Daily Funding Roundup:
May 5, 2026
Defense unicorn, ocean data centers, and a billion-euro M&A. SAP committed €1B to acquire German AI lab Prior Labs. Kela hit $1.2B on a $200M Series C. Panthalassa raised $140M from Peter Thiel for floating wave-powered AI data centers. ZyG took $60M at $500M from Accel just two months out of stealth. Project Freedom paused and the S&P closed at a record 7,259.
Rounds
Israeli defense-tech Kela raised $200M Series C at a $1.2B post-money valuation, co-led by Stripes and D1 Capital Partners. Bill Ackman and Eric Schmidt joined alongside existing backers Sequoia and Lux. The company builds an open-architecture operating system for modern militaries, connecting sensors, drones, and UAVs into a unified real-time battlefield picture. Founded July 2024 by Hamutal Meridor (ex-Palantir Israel ops) and Unit 8200 alumni, the company generated roughly $20M in 2025 revenue and crossed the unicorn line less than 22 months from incorporation.
Panthalassa raised $140M Series B at roughly $1B led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. The Portland public-benefit corporation builds floating, wave-powered AI data centers: ocean buoys with onboard AI compute, seawater cooling, and LEO satellite uplinks. Pilot Ocean-3 nodes deploying in the northern Pacific in 2026. The investor list reads like a who's who of climate-tech, defense, and consumer: NEA's John Doerr, TIME Ventures' Marc Benioff, SciFi Ventures' Max Levchin, Hanwha, Susquehanna Sustainable, Supermicro, Figma's Dylan Field, and more. The thesis: the AI build-out needs unprecedented power, and the ocean is the unclaimed frontier.
Tel Aviv agentic ecommerce OS ZyG raised $60M Series A at a $500M post-money valuation led by Accel, with the entire seed syndicate following on. Founded in 2025 by the ironSource trio of Tomer Bar-Zeev, Arnon Harish, and Eyal Milrad plus three senior AI engineers from an Israeli cyber unit, the company identifies products with scale potential and autonomously runs brand building, store creation, creative generation, paid acquisition, conversion, and logistics. Series A lands just two months after a $58M stealth-exit seed. Total: $118M.
Coquitlam, BC battery storage company Moment Energy raised US$40M+ Series B led by Evok Innovations, with Liberty Mutual Investments, W23 Global Fund, and Tokyo Gas CVC Acario joining alongside existing backers. The company repurposes used EV batteries (70-80% original capacity) into 30-year-lifespan commercial battery storage for data centers, hospitals, factories, and microgrids. Texas gigafactory planned at roughly 1 GWh per year (250 jobs), backed by a $20.3M DOE grant from late 2024. UL 1974 and UL 9540A certified. Total raised: ~$100M+.
Also Noted
AI gaming platform Astrocade raised a combined $56M (Series A led by Sea, Series B led by Sequoia) with Google AI Futures Fund, Nvidia, LG Technology Ventures, and Dentsu Ventures participating. Founded by Ali and Amir Sadeghian (both ex-Google Research PhDs) in 2022, the natural-language game-creation platform reaches ~5M MAUs and ~140M monthly game plays across 75,000+ user-created games in 80 countries.
Seattle-based CopilotKit raised $27M total ($20M Series A plus a previously-unannounced $7M seed) led by Glilot Capital Partners with NFX, SignalFire, and 97212 Ventures. Builds an open-source framework and AG-UI protocol that lets AI agents render interactive UIs, charts, and actions inside any application. Adopted by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle as a default agent integration layer.
Paris-based Lithosquare raised $25M seed co-led by World Fund and Kindred Capital, with Daphni, Omnes Capital, and Ovni Capital. Combines foundational AI with geological expertise to accelerate critical mineral exploration (copper, rare earths, lithium). Same energy-transition + AI capex thesis driving Panthalassa and Moment Energy, applied to upstream raw materials.
Palo Alto applied AI company Nace.AI raised a $21.5M seed extension led by Walden Catalyst, with existing investor General Catalyst plus AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC Ventures, .406 Ventures, Jerry Yang (angel), and MA7 Ventures. Building MetaModel, a stack of task-specific Small Language Models that run 100+ specialized agents on finance, audit, and compliance workflows. Founded 2024 by ex-Google/Meta engineering leader Dos Baha.
