Daily Funding Roundup:
May 14, 2026
Cerebras opens at $350 and closes +68% on its Nasdaq debut, the biggest pure-play AI IPO ever. CREATE Medicines pulled $122M for in vivo CAR therapies. equipifi took $34M for bank-led BNPL, Nectar Social $30M from Menlo for agentic marketing. S&P and Nasdaq closed at fresh records (7,444 and 26,402). AI capital is being marked up in private and public markets simultaneously.
Rounds
Cambridge, MA clinical-stage biotech CREATE Medicines (formerly Myeloid Therapeutics) raised $122M Series B led by Newpath Partners, with ARCH, Hatteras, and Alexandria participating. The company develops in vivo CAR therapies that reprogram immune cells (T cells, NK cells, myeloid cells) inside the body using an mRNA plus lipid nanoparticle delivery platform. Lead program CRT-402 targets CD19 for autoimmune disease. Co-founded 2021 by CEO Daniel Getts with scientific co-founders Siddhartha Mukherjee (Pulitzer-winning oncologist) and Ronald Vale (Cytokinetics co-founder).
Scottsdale-based equipifi raised $34M Series B led by Left Lane Capital, with existing investors Curql and PHX Ventures. The fintech delivers BNPL-as-a-service to banks and credit unions, letting them offer buy-now-pay-later natively inside their own digital banking apps rather than ceding installment lending to third-party fintechs. Founded 2021 by CEO Bryce Deeney (ex-VP Payments at REPAY). Total raised: $49M.
Palo Alto-based agentic AI marketing OS Nectar Social raised $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures (through the Anthology Fund, Menlo's joint vehicle with Anthropic), with True Ventures, GV, and Kinship Ventures (Gwyneth Paltrow). Co-founded 2023 by sisters Misbah Uraizee (CEO, ex-Meta News Feed product lead) and Farah Uraizee (ex-Meta engineering, scaled Facebook Groups to 1B+ users). Powers 10M+ conversations per week with official data partnerships across Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, and X. Has attributed $100M in revenue back to social channels for customers.
Also Noted
Sheffield, UK precision chassis-level liquid cooling company Iceotope raised $26M Series B led by Two Seas Capital, with Barclays Climate Ventures, Edinv, ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone, and British Patient Capital. Holds 200+ patents on chassis-level immersion cooling for AI data centers, HPC, and edge infrastructure. Founded 2005 by Peter Hopton and David Craig; current President and CEO is Jonathan Ballon.
San Francisco and Yerevan multimodal AI training-data supplier Wirestock raised $23M Series A led by Nava Ventures, with SBVP, Formula VC, and I2BF Ventures. Pivoted from a stock-photo distribution layer into a training-data marketplace serving six of the largest foundation model labs across images, video, design, gaming, and 3D. 700K+ contributing artists and $40M ARR. Founded 2020 by CEO Mary Avetisyan.
New York AI-powered wholesale insurance brokerage Novella raised $21M Series A led by Brewer Lane Ventures with BoxGroup, Crystal Venture Partners, SV Angel, Avid Ventures, Verissimo Ventures, Blank Ventures, and Arch (global insurer). AI agents handle placement, binding, form comparison, policy review, billing, endorsements, and renewals in the E&S market. Founded 2024 by Max Kane with R&D in Tel Aviv.
News & Signals
Cerebras (CBRS) Nasdaq debut: opens at $350, peaks at $386, closes +68% at $311
Cerebras priced at $185 Wednesday night (far above the original $115-$125 range), opened Thursday at $350, peaked at $385-$386 (up roughly 108%), and closed at $311.07 (+68%). Raised $5.55B with ~$95B fully-diluted market cap at close. Demand reportedly oversubscribed 20x. The largest US tech IPO since Uber 2019 and the biggest pure-play AI IPO ever. Caveats analysts flagged: customer concentration (OpenAI alone is a $20B+ cloud deal expiring 2028), widening operating losses, valuation 'borderline euphoric.' The print decisively reopens the AI IPO window.
