Weekly Private Markets Digest: May 5−12
Axevil Capital7 min read·Just now--
📈 Weekly Highlights
- Kraken Acquires Reap Technologies for $600M: The Crypto Exchange’s First Asian Acquisition; Parent Payward Is Valued at $20B
- ElevenLabs Surpasses $500M in ARR Revenue: Up From $350M in Four Months, Plus Expansion Into Australia and New Zealand
- Cerebras Raises IPO Range: New Price of $150–160 Per Share, Pricing on Thursday, May 14, at an Expected Valuation of Up to $48.8B With 20x Oversubscription
- Mira Murati Unveils “Interaction Models”: A Thinking Machines Model That Listens and Speaks Simultaneously
- Kalshi Raises $1B at a $22B Valuation: Valuation Has Doubled in Five Months, Annual Revenue Reaches $1.5B
- Sierra Raises $950M at a $15B+ Valuation: Bret Taylor’s AI Agents Are Used by 40% of the Fortune 50
- Moonshot AI Closes $2B at $20B: Valuation of Chinese Kimi Lab Has Increased 5x Since Late 2025
- Corgi Reaches $1.3B Just Four Months After Series A: TCV-Backed Business Insurance Startup Becomes a YC Unicorn
- a16z Raises Fifth Crypto Fund at $2.2B: Total Capital in Its Crypto Division Reaches $9.8B
- Haun Ventures Closes Second Fund at $1B: Expands Into AI Agents and Asset Tokenization for the First Time
💱 Kraken Acquires Reap Technologies for $600M — First Acquisition in Asia
Kraken, an Axevil Capital portfolio company, is acquiring Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments startup Reap Technologies for $600M in cash and stock. It marks the crypto exchange’s first acquisition in Asia — valuing parent company Payward at $20B and expanding Kraken’s infrastructure for business payments in dollar-denominated stablecoins.
The deal follows April’s $550M acquisition of derivatives exchange Bitnomial and continues Kraken’s strategy of evolving from a pure trading venue into full-stack financial infrastructure. Reap enables companies to issue cards, make international payments and accept stablecoins as a form of payment — giving Kraken a ready-made gateway into Asia’s B2B segment.
Sources: CoinDesk
🎙️ ElevenLabs Surpasses $500M ARR in the First Four Months of 2026
ElevenLabs has crossed the $500M ARR threshold — up from $350M at the end of 2025 in just four months. The AI speech startup is rapidly becoming a full-fledged voice platform: beyond voice generation and cloning, the company is building agentic voice products for contact centers and media.
At the same time, ElevenLabs announced the opening of an Asia-Pacific hub in Sydney — where it already has around 750,000 users in the region. The expansion into Australia and New Zealand gives the company a beachhead for working with local media companies, banks and the public sector, where localization across languages and accents is becoming a meaningful competitive advantage.
Sources: ElevenLabs
🔧 Cerebras Raises IPO Range to $48B Amid 20x Oversubscription
Cerebras Systems, a developer of AI chips, raised its IPO price range to $150–160 per share from the initial $115–125 and increased the offering to 30 million shares from 28 million. At the top end of the new range, the company would raise about $4.8B at a fully diluted valuation of up to $48.8B — more than double the $23B valuation in its February 2026 round. The Nasdaq listing under ticker CBRS is scheduled for May 14, with Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS leading the offering.
The order book is more than 20x oversubscribed — making Cerebras the largest IPO globally in 2026. The company’s 2025 revenue rose 76% to $510M, with net income of $238M (47% margin) — a rare combination of growth and profitability for an AI infrastructure player.
Cerebras designs AI chips without owning manufacturing capacity and is betting on inference — the execution of already-trained models — as a fast-growing market segment, competing with Nvidia for infrastructure deals with customers such as OpenAI and Amazon.
Sources: CNBC | Reuters via CNBC | SiliconANGLE
🗣️ Thinking Machines Unveils “Interaction Models” — AI That Listens While Speaking
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, introduced a new class of models the company calls interaction models. Today’s AI systems mostly operate in turn-taking mode: you speak, it listens; it responds, you listen. Thinking Machines is trying to change that by building a model that processes user input and generates responses simultaneously — closer to a phone conversation than a chat.
Technically, this is known as full duplex, and the company’s first model, TML-Interaction-Small, responds in 0.40 seconds — roughly the pace of natural human conversation and meaningfully faster than comparable systems from OpenAI and Google. For now, it remains a research preview with no public release; limited access is expected in the coming months, with broader rollout later this year. For Thinking Machines, it is the first meaningful technical demonstration since raising a $2B seed round in 2025.
