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Running the wire
Funding Prime Intellect hits $1B valuation on $130M Series A; $100M ARR; enterprise RL agents move off-frontier Funding ElevenLabs targets $22B secondary valuation; voice AI doubles from $11B in five months on $500M ARR Breaking SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 at Opus-class performance; $2/M input tokens vs Claude $5/M Market Blackstone QTS raises $870M via data center asset-backed securities; Nemotron benchmarks open vs closed models Breaking China flags Claude Code monitoring mechanism as security backdoor; Anthropic says it's anti-abuse experiment Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M for AI agent training environments; frontier labs abandon pure model scaling Chips NVIDIA denies Kyber NVL144 delay reports; roadmap remains intact for H2 2027 launch Funding Taktile raises $110M Series C from Goldman Sachs for AI decisioning in banks and insurers Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M Series A to build realistic training grounds for long-horizon AI agents Market SpaceX stock slides to $148 post-Nasdaq 100 inclusion; analysts see AI data center, Starlink upside Market Together AI launches Provisioned Throughput for reserved open-model inference at 90% below closed APIs Market Meta breaks ground on $9B Alberta data center; first Canadian AI facility Market Microsoft commits $10 billion to Japan AI infrastructure, trains 1M engineers through 2029 Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M Series A to build simulation environments for training autonomous AI agents Market Meta launches Meta Compute cloud business to sell excess AI infrastructure capacity Market Gaming GPU Memory Shortage Pushes RTX 5090 Over $3,000 as AI Data Centers Outbid Consumers Funding Crusoe Energy in Talks to Raise $3B at $30B Valuation; AI Data Center Operator Triples Mark in 9 Months Breaking LangChain + NVIDIA Nemotron NemoClaw Achieves 10x Cost Reduction for Enterprise Agents Funding Anthropic in talks with Samsung for custom AI chip on 2nm foundry process Breaking OpenAI launches GPT-Live voice models with full-duplex streaming and live delegation Funding Prime Intellect hits $1B valuation on $130M Series A; $100M ARR; enterprise RL agents move off-frontier Funding ElevenLabs targets $22B secondary valuation; voice AI doubles from $11B in five months on $500M ARR Breaking SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 at Opus-class performance; $2/M input tokens vs Claude $5/M Market Blackstone QTS raises $870M via data center asset-backed securities; Nemotron benchmarks open vs closed models Breaking China flags Claude Code monitoring mechanism as security backdoor; Anthropic says it's anti-abuse experiment Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M for AI agent training environments; frontier labs abandon pure model scaling Chips NVIDIA denies Kyber NVL144 delay reports; roadmap remains intact for H2 2027 launch Funding Taktile raises $110M Series C from Goldman Sachs for AI decisioning in banks and insurers Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M Series A to build realistic training grounds for long-horizon AI agents Market SpaceX stock slides to $148 post-Nasdaq 100 inclusion; analysts see AI data center, Starlink upside Market Together AI launches Provisioned Throughput for reserved open-model inference at 90% below closed APIs Market Meta breaks ground on $9B Alberta data center; first Canadian AI facility Market Microsoft commits $10 billion to Japan AI infrastructure, trains 1M engineers through 2029 Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M Series A to build simulation environments for training autonomous AI agents Market Meta launches Meta Compute cloud business to sell excess AI infrastructure capacity Market Gaming GPU Memory Shortage Pushes RTX 5090 Over $3,000 as AI Data Centers Outbid Consumers Funding Crusoe Energy in Talks to Raise $3B at $30B Valuation; AI Data Center Operator Triples Mark in 9 Months Breaking LangChain + NVIDIA Nemotron NemoClaw Achieves 10x Cost Reduction for Enterprise Agents Funding Anthropic in talks with Samsung for custom AI chip on 2nm foundry process Breaking OpenAI launches GPT-Live voice models with full-duplex streaming and live delegation
Funding

ElevenLabs targets $22B secondary valuation; voice AI doubles from $11B in five months on $500M ARR

London-based voice AI startup ElevenLabs is in early talks for a secondary share sale (tender offer) that would value the company at roughly $22 billion, double its $11 billion valuation from February 2026. The tender would let employees and early backers sell shares without the company raising fresh primary capital. Talks are preliminary; deal is expected by September 2026. The doubling in five months reflects accelerating demand for voice infrastructure across entertainment, gaming, publishing, and enterprise customer service, where ElevenLabs has become the de facto API layer.

ElevenLabs reported $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by May 2026, up from $330M at end of 2025. Enterprise customers include Salesforce, Cisco, Adobe, Deutsche Telekom, Revolut, and Boston Consulting Group. The company's model library spans text-to-speech, voice cloning, multilingual AI dubbing, and real-time voice agents. With ~50 employees globally, ElevenLabs has raised over $800M total and targets IPO within 2–3 years per co-founder Mati Staniszewski.

A $22B secondary at ~44x projected 2026 ARR signals the market is pricing voice AI as inevitable infrastructure. ElevenLabs now outvalues Mistral AI ($12B as of January 2026), making it Europe's highest-valued private AI company. For architects choosing speech infrastructure: the secondary anchors ElevenLabs' next primary round at higher floor, and signals that voice agents (not just TTS) are becoming category-defining. The legal tail (Biometric Information Privacy Act class action pending; EU AI Act full effect August 2) will test whether the training-data moat is durable.

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