Markets close at fresh records: S&P 7,444, Nasdaq 26,402
S&P 500 +0.5% to a record 7,444.25. Nasdaq Composite +1.2% to a record 26,402.34 (AI-led, Cerebras-fueled). Dow -0.14% to 49,693.20. Wednesday's hot PPI print (headline +1.4% MoM, +6% YoY, biggest since December 2022) had pressured stocks but Thursday's chip-driven flows overwhelmed it. The melt-up resumes with AI infra as the dominant beta.
Recursive Superintelligence emerges from stealth at $4.65B
Founded 2025 by Richard Socher (ex-Salesforce AI, You.com), Tim Rocktäschel (ex-DeepMind, UCL), Tim Shi, Yuandong Tian (ex-Meta FAIR), Josh Tobin (ex-OpenAI), Alexey Dosovitskiy (Vision Transformer author), Caiming Xiong, and Jeff Clune. Adviser Peter Norvig. Raised $650M from GV, Greycroft, Nvidia, and AMD at a $4.65B post-money valuation. Mission: AI that autonomously identifies its weaknesses and redesigns itself. First product within 'quarters, not years.'
Anthropic $900B round still in flight, May 26 target intact
Bloomberg confirmed earlier in the week that Anthropic is in talks to raise at least $30B at a $900B+ valuation, with the round potentially reaching $50B. Annualized run rate hit $30B by end of March. The round is expected to close in roughly two weeks (May 26 target intact). Would top OpenAI's $852B February post-money. Combined with Cerebras's IPO print today, the frontier AI capital stack is being marked up across both private and public modes simultaneously.
Strait of Hormuz still simmering, Pakistan-mediated talks continue
Trump's May 6 announcement of a pause on Operation Project Freedom remained in effect through May 14; Pakistan-mediated US/Iran talks continued. Energy markets quiet, no flare-up dated specifically to May 14. The 14-point MOU draft circulating earlier in the week is consistent with the current negotiating posture. The pause is now treated as the de-facto status quo, with markets pricing toward an eventual reopening.
VC Mood on X
Cerebras was the entire conversation. AI infrastructure Twitter spent the day refreshing CBRS. Opening at $350 against a $185 price was the kind of pop that breaks the "IPOs are dead" narrative people had been recycling since 2022. Founders DM'd their bankers. Bankers DM'd their founders. Late-stage growth investors sitting on Cerebras secondaries marked their books up. The "the IPO window is open" tweets started by lunchtime, and by close at least a dozen growth-stage CEOs were rumored to be ringing up their boards about 2026/2027 windows.
The second-order mood was anxious. The Cerebras valuation works out to roughly 100x current revenue, and the customer concentration story (OpenAI accounts for the majority of bookings on a contract expiring 2028) made the more disciplined corners of the timeline nervous. The Wednesday PPI print (6% YoY, hottest since late 2022) sat in the background as the inflation hawks reminded everyone the Fed is not cutting into this. Two-track conversation: AI IPOs are back, party time, versus we just paid 100x for the AI version of Snowflake-at-peak and the PPI is at 6%.
Meanwhile in private-market land, $122M for CREATE Medicines (in vivo cell therapy), $30M for Nectar (agentic marketing), $34M for equipifi (embedded BNPL), $26M for Iceotope (data center cooling), $23M for Wirestock (multimodal training data), $21M for Novella (AI insurance brokerage) painted a less euphoric but more sustainable picture. Investors leaning into platforms that sit close to real infrastructure rather than pure model bets. The Cerebras pop got the headlines; the workmanlike mid-cap rounds across biotech, fintech, and healthtech are what actually compose the trend.
Rounds and signals sourced from SEC filings, press releases, and verified news reports. All amounts in USD unless noted. Reporting reflects information available at time of publication.