Weekend Funding Roundup:
May 16-17, 2026
Cautiously hot weekend. Stitch raised $25M Series A from a16z, the firm's first GCC bet. OpenAI's January acquisition of voice AI startup Weights surfaced publicly via NYT and The Information. Powell exited the Fed; Warsh sworn in. Iran/Hormuz 60-day ceasefire close. Bitcoin slipped below $80K on hot PPI. Anthropic $900B round watch continues into the final stretch toward May 26.
Rounds
Riyadh-based fintech Stitch raised $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, the firm's first-ever GCC investment. Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and SVC joined alongside. The company builds a cloud-native operating system for banks and financial institutions covering lending, cards, payments, and ledgers, letting banks modernize legacy cores module by module. Over $5B in transactions processed in the trailing six months; revenue up 20x in 2025. Founded 2022 by CEO Mohamed Oueida. Total raised: $35M.
Acquisitions
OpenAI's January 2026 acquisition of consumer AI voice and audio platform Weights surfaced publicly over the weekend via NYT and The Information. Weights (weights.gg) was best known for Replay, which let users create and share synthetic voice models including widely-shared celebrity imitations. Roughly 5M creators at peak, built with just two core engineers. Founded 2023 by CEO JonLuca DeCaro (ex-Citadel, Pinterest, Google, Apple). Raised ~$4M total (Kleiner Perkins as backer). Replay shut down April 1, 2026; the team was disbanded across OpenAI divisions. OpenAI confirmed it will not relaunch a consumer voice-cloning product; the technology was rolled into ChatGPT voice features and the API. Read as a methodical pre-IPO cleanup of synthetic media liabilities.
News & Signals
Powell exits, Warsh in: more hawkish Fed posture now baked in
Jerome Powell's Fed chair term ended Friday May 15. Kevin Warsh, confirmed by the Senate Banking Committee 13-11 the prior week, was sworn in ahead of the June FOMC. Weekend commentary focused on the 'Warsh revolution': a more hawkish stance on inflation now sits at the top of the Fed. Market pricing tightened around zero cuts through year-end with roughly 39% odds of a hike. The handover lands the same week as a hot April PPI print (+6% YoY) and as Anthropic's $900B board target looms.
Iran/Hormuz talks 'largely negotiated', 60-day ceasefire extension close
Weekend reporting firmed up that a 60-day ceasefire extension is close, with the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened and Iran allowed to resume oil sales freely. A separate framework track for nuclear talks remains pending; Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi, UAE, and Qatar are involved as mediators. Iran's Fars dismissed parts of Trump's framing as 'inconsistent with reality' and uranium handover remains the sticking point. Crude pulled back; the geopolitical risk premium narrowed but did not collapse.
Bitcoin slips below $80K on hot PPI; risk-off undertone despite equity records
BTC traded around $79,049 Saturday morning IST with 24h volume of roughly $38B. Friday's 6% YoY PPI print sparked profit-taking with support at $75K-$77K and resistance at $81K. Risk-off undertone for the weekend despite Friday's equity records (S&P 7,501, Dow 50,063, Nasdaq 26,635). Crypto Twitter spent the weekend debating whether the $80K break was a healthy reset or the start of a deeper macro correction.
Foxconn ransomware fallout still rippling into Nvidia week
Nitrogen ransomware gang's 8TB and 11M file dump from Foxconn (confirmed earlier in the week) was the weekend security story. Apple server schematics, Nvidia GH200 module documents, and Intel, Google, and Dell project files all reportedly inside. Production resumed at Wisconsin and Houston plants. Hardware supply-chain risk premium is back in focus going into Nvidia's earnings on May 20.
Anthropic $900B round watch, Lime IPO setting up for June
Anthropic's $30B+ round at $900B pre-money is still expected to close in May per Bloomberg reporting; Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter, and Greenoaks expected to co-lead. No formal weekend announcement, but VC X was thick with 'Anthropic will overtake OpenAI at announcement' takes. Separately, Lime's S-1 from May 7-8 drew weekend commentary (Motley Fool's 'Lime Filed for an IPO, Buy This Stock Instead') focused on the $845M going-concern debt due in 12 months. Tone: this IPO is forced, not opportunistic.
VC Mood on X
The weekend tape was a microcosm of the 2026 paradox: equities at all-time highs (S&P 500 Equal Weight and Dow both new records Friday) and yet PPI ran hot at 6% YoY, bitcoin slumped, and Powell walked out the door with Warsh (an inflation hawk) about to start dictating the message. VC X read like a split brain. AI optimists were celebrating Anthropic's looming $900B mark and treating Stitch's a16z-led first-GCC deal as proof capital is finally pricing emerging-markets fintech properly. The bears, Burry-citers, and "AI bubble 2026" tracker accounts were back, leaning on the OpenAI/Weights story as Exhibit A of an industry buying its own legal and PR cleanup at any price.
OpenAI's quiet absorption of a $4M startup, surfaced months after the fact via NYT, prompted the weekend's sharpest take: this is what a market-leader looks like when it is pre-IPO and methodically clearing copyright and synthetic-media liabilities off the board. ElevenLabs and any other voice startup with celebrity models in their training set spent the weekend nervously refreshing their inboxes. Meanwhile the Iran/Hormuz "largely negotiated" headlines bled hope into oil markets and equities, but Iran's Fars statement pushing back on Trump's framing kept the geopolitical risk premium from collapsing entirely.
Net mood: founders and growth-stage VCs feel rich. Macro and infra people feel like the music is still playing but the floor is getting sticky. Everyone is waiting for two things: Anthropic's board to vote at $900B and Nvidia's earnings on Wednesday May 20.
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.