Sources: TechCrunch | Thinking Machines
🎯 Kalshi Raises $1B at a $22B Valuation — Valuation Doubles in Five Months
Kalshi, one of the leaders in prediction markets — platforms where users can bet on the outcome of real-world events — raised $1B in a Series F led by Coatue at a $22B valuation. The valuation has doubled in just five months, reflecting surging investor interest in the category after successful forecasts tied to elections and sports events.
The metrics support the valuation: institutional trading volume rose 800% in six months, annual revenue reached $1.5B, monthly active users hit 2 million, and the company holds about 90% of the U.S. prediction markets segment. Kalshi is the only platform regulated by the CFTC, the U.S. commodities markets regulator, which gives it an advantage over rivals such as Polymarket in serving institutional participants.
Sources: Kalshi News
🤖 Sierra Raises $950M at a Valuation Above $15B
Sierra, the AI startup founded by Bret Taylor — chairman of OpenAI and former Salesforce co-CEO — raised $950M from Tiger Global and GV at a valuation above $15B. Sierra is building a platform of customer-facing AI agents for large enterprises — its agents already handle billions of interactions per year, replacing or augmenting contact centers and sales support.
The company’s ARR increased from $100M in November 2025 to $150M in February 2026 — a 50% increase in three months. More than 40% of the Fortune 50 are already customers, including ADT, Sonos and SiriusXM. The round cements Sierra as one of the leading enterprise AI companies alongside OpenAI and Anthropic — with the difference that Sierra sells a finished agent product rather than a model.
Sources: TechCrunch
🌙 Moonshot AI Closes $2B at a $20B Valuation
Moonshot AI, the Chinese lab behind the open-source Kimi models, raised $2B at a $20B valuation. The round was led by Meituan’s venture arm, and the valuation has increased 5x since the end of 2025, reflecting a sharp rise in investor appetite for Chinese open-source models after the success of DeepSeek and Qwen.
Moonshot’s ARR surpassed $200M in April, and Kimi K2.6 ranked as the second most popular model on OpenRouter — a platform where developers choose models for their applications. Open source and competitive benchmark performance make Kimi a credible alternative to U.S. models for developers globally, especially where inference cost and the ability to self-host matter most.
Sources: TechCrunch
🐕 Corgi Reaches a $1.3B Valuation Just Four Months After Series A
Corgi, a business insurance startup from the latest Y Combinator batch, announced a $160M Series B led by TCV at a $1.3B valuation — just four months after a $108M Series A. Total funding has reached $268M, and the company has become YC’s latest unicorn.
Corgi offers general liability, cyber-risk and technology- and AI-related insurance, with Deel and Artisan already among its customers. Investors in the round include Kindred Ventures, Leblon Capital and First Order Fund. The pace of valuation growth is unusual even in the current market: in six months, the company went from Series A to unicorn status, underscoring demand for specialized AI-risk insurance in the fast-growing B2B software segment.
Sources: TechCrunch
💎 a16z Raises Fifth Crypto Fund at $2.2B
Andreessen Horowitz closed its fifth crypto fund, a16z Crypto Fund V, at $2.2B — one of the largest sector-specific funds this year. Total capital in a16z’s crypto division has reached $9.8B, reinforcing the firm’s position as the largest institutional investor in the crypto industry.
The fund will focus on stablecoins, tokenization of real-world assets, prediction markets and onchain finance — sectors that moved from niche to mainstream in 2025–2026. The size of the fund signals to institutional LPs that crypto has become a permanent portfolio allocation rather than a cyclical bet — and that a16z is prepared to support later-stage crypto startups on par with traditional venture growth.
Sources: Forbes
🪙 Katie Haun’s Haun Ventures Closes Second Fund at $1B
Haun Ventures, founded by Katie Haun — former a16z Crypto general partner and former federal prosecutor — raised $1B for its second fund. The capital is split evenly between early- and late-stage investing, an unusual structure that gives the firm flexibility to invest across the full company life cycle. Beyond crypto, the fund is expanding into AI agents and tokenization of real-world assets for the first time.
The track record of the first fund is supporting LP appetite: exits include Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company sold to Stripe for $1.1B, and BVNK, a stablecoin payments company acquired by Mastercard for $1.8B. Those deals showed that fintech giants are willing to pay billion-dollar sums for stablecoin infrastructure — a thesis that underpins the new fund.
Sources: Haun Ventures
