Vesting Daily

Good morning. Here's everything happening in startup land today, in under 2 minutes.

$725 billion is what Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon plan to spend on AI infrastructure in 2026. That's a 77% increase from last year.

Here’s the breakdown:

Most of that cash goes to data centers, GPUs, power, and networking.

The tradeoff: their cash is gone. Combined free cash flow drops to the lowest since 2014 when these companies were 7x smaller. Google’s FCF is down 90%. Meta’s could go negative in 2027. These companies used to be cash machines. Now they’re cash furnaces.

Bottom line: Big Tech traded 25%+ cash flow margins for AI capacity. The bet is that today’s capex becomes tomorrow’s monopoly. If they’re wrong, the entire AI startup ecosystem feels it first.

Ramp — $750M raise at $40B+ valuation

Ramp is a corporate spend management platform. They give companies a single product that handles corporate cards, expense tracking, accounts payable, procurement, and treasury. Where they're different is the AI layer. Their autonomous agents handle real-time fraud detection, policy enforcement, and cash flow optimization. Finance teams don't have to manually review every transaction.

The company is in advanced talks to raise $750M at a $40B+ pre-money valuation, co-led by existing backers GIC and Iconiq Capital. That's up from $32B in November and $16B last summer. Ramp crossed $1B in annual revenue last year, serves over 50,000 customers, and is cash flow positive. Brex, the longtime rival, was just acquired by Capital One for $5.15B. Ramp is now worth 8x that.

→ Allen Control Systems is raising at a $2B valuation. The Austin-based counter-drone startup builds the Bullfrog, an AI-powered autonomous weapon system that detects and shoots down drones for the US military. Founded by former Navy nuclear engineers in 2025, the company is one of the fastest-growing defense tech bets in the market.

→ Sierra topped the week's biggest funding rounds at $950M. Bret Taylor's AI customer service company led Crunchbase's weekly megadeals tracker. Other big rounds went to Astranis ($450M, satellites) and Anagram Therapeutics (biotech). AI, space, and biotech are the only three categories where mega rounds still happen.

→ SoftBank is launching a battery business to support the physical buildout of AI infrastructure. SoftBank will partner with Cosmos Lab and DeltaX Co. to produce zinc-halogen battery cells at its Sakai City, Osaka plant. The company targets over 100 billion yen, about $638 million, in annual battery revenue by fiscal 2030 as it pivots deeper into the global AI supply chain.

→ Moonshot AI raised $2B at a $20B valuation. The Beijing-based AI lab behind the Kimi chatbot is now China's most heavily funded LLM startup, with $3.9B raised in the past six months. Meituan's venture arm led, with China Mobile and Tsinghua Capital participating.

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