 customers including Salesforce. The shift follows June's mandate requiring 30-day retention on Fable, Mythos, and future frontier models for cyberattack monitoring, and comes a day after rival OpenAI unveiled a safety system that avoids retaining customer data altogether. (9)

Applied Intuition earns TÜV SÜD's VIVALDI certification

Applied Intuition earned TÜV SÜD's VIVALDI Inspection Certification, independently validating its simulation platform across 100+ requirements for safety-critical automated driving virtual validation and UN R171 homologation. The certification lets OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers skip months of toolchain credibility justification, using Applied Intuition's pre-validated, end-to-end traceable platform to focus directly on type approval and system performance. (10)

Canva invests $23M in Sharon AI before becoming major client

Canva invested $23M in Sharon AI via convertible notes during its December 2025 pre-IPO round at $12.53 per share, alongside Regal Funds Management, Ellerston Capital, and Digital Alpha in a $103M raise. The notes converted to 406,000 shares now worth far more at Sharon AI's roughly $59 share price, with Canva becoming a major customer two months later; Sharon AI is now valued at $2.1B. (11)

Cerebras unveils new chip system for AI chatbots

Cerebras launched the CS-4 server system, powered by three of its wafer-scale chips built on TSMC's 5nm process, aiming to speed AI inference for chatbots like Claude. The Nexus-based rack uses 50% fewer components for faster data center setup, with CEO Andrew Feldman targeting 600 megawatts of compute by end-2027 and a 20x throughput gain, after last week's $6.9M adjusted loss on $180.1M in sales. (12)

ARK Invest bets $8.8M on Cerebras after IPO dip

ARK Invest bought roughly $8.84M of Cerebras stock on Aug. 18, with shares down nearly 29% since May's IPO, betting on the company's longer-term AI opportunity following its new CS-4 system launch. Q2 revenue rose 74% to $180.1M but missed estimates as gross margin slipped to 40.6%, though cloud revenue nearly quadrupled to $126M and Cerebras raised its 2026 core revenue guidance to $880-890M. (13)

Cursor launches Origin to rival GitHub hosting

Cursor launched Origin, a code-hosting platform designed to compete with GitHub while remaining interoperable with it, letting developers sync repos between both. The launch coincided with a worldwide GitHub outage causing nearly 20% error rates, part of 257 reported outages over the past year, though GitHub still hosts roughly 180 million developers as of last October. (14)

Deel taps Mesh to secure stablecoin worker payments

Deel partnered with Mesh to power secure stablecoin payouts for its global workforce, using Mesh's verification technology across 300+ wallets and exchanges to eliminate wrong-address payment risk. The integration lets Deel deliver funds directly to verified accounts within minutes, building on Mesh's recent momentum including its Alliance Program, Mesh Wallet for AI-agent transactions, and joining Paxos' Global Dollar Network. (15)

Kraken affiliate Krak enters US debit card market

Kraken affiliate Krak launched the Krak Card, a US cashback debit card offering up to 2% cash or bitcoin back paid directly as money, letting customers spend from over 600 currencies and crypto assets. The move puts Krak in direct competition with CashApp, Venmo, SoFi, Robinhood, and Chime, as Kraken aims to capture more of each customer's financial life beyond trading. (16)

Kraken adds 7,000 U.S. stocks for EEA customers

Kraken added direct trading in over 7,000 U.S.-listed stocks for EEA customers, becoming the only crypto-native exchange to offer both traditional equities and tokenized versions of some of the same shares. The move puts Kraken in direct competition with Interactive Brokers, eToro, and rival crypto platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood, as exchanges race toward becoming all-in-one financial "super apps.” (17)

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with new safeguards

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens for users aged 13-17, adding content restrictions on self-harm, suicide, and sexual content, plus parent-set "quiet hours" and safety notifications for high-risk situations. The chatbot is designed to avoid suggesting it has feelings or consciousness, and won't give direct homework answers, arriving as a Common Sense Media study found over 70% of US teens use AI chatbots for companionship. (18)

Ramp enters AI routing market with new Router tool

Ramp launched Router, an AI model routing service letting users switch between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and others via API, free through 2026 with a $26 launch credit, initially U.S.-only. The company has used the internally built router for its own AI needs over three years, entering the space shortly after Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition, as Ramp looks to extend its AI token spend management business following its $750M raise at a $44B valuation. (19)

Revolut pushes into Finland with local IBAN plan

Revolut applied to establish a bank branch in Finland, aiming to offer local IBANs to its over 250,000 Finnish customers and enable seamless salary deposits and direct debits. CEO Kuba Fast confirmed the application, led on the ground by Tuomas Autero's team, as Revolut pushes to become customers' primary bank rather than a secondary account, building toward its $115B valuation ambitions. (20)

Revolut taps banking, government veterans for Singapore board

Revolut appointed a three-member Singapore Advisory Board comprising former Minister of State Teo Ser Luck, former GXS Bank founding CEO Charles Wong, and governance specialist Yvonne Aw, to support local governance and regulatory engagement. The move, led by Revolut Singapore and Southeast Asia CEO Raymond Ng, aims to strengthen accountability as the fintech deepens its presence in the region. (21)

Ripple Prime closes $275M senior notes offering

Ripple Prime, Ripple's non-bank prime brokerage, closed an upsized $275M private placement of senior unsecured notes to support U.S. business expansion, backed by an investment-grade BBB rating from KBRA. The offering, Ripple Prime's inaugural notes deal, drew a diverse institutional investor base, with Piper Sandler serving as lead placement agent. (22)

