Issue #69 • January 09, 2026
Hi Seedradar Squad! This week, the scale of the AI arms race officially left the stratosphere. xAI secured a historic funding round to massively expand its "Colossus" supercomputer, aiming for decisive cognitive superiority by next year.
Simultaneously, we also track Anthropic's valuation surge and Nvidia's architecture reset, including a really interesting new launch for autonomous vehicles.
🌌 xAI Raises Massive $20 Billion Series E
Elon Musk's xAI officially announced a record-breaking $20 billion Series E round, exceeding its original target and valuing the company at over $230 billion.
The capital is explicitly earmarked to expand the "Colossus" supercomputer in Memphis from 200,000 to 1 million GPUs, creating the necessary infrastructure to train Grok 3. This massive compute injection aims to achieve "decisive cognitive superiority" over competitors like OpenAI and Google DeepMind by late 2026.
🚗 Nvidia Launches "Alpamayo" AV Models
Nvidia unveiled "Alpamayo," a family of open-source Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models designed to bring "System 2" reasoning to autonomous vehicles.
The flagship 10-billion-parameter model employs chain-of-thought processing to navigate complex edge cases—such as traffic light outages—by generating explainable logic traces. Mercedes-Benz confirmed the system will debut in the US in the new CLA class in Q1 2026
💰 Snapshots: What Else Is Happening?
• Cyera secured $400 million at a $9 billion valuation. The round, led by Blackstone, addresses the critical enterprise need to discover and secure shadow data before deploying GenAI agents. - Read More
• OpenAI launched a dedicated health vertical, ChatGPT Health, revealing that 230 million users now query the model for medical advice weekly. The update includes partnerships with major health providers for verified triage. - Read More
• Anthropic is closing a fresh $10 billion funding round. The deal values the safety-focused AI lab at a staggering $350 billion, cementing its position as the primary rival to OpenAI and Google. - Read More
• Nvidia unveiled the "Rubin" architecture, featuring the new "Vera" CPU. It resets the compute baseline for training trillion-parameter models and physical AI robots. - Read More
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💼 Join the Revolution: Hot Startup Jobs!
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💼 Resource of the Week!
📊 Google Cloud: AI Agent Trends 2026 Report
Fresh strategic intelligence (released Jan 5) analyzing how successful enterprises are moving from "chatbots" to autonomous "agentic workflows," with data-backed predictions for the next 12 months.
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Disclosure: Seedradar Ventures and/or its general partner may hold investments in some of the companies mentioned in this newsletter. This content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice.
