YWR: PE/VC Q4 2025 Deal Tracker

Once a quarter we check in on the top Private Equity and Venture Capital deals. PE/VC is an $11 trillion industry. We like to see what’s hot and where capital is being deployed. Sometimes it gives us ideas.

Usually, it makes us happy to own a PE/VC manager (be a GP not an LP), but less interested in the deals.

The dataset with over 2,500 investment rounds in Q4 is at the bottom of the post and in the YWR Data & Models section.

FYI, as usual the data is sparse and deal amounts are usually only for the growth and venture deals.

Top 30 PE/VC deals in Q4 2025

OpenAI: This is Softbank completing their commitment to invest $40bn into OpenAI. Do you remember that? We will see how it goes, and hard to criticise one of the best investors in the world, but this has a WeWork tingle.

Interesting to see where Softbank has made money over time. ARM has turned into a big holding and rumour is the position was margined in order for Softbank to come up with the additional $22bn for OpenAI.

Softbank Q2 2025 Presentation

Databricks: As we observed in How to analyse 2,000 stocks in 2 hours, databases are turning into a key piece of infrastructure for AI workflows. Databricks, Snowflake (and Neon) have become hot properties.

“Enterprises are reimagining how they build intelligent applications, and the convergence of generative AI with new coding paradigms is opening the door to entirely new workloads.” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks

The round was led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management with additional participation from Andreessen Horowitz, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, funds managed by Blackstone (“Blackstone”), Coatue, GIC, MGX, NEA, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, Robinhood Ventures, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Temasek, Thrive Capital and Winslow Capital.

Databricks raised $4bn at a $134bn valuation while Snowflake, which is public, and also has a $4bn revenue run rate and trades at a $75bn valuation. Snowflake trades on over 100x adjusted earnings, so neither look great. You can see why the Databricks realises it is better to stay private.

Cursor (Anyspere) raised $2.3bn at a $29.3bn valuation. Will AI coding retain value over time or does it become just another feature? I guess the idea is there are network effects. The more users you have, the better the AI code writer gets.

We’re excited to deepen our work with existing investors, Accel, Thrive, and Andreessen Horowitz, and welcome new partners Coatue, NVIDIA, and Google.

Mari Group is interesting. This is the idea that attending events is the new luxury. Anyone can buy an LVMH handbag, they’ve become common. But sitting court side at a high profile tennis event or trading vintage cars at Barrett Jackson in Scottsdale is the new flex. So Mari Group raised $2bn to buy events.

MARI is backed by a global group of leading investors, including  funds managed by Apollo, RedBird Capital Partners, Qatar Investment Authority, HSG, IMI media group, Ares Management funds, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a16z Growth, Nancy Zhang, FORTA Advisors, Main Street Advisors, Causeway Media Partners, Gannet Capital, Eric Schmidt, FMZ Ventures, Sideline Group, Curated Wealth Partners, Gaurav Kapadia, Bulat Utemuratov, and Sanjay Govil, as well as superstars from the sports world including Luka Dončić, Anthony Edwards and Sabrina Ionescu.

Reflection AI…. oh goodness…. I would be a terrible VC investor, because I would write this one down 90% right away. Reflection raised $2bn so a bunch of really smart people in sandals and shorts can sit together on fluffy couches with their laptops while talking about really smart things new frontier LLM models. Probably the only time they came into the office was to take these pictures. Otherwise, they are home with their cats.

Reflection is also guilty of this is new trend with AI companies of making the website super minimalistic as in ‘what we are doing is sooo profound, we can’t bother to tell you about it on the website.’ I’m probably too mean though because Eric Schmidt is involved, and usually he’s hardcore.

We’re building frontier open intelligence accessible to all. We’ve assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion.

We are thankful for the support of our investors including B Capital, Citi, CRV, Disruptive, DST, Eric Schmidt, Eric Yuan, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia, 1789 and others.

Big Brand Tire’s $1.63 recapitalisation by Percheron, Blue Owl and ICONIQ is probably more my style. This strategy of revamping service businesses with AI and tech is an interesting opportunity for the private equity industry.

Since Percheron’s investment in 2021, the company has achieved transformational growth, expanding revenue more than tenfold and profitability more than fifteenfold. In partnership with Percheron, Big Brand advanced its proprietary EDGE Intelligence operating system into a powerful enterprise-grade platform, built a high-velocity programmatic M&A and integration engine, and amplified its market-leading organic growth.

Lambda: ‘AI Factories’ are the new thing and so Lambda raised $1.5bn led by Thomas Tull’s TWG Global.

“As we move into a new phase of AI scale, the most valuable infrastructure will be that which converts kilowatts into tokens with minimal friction. We are excited to continue supporting Lambda as it becomes a key player in the industrialization of inference and helps the U.S. master the energy-to-cognition pipeline.”

“Our mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and bring the power of AI to every person in America. One person, one GPU. It’s a privilege to work with Thomas, USIT, and TWG Global to realize this vision.”