Acquisitions
SAP agreed to acquire Freiburg AI lab Prior Labs in a deal worth €1B (~$1.16B) over four years, establishing a frontier European AI lab inside SAP. Prior Labs pioneered Tabular Foundation Models (the TabPFN series, published in Nature) that set state-of-the-art on tabular benchmarks for structured enterprise data. Founded late 2024 by ML professor Frank Hutter (CEO), Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir. Deal is reportedly almost all cash with over half a billion in cash up front to founders, and Prior Labs continues as an independent unit maintaining open-source releases. Close expected Q2/Q3 2026.
News & Signals
Project Freedom paused, S&P closes at fresh record 7,259
Trump announced Tuesday he was pausing Operation Project Freedom (the US escort mission in the Strait of Hormuz that launched just the day before) citing 'great progress' toward a complete and final agreement with Iran, reportedly including a moratorium on nuclear enrichment. S&P 500 closed at a record 7,259.22 (+0.81%). Oil prices fell sharply. The reversal came less than 24 hours after Monday's Dow drop of 557 points. Risk-on rotation back to AI and consumer tech, defense and energy gave back gains.
Trump administration expands AI oversight with Google, Microsoft, xAI
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation announced agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI to allow government pre-release evaluation of frontier models. Explicit response to Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview, which Anthropic restricted to Project Glasswing partners after demonstrating it could identify software security flaws. Dario Amodei reportedly met White House officials about Mythos. Combined with last week's seven-company Pentagon deployment deal (which also excluded Anthropic), the federal AI procurement story is now structurally split between an Anthropic safety wing and an OpenAI-Google-xAI everywhere-else wing.
Anthropic $900B round moves past board review, targets late-May close
Multiple May 5 reports confirmed Anthropic's $30B+ round at $900B pre-money valuation, co-led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter (each writing roughly $2B), has moved past board review and is targeting close in the week of May 26. Would surpass OpenAI's $852B mark, making Anthropic the most valuable private AI company. ARR reportedly on track to exceed $45B, with Claude Code alone above $2.5B annualized. Bloomberg flagged an exploratory October 2026 IPO conversation with Goldman and JP Morgan.
Climate-AI infrastructure bets get weirder and bigger
Three different routes to the same problem on a single Tuesday. Panthalassa: floating wave-powered AI data centers at $1B. Moment Energy: second-life EV battery storage at the largest factory of its kind. Lithosquare: AI-driven copper and lithium exploration in Paris. The AI build-out needs unprecedented power, hardware, and raw materials, and capital is flowing aggressively to whichever angle the LP base is comfortable underwriting. The middle of the AI stack (generic vertical SaaS) is where the bubble talk is loudest. The infra extremes are where conviction is concentrating.
VC Mood on X
The mood was distinctly "buy the relief rally" energy. With Hormuz pausing, oil dropping, and the S&P 500 printing a new all-time high, the dominant tone on VC X was bullish. Anthropic-at-$900B chatter, Panthalassa landing Thiel plus Doerr plus Benioff in one round, and three Israeli unicorn-track rounds in a single day fed an "infra and defense are the trade" narrative. Operators kept posting screenshots of the Sequoia-led Astrocade round and Sea coming back in as a sign that the consumer AI creator stack is no longer left for dead.
But the asterisk got louder too. Q1 2026 hit $300B in global venture deployment with AI capturing roughly 80% ($242B), and the AI-bubble takes that Sifted, Crunchbase, and Michael Burry have been pushing leaked into mainstream feeds. Hiten Shah and others resurfaced examples of breakout AI features launching and immediately stalling. Adoption fatigue is the quiet counter-narrative. Several investors flagged the cognitive dissonance of cheering a $900B round while pre-IPO secondary desks quote Anthropic competitors flat-to-down YoY.
Net-net: capital is being written aggressively at the top of the stack (compute, defense, energy, foundation models) and at the very bottom (agent infra seeds like CopilotKit, Nace.AI, MOTHER.tech). The middle, generic vertical-AI SaaS Series Bs, is where the bubble talk is loudest. SAP's €1B for Prior Labs reset expectations for European AI exits the same week Anthropic is poised to redefine the top end of private capital. May 5 was a day that rewarded conviction extremes.
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.