85 original AI-venture articles from SVTR
Bloomberg reports Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic. According to the SVTR AI venture database, 13 of the 20 AI companies he has backed in his own name train their own models, versus 4 of 27 for Innovation Endeavors, the fund he co-founded, since 2023. His fund backs apps; his own money backs models, and Anthropic is the first of those bets to pay off.
The SVTR AI Venture Activity Index fell 4.8% to 155.7 this week. 92 confirmed AI rounds totaled $3.3B, less than half of last week. Money was scarcer, yet deals that put gates around AI agents piled up: five agent security and governance companies raised $120M combined, and Workday signed to acquire agent identity platform C1.ai.
On October 14 Modal raised $750M at a $15.75B valuation, 3.4 times its level five months earlier and both times under 16x annualized revenue; on October 12 Infinigence AI announced a RMB 2.3B Series C, and on October 15 China Telecom led Qingcheng.AI's round. Our view: in the compute middle layer between chips and models, the US prices on revenue while China prices on making domestic chips usable. SiliconFlow, the only one with disclosed revenue, is valued at about 140x its 2025 full-year revenue, and the money comes from carriers, cloud companies, chipmakers and local state funds.