Crusoe: In case you were worried about the datacenter AI factory theme running out of money you will be relieved to know Crusoe raised $1.4bn and everyone in the world participated. This is the firm building Stargate in Abilene, TX.

SAN FRANCISCO and DENVER – October 24 – Crusoe, the AI factory company, today announced the initial closing of its anticipated $1.375 billion Series E round, bringing the company’s expected valuation to over $10 billion. The oversubscribed round was co-led by technology investors Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Capital, with participation from 137 Ventures, 1789 Capital, Activate Capital, Altimeter Capital, Atreides Management, BAM Elevate, DPR Construction, Ora Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Founders Fund, Franklin Templeton, Galvanize, Long Journey Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, M37 Management, MCJ, NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Saquon Barkley, Spark Capital, StepStone Group, Supermicro, T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management, Upper90, Winklevoss Capital, and Zigg Capital. In addition, funds managed by Blue Owl are expected to join in a later closing.

Kalshi and prediction markets are super hot. Robinhood is building a prediction market and so is Coinbase.

“Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth,” said Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi. “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information. It’s hard to have an opinion about the future today without thinking about Kalshi.”

The round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech Capital, IVP, ARK Invest, Anthos Capital, CapitalG, and Y Combinator.

Luma AI: If AI is the combination of intelligence and energy maybe this is a good fit for Saudi Arabia. Right?

Oh wait… they already see it. Saudi could end up massive in AI data centers. It could be a new diversifier for them.

Luma AI, the company building multimodal AGI, today announced it has raised $900 million in Series C funding, led by HUMAIN, a PIF company delivering global full-stack AI solutions, with significant participation from AMD Ventures, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners.

To train and deploy these next-generation AI systems, Luma AI will become a customer of HUMAIN as HUMAIN builds Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia, making it one of the world’s largest compute infrastructure buildouts.

Sayvint is the idea we will need to have identity management for AI Agents, which is kind of a good idea.

AI-generated identities are the newest and fastest-growing type of identity class, and the one with the greatest potential to reshape how work, productivity, and operations function across the enterprise.

Funds managed by KKR, a leading global investment firm, led the round with participation from Sixth Street Growth and TenEleven, as well as new funding from existing Series A investor Carrick Capital Partners.

FNZ: Were you wondering what Blythe Masters is up to? She’s at FNZ building technology so financial advisory firms can create better apps customer experiences. They raised $650mn. Interesting that Ninety One is doing private equity now. Most public managers are getting drawn into PE because it’s the only thing you can charge fees on anymore.

The investment comes from some of the world’s most sophisticated investors, including La Caisse, Generation Investment Management, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and Motive Partners, and will be joined by some of FNZ’s most prominent clients worldwide, including Aberdeen Group PLC, Aviva PLC, FirstCape, Ninety One and Nucleus Financial Platforms.

Chaos Industries is another sign ESG is officially dead and DefenceTech is cool. Chaos is building radar systems for defence against drone attacks.

CHAOS Industries, the defense technology company building Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN™) systems that give warfighters time to act against borders and autonomous threats, today announced it has raised $510 million in new funding led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from previous investors 8VC and Accel, at a $4.5 billion valuation.

Stoke: Remember Thomas Tull and the AI Factories? Well he must read Le Shrub because he’s doing the space theme as well.

We’re pleased to announce we have raised $510 million in Series D funding led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT) in conjunction with a $100 million debt facility led by Silicon Valley Bank. The round also drew support from Washington Harbour Partners LP and General Innovation Capital Partners, underscoring Stoke’s importance to national security and the U.S. industrial base. Existing backers who also participated include 776, Breakthrough Energy, Glade Brook Capital, Industrious Ventures, NFX, Sparta Group, Toyota Ventures, Woven Capital, among others.

“Launch capacity is now a defining factor in the U.S.’s ability to compete and lead in the space economy,” said Thomas Tull, Chairman of USIT. “Stoke’s pioneering approach to reusable launch systems directly advances our national security and commercial access to orbit. Their vision for resilient, high-frequency launch operations is the kind of innovation essential to maintaining leadership in the space industry. We’re proud to support their mission in defining the next chapter of U.S. aerospace.”

Finally Ripple.

Ripple doesn’t get much love in the crypto world because they’re playing an inside game. Rather than disrupt the banks, Ripple is building blockchain based payment systems for the banking system. Ripple are also making strategic investments like GTreasury and Hidden Road (prime brokerage).

SAN FRANCISCO- Ripple, the leading financial technology company that offers crypto solutions for businesses, today announced a $500 million strategic investment at a $40 billion valuation from world-class institutional investors led by funds managed by affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, affiliates of Citadel Securities, Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace.

Still no precious metals deals, but at least it makes our NASDAQ holdings feel sensible.

The full dataset of PE/VC investment rounds in Q4 2025 is below.