💸 Anthropic is closing a $5 billion round at a $170 billion valuation.
📈 Anthropic’s ARR jumped to $5 billion, aiming for $9 billion by year-end.
🧠 Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion at a $10–12 billion valuation.
📲 Seeke AI and TikTok Lite are dominating downloads in emerging markets.
🏢 Microsoft 365 Copilot and Harvey are now core enterprise AI tools.
The market went absolutely nuclear this week. We're talking $7+ billion in fresh funding, consumer apps getting smarter by the second, and enterprise tools that basically run themselves now. If you blinked, you missed about three unicorns being born. Here's what happened when everyone decided to throw money at anything with "AI" in the name,and why most of it was actually smart.
The Week That Broke VC Calculators
Three things happened this week that made every investor either very happy or very scared: Anthropic almost became more valuable than most countries, lightweight apps started eating their bigger siblings alive, and AI tools got so good they're basically doing everyone's job now. Oh, and apparently we're manufacturing medicine in space now because why not?
🔥 AI Startups: The Billion-Dollar Feeding Frenzy
Top AI startup funding rounds from July 21-27, 2025 showing Anthropic and Thinking Machines Lab leading with multi-billion dollar rounds
The Megadeals That Made Headlines:
Anthropic just closed a $5 billion round that puts them at a $170 billion valuation. That's not a typo,they're now worth more than most Fortune 500 companies. Their Claude models are apparently so good at reasoning that investors are treating them like the next Google. Smart money or bubble behavior? Time will tell, but their SWE-bench scores suggest the former.
Thinking Machines Lab (yeah, that's Mira Murati's new gig after leaving OpenAI) raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation. They're building "agentic AI infrastructure",basically the plumbing that will let AI agents actually do stuff instead of just chat about doing stuff. DST Global and Sequoia are betting big that agents are the next platform shift.
The $100M Club Is Getting Crowded:
CuspAI grabbed $100M for AI-driven materials discovery targeting climate solutions,because apparently we need AI to save the planet now too
Carbyne raised $100M for AI-enhanced emergency response,your 911 calls are about to get a lot smarter
Ultromics secured $55M for AI that can detect heart failure from echocardiograms,because human doctors weren't fast enough
India's AI Moment:
The subcontinent is having its AI awakening with Gupshup (conversational AI) raising $60M, Composio (agentic AI) getting $25M from Lightspeed, and Kluisz.ai (AI infrastructure) securing $9.6M. When India starts writing AI infrastructure checks, you know the party's just getting started.
📱 Consumer Apps: The Lightweight Revolution
Grid visualization of the hottest consumer apps from July 2025, showing dominance of AI-powered and lightweight applications
The Apps Everyone's Actually Using:
ChatGPT remains the download king with 30M+ monthly downloads, but here's the twist,TikTok Lite is now outperforming regular TikTok with 28.9M downloads. Turns out when you're dealing with expensive data plans and older phones, "lite" isn't just nice to have,it's survival.
Seeke AI came out of nowhere with 35M+ downloads by doing one thing really well: being a minimalist AI assistant that actually works in emerging markets. While everyone else was adding features, they were subtracting friction.
The AI-Everything Trend:
Remini hit 90M monthly active users by turning anyone into a LinkedIn headshot model
CapCut Ultra is using AI scene detection to make TikTok creators look like Spielberg
BeReal Extended added AR overlays because apparently authentic moments weren't authentic enough
HealthPal became the #1 wellness app by giving everyone an AI health coach that actually listens
What's Actually Happening: Apps are splitting into two camps, ultra-lightweight versions for emerging markets and AI-supercharged versions for power users. The middle ground is disappearing faster than reasonable valuations in 2021.
⚙️ AI SaaS Tools: When Software Builds Itself
Harvey closed a $300M Series E at a $5 billion valuation, proving that lawyers will pay any amount to avoid reading documents. Their AI handles complex legal research and document drafting, and apparently it's so good that major law firms are treating it like a junior partner.
Cursor IDE went from startup to $2.6 billion valuation in 12 months with the fastest SaaS revenue growth ever,$1M to $100M ARR. It's not just code completion; it's an AI that understands entire codebases and can refactor complex systems in real-time.
The Development Stack Revolution:
Claude 4 Sonnet hit 80.2% on SWE-bench,that's better than most human engineers on real-world tasks
Stack AI is letting non-technical teams build AI agents with drag-and-drop
Zapier AI upgraded their automation with GPT-4 integration because apparently regular automation wasn't smart enough
What This Means: We're not just automating tasks anymore,we're automating entire workflows. SaaS tools are becoming AI agents that understand context, make decisions, and improve themselves. The "no-code" movement just became "no-thought" movement.
🏢 Enterprise Tools: The Corporate AI Takeover
The Tools Running Fortune 500 Companies:
Yahoo Japan made AI usage mandatory for all employees with a company-wide goal of doubling productivity by 2030. That's not a suggestion,it's policy. When a major corporation treats AI like email (mandatory, not optional), the enterprise software market pays attention.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming the default way to work, Snowflake Intelligence launched conversational data analytics, and Atera Autopilot is now resolving 40% of Tier 1 IT issues without human intervention.
The High-Key Players:
Salesforce Einstein continues to dominate CRM AI
UiPath AI Center is combining RPA with actual intelligence
IBM Watson Assistant is handling enterprise conversations at scale
The Low-Key Winners:
Delve raised $30M to automate compliance frameworks,because nobody wants to manually manage GDPR anymore
Sema4.ai is doing semantic search that actually understands what you're looking for
Mindbreeze InSpire is turning enterprise data chaos into actual insights
🎯 The Bottom Line: What This Actually Means
The Agent Economy Is Here: We're not building chatbots anymore, we're building digital employees that actually do work
Lightweight Is the New Premium: TikTok Lite beating TikTok isn't an anomaly, it's the future
AI Infrastructure Is the New Cloud: Companies like Thinking Machines Lab and Composio are building the rails for autonomous software
Enterprise AI Went from "Maybe" to "Must-Have": When Yahoo Japan mandates AI usage, the discussion phase is over
The money isn't flowing toward AI because it's trendy, it's flowing because AI tools are actually replacing human tasks at scale. This isn't the "AI winter" skeptics predicted; it's the AI spring that's about to become summer.
Next week: Watch for more stealth startups coming out of the woodwork, enterprise software companies scrambling to add AI features, and probably another billion-dollar funding round that breaks the internet.
The future arrived this week. Hope you were paying attention.
Thanks. See you next week!
Fardy.