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Aug 13, 2026
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Happy Thursday! Kalshi, the biggest prediction market, is in talks to raise a new round at a $40 billion valuation. Neocloud firm Nebius reports a 454% jump in revenue. DeepSeek's latest flagship model recieves mixed reviews.
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Kalshi, the biggest prediction market, is in advanced talks to raise at least $750 million in a new financing round at a $40 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the matter. Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management are in talks to be co-lead investors, some of the people said. The funding size is not finalized and is subject to change, the people said. Sequoia is an existing investor in Kalshi, and its partner, Alfred Lin, sits on the board of Kalshi. Wellington would be a new investor in Kalshi. Wellington is an asset management giant and has made private investments in companies leading up to their initial public offerings. Kalshi has surpassed Polymarket to become the dominant prediction market. Its annualized revenue jumped to more than $4 billion in July, buoyed by World Cup wagers, doubled from about two months ago, The Information reported Tuesday. But it’s also incurring big marketing expenses and could face new state taxes. In May, Kalshi announced it raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation. Kalshi has held informal conversations with banks about an initial public offering as soon as next year, The Information reported in June. The company generates most of its revenues from sports-contracts, which contribute to over 80% of its volume. Kalshi is in several legal battles with state regulators who allege it offers illegal gambling. The company has said it is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and state regulators have no power to shut down a federally licensed exchange. Kalshi announced Wednesday that Jeff Bandman, the lawyer who helped Kalshi secure a license to be a CFTC-regulated exchange in 2020, is returning to Kalshi as CEO of Kalshi Prime, which serves customers of Kalshi’s margined perpetual futures business. Representatives for Kalshi, Sequoia and Wellington declined to comment.
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Nebius, another neocloud using the AI boom to establish itself in the cloud computing sector, reported a 454% expansion in second quarter revenues to $582 million thanks to surging demand for AI computing. Nebius’ cash burn also rose, to $3.4 billion from $678 million a year earlier, due to soaring capital expenditures on new chips, servers and data center expansion. Capex was $5.657 billion in the quarter, compared with $510.6 million a year earlier. On a conference call with analysts, Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said “demand for what we are building continues to be enormous,” adding that Nebius could “sell today our entire 2027 capacity…if we wanted.” Nebius shares jumped 17% on Wednesday morning.
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Chinese AI developer DeepSeek has launched its flagship model, V4-Pro, to mixed reviews from users, with some expressing disappointment. The company officially released the model on Wednesday. A leaderboard compiled by U.S. AI benchmarking startup Vals AI ranked V4-Pro second among all open-source models, just behind Moonshot AI’s popular Kimi K3. However, on Chinese social media, engineers who tested V4-Pro reported that the model sometimes lost continuity in its reasoning and showed weak performance on tasks involving images. In certain coding tasks, V4-Pro’s performance was worse than DeepSeek’s smaller-size model, V4-Flash, they said. The feedback highlights the difficulty of continuing to live up to industry expectations. The smaller V4-Flash model, released late last month, became a major hit thanks to its surprisingly strong performance and low operating costs. On X, some users also described V4-Pro’s performance as underwhelming, but others noted that the model’s low pricing makes it attractive. DeepSeek is offering V4-Pro at a fraction of the price of Kimi K3, which is already significantly cheaper than U.S. frontier models. The application programming interface for V4-Pro costs only $0.435 for input and $0.87 for output per 1 million tokens. By comparison, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 charges $3 for input and $15 for output, while Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 costs $5 for input and $25 for output. DeepSeek is setting the prices of V4-Pro remarkably low, even though the company recently said it was planning a “significant increase” in the near future in the overall API pricing for its AI models.
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Cerebras, which designs AI chips meant to run AI models extra fast, reported rapid sales growth for the latest quarter but investors sent its shares down sharply on competition and other concerns. Revenue for the three months through June rose 74% from a year earlier to $180 million, Cerebras said Wednesday. Of that, $54 million came from hardware sales, about half the amount from last quarter and less than the figure from a year ago. Cerebras’ cloud revenue offset that, nearly quadrupling compared to last year. The company reported a net loss of $451 million, which included nearly $400 million in stock-based compensation. Still, Cerebras raised its projections for full-year revenue to $880 million to $890 million, excluding adjustments for customers who have rights to purchase its stock as incentives to buy or rent Cerebras chips. Despite the strong points, shares fell 16% after hours on concerns about lower hardware sales, customer concentration and lots of competition. The shares, which had risen during regular trading, are still well above their IPO price from May, but more than 40% below their peak. Speaking in Cerebras’ second earnings call since going public, CEO Andrew Feldman emphasized that Cerebras can grow by partnering with other chip designers to run the same AI tasks concurrently via disaggregated inference—which would make workloads faster and more efficient. This year, Cerebras announced deals to run its chips alongside those of Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon. Investors have also expressed worries about Cerebras’ customer concentration. This quarter, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and OpenAI each accounted for approximately one third of Cerebras’ revenue. In the latest quarter, Cerebras disclosed $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations, or legally binding customer orders, approximately flat from $25.0 billion last quarter, and said a “significant amount” is from OpenAI.
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Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner and former Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger have reached a deal to buy control of one of the most storied franchises in professional sports, the Los Angeles Lakers. ESPN reported that the deal will value the Lakers at $12.5 billion, a significant jump in the franchise’s $10 billion value last year when businessman Mark Walter purchased a controlling stake in the team. The NBA board of governors still needs to approve the transaction. Kushner and Iger are purchasing the stake of Walter, who | | | |
