TechPulse USA

Report: DeepSeek Banked $15B, Battery Maker Doubled Down By Daniel Rao · October 22, 2026 Fifteen billion dollars, raised in the dark, confirmed by no one. According to Bloomberg — the only newsroom with this story, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter — DeepSeek has closed a roughly 100 billion yuan (about $15 billion) funding round that was supposed to be half that size, then doubled, then doubled again as investors fought for allocation. And DeepSeek, Tencent and CATL — the last two reportedly the round's biggest backers — all declined to comment. Bloomberg says they didn't even answer the emails. That is the state of the biggest AI funding story out of China this year: enormous numbers, an impeccable sourcing pedigree, and not a single named human willing to stand behind any of it. Which is not a reason to ignore it. It is a reason to read it the way it deserves to be read — as Bloomberg reported it, hedges and all — and to pay attention to the strangest d...

Pigment's $250M Series E Values French Excel Rival at $2.3B France has an Excel-killer, and this week it got the kind of money that usually only flows down Sand Hill Road. Pigment, the Paris-based enterprise planning software company, has raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation — and the cheque wasn't led by a Silicon Valley giant. It was led by Brussels. Europe's own €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, headed a round that also carries a planned investment from Nvidia, whose chief executive spent the past fortnight criss-crossing the continent declaring, whisky glass in hand, "I'm the biggest VC in Europe!" For a company whose stated mission is to replace Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint in the finance office, the symbolism is the whole story: Europe's sovereign-AI bet is walking straight onto Microsoft's home turf. The round was announced on October 21, 2026 — Bloomberg had broken the news ahead of the announcement. Pigment c...

Nvidia Veterans Just Raised $90M to Give Dumb Robots a Brain By Daniel Rao · 20 October 2026 There are more than five million industrial robots working in factories right now, and here is the industry's dirty little secret: almost every one of them is an idiot savant. Each was programmed — painstakingly, expensively, by a specialist — to do exactly one thing, and nothing it learns can ever be transferred to another machine. Yesterday, two former Nvidia researchers raised $90 million to change that equation. Whether they can is a far harder question than their press release lets on. KUKA industrial robots palletising bread crates in a German bakery. Machines like these now number over five million worldwide, yet almost every one is programmed for a single task. Dream Labs says its Dream-1 model can give any gripper-equipped robot general skills, straight from video. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Update, Oct. 20: the price is public — a robot brain costs $3 an hour...

By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA · October 14, 2026 Thirty-three and a half billion dollars. That is how much venture money has poured into American startups whose entire job is making sure AI data centres do not run out of electricity — or run out of clever ways to use it. The figure covers funding raised by early October 2026, and it is nearly double what the same corner of the market managed in all of 2025. And the bank that counted it all thinks the pile of money may already be the wrong scoreboard. In a research note relayed by ANI on October 13, Morgan Stanley warns that the next phase of this trade will not be judged by capital raised. It will be judged by capacity deployed. Cash, it turns out, cannot buy megawatts — and 2026 is the year Silicon Valley is learning that the hard way. The note lands at a moment when the AI buildout's money story is splitting into two streams. We have been tracking both on this page: the credit markets, where the giants are borrowing at a scal...

By TechPulse USA Newsroom The most consequential Nvidia–OpenAI story of October isn’t a story at all. It is a corpse. The Wall Street Journal reported on 30 January — nine months ago — that Nvidia had halted negotiations on its planned $100 billion investment in OpenAI, and the deal never came back to life. What is fresh, and what actually matters this week, is everything that replaced it: a $30 billion equity deal whose final wires landed this month, a brand-new $30 billion raise OpenAI is already courting at a $1.4 trillion valuation, and a chip giant suddenly shopping for allies everywhere else. We checked the Reuters wire archive: the “pause” story is dated 30 January 2026. Zombie recirculations of it keep passing it off as this week’s news. Everything below is what actually happened next — and it is a far better story than the recycled headline. Photo: Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder, president and CEO, at a 2024 meeting in Brussels. File photo. Credit: Peter Dasilva / Europea...

By Daniel Rao The most interesting name on the cap table of this week's buzziest AI funding round isn't Nvidia. It's the Palm Beach venture fund where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner — and it has just bought into a lab famous for shipping open-weights AI models without content filters. Nous Research confirmed on Wednesday that it has closed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, launching "Hermes for Businesses" to take its viral open-source AI agent into corporate America. Robot Ventures led the round, with Nvidia, Samsung, Microsoft's M12, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and 1789 Capital — Trump Jr.'s fund — among the backers. Total funding now stands at about $158 million. TechCrunch first reported in July that Nous was in talks to raise at least $75 million at the same valuation; the final figure came in bigger, and now it's done rather than rumoured. We checked TechPulse USA's own archive before writing this — no earlie...

Nine years ago, Masayoshi Son walked out of the Gulf with nearly $100 billion in commitments for the first Vision Fund — the biggest tech fund ever assembled, bankrolled largely by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala. It gave the world ByteDance. It also gave the world WeWork at a $47 billion valuation. Now Son is back in the Gulf, and according to the Financial Times, he's asking for another $100 billion — this time while his company's shares are sliding, his biggest bet just saw its revenue numbers disputed by $20 billion, and the region he wants the money from is in the eighth month of a war. The report landed Friday, October 9, and it says Son has held discussions in recent weeks with senior figures, including in the United Arab Emirates, about a potential fundraising for a new AI investment fund. SoftBank declined to comment. Reuters said it could not independently verify the report. We checked the wire copies against the FT's ori...