Rippling adds treasury management via Apex partnership

Rippling and Apex Fintech Solutions launched an integrated treasury management product, letting Rippling's 30,000+ business customers invest idle cash via Apex's Money Market Fund Sweep program directly within the HR platform. The offering features real-time account opening within one business day and instant cash transfers, with Apex Clearing serving as the FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and plans to add fixed-income instruments later. (23)

OTHER NEWS

Williamson County approves $674M Blue Origin development plan

Williamson County Commissioners approved a $674M economic development agreement with Blue Origin Manufacturing, the largest investment in county history, for a roughly 1 million-square-foot industrial research facility in Hutto, Texas. The project is expected to bring 2,000 jobs over 10 years averaging $88,000 in salary, along with 15 paid summer internships and a partnership with Hutto ISD on career education programs. (24)

ByteDance draws $30B in orders for jumbo loan

ByteDance attracted over $30B in orders for its $20B syndicated loan, which carries an upsize option and would mark its largest-ever offshore borrowing, coordinated by Citigroup and JPMorgan. The three-year facility, extendable to five, supports ByteDance's plan to boost AI capex to as much as $70B this year, up from $10.8B raised via its last global loan in 2024. (25)

CesiumAstro readies satellite launch for October debut

CesiumAstro will launch Element-1, its first satellite testing multibeam phased-array antennas, via SpaceX rideshare to sun-synchronous orbit in October, ahead of its planned 737-satellite Synchronicity constellation for enterprise and government connectivity. The 510-kilogram spacecraft follows CesiumAstro's Jariet Technologies and Vidrovr acquisitions, and a $470M equity and debt raise to scale satellite and component manufacturing. (26)

Nvidia's $20B Groq buy nears commercial deployment

Nvidia announced its Groq 3 LPX rack, built from assets acquired in its $20B December purchase, the company's largest-ever deal, is in full production and will be deployed at Nebius later this year. The rack packages 256 Groq chips delivering 3,400 tokens per second, targeting low-latency AI inference alongside Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, as CEO Jensen Huang projects $1T in cumulative Blackwell and Vera Rubin sales through 2027. (27)

France taps sovereign AI like Mistral after tax hack

French Budget Minister David Amiel said the government will hire "sovereign" AI providers such as Mistral, explicitly excluding OpenAI, to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities following a tax agency hack that exposed about 700,000 taxpayers' data. A second data breach was detected Monday and remains under evaluation, according to tax agency chief Amelie Verdier. (28)

Mistral and HUMAIN launch Saudi sovereign AI push

Mistral and HUMAIN announced a strategic collaboration worth hundreds of millions of euros to develop sovereign AI infrastructure and models in Saudi Arabia, initially focusing on cybersecurity, voice, and Arabic-language frontier models. Mistral will explore using HUMAIN's data centers for local compute needs, with the companies also planning a joint go-to-market strategy targeting regulated industries including financial services, manufacturing, and telecommunications. (29)

CHART OF THE WEEK

AI now accounts for nearly half of unicorn valuation

No other technology category has taken over this much of private markets this fast.

AI's share of aggregate unicorn valuation climbed from under 10% in 2016 to close to 50% by 2026. That growth hasn't been a straight line: the share crept up steadily through the late 2010s, flattened for a few years in the early 2020s, then accelerated sharply again as AI infrastructure spending and model-scaling races took off.

The influence goes beyond AI-labeled companies themselves. As AI gets built into software, infrastructure, cybersecurity, fintech, healthcare, and industrial applications, its footprint in private markets extends well past the sector's own valuation share.

The Stableton Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 strategy is positioned around many of the private technology leaders driving this shift, capturing exposure to AI and the ecosystem building up around it.

THE UNTOLD UNICORN STORY

Perplexity AI: Turning search into reasoning

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas. (30)

Founded in 2022, Perplexity set out to rethink one of the internet’s most established elements: search. Instead of just providing pages of links, Perplexity introduced an AI-powered answer engine that generates responses with cited sources in real time. The founding team brings experience from OpenAI, Meta AI, Quora, and Databricks, combining research depth with product execution. (31)

In just a few years, Perplexity has become one of the biggest challengers in AI-driven search, expanding into browser integrations and enterprise features while attracting backing from leading technology investors. By combining large language models with transparent attribution, Perplexity introduced a more direct and synthesis-driven way to interact with information. (32)

Fun Fact: The name Perplexity comes from a core metric in natural language processing. In AI research, “perplexity” measures how well a language model predicts the next word in a sequence. The lower the perplexity, the better the model understands language. (33)

Did you know? Perplexity is one of the 20 companies in our Stableton Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 strategy, a systematic, index approach that aims to outperform public benchmarks with low-cost fees, and without a performance fee. Click below for more information.

SOURCES

1 - The Information, 2 - NPR, 3 - CNBC, 4 - The Guardian, 5 - Bloomberg, 6 - Figure AI, 7 - The Guardian, 8 - Bloomberg, 9 - Reuters, 10 - Applied Intuition, 11 - Forbes, 12 - Reuters, 13 - GuruFocus, 14 - TechCrunch, 15 - PR Newswire, 16 - CNBC, 17 - CoinDesk, 18 - The Guardian, 19 - TechCrunch, 20 - FF News, 21 - Asian Banking and Finance, 22 - Ripple, 23 - FF News, 24 - KXAN, 25 - Bloomberg, 26 - SpaceNews, 27 - CNBC, 28 - Reuters, 29 - PR Newswire, 30 - TechCrunch, 31 - Business Standard, 32 - Forbes, 33 - Observer