Daily Funding Roundup:
May 7, 2026
Capital flywheel goes higher gear. Kalshi doubled to $22B on a $1B Coatue Series F. Moonshot AI raised $2B at $20B from Meituan. Astranis took $450M for satellite production. Quantum Motion raised $160M, the largest UK quantum VC round ever. Anthropic signed a $40B+ Colossus 1 compute deal with SpaceX. Parker (YC fintech) filed Chapter 7 without warning.
Rounds
Beijing-based Chinese open-weight AI lab Moonshot AI raised roughly $2B at a $20B+ valuation, led by Meituan's Long-Z Investment with Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng. The full existing cap table (Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, ZhenFund, IDG, 5Y) followed on. Moonshot is the lab behind the Kimi LLM series; Kimi K2.6 is a 1T-parameter MoE with a 262K context window. ARR crossed $200M, and the company has now raised roughly $3.9B across the prior six months. The May 7 print mirrors Anthropic at the top: open-weight Chinese AI is consolidating onto Moonshot and DeepSeek the same way Western frontier capital is consolidating onto Anthropic and OpenAI.
New York-based regulated prediction market exchange Kalshi raised $1B Series F at a $22B post-money valuation led by Coatue, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, IVP, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest. Volume tripled to roughly $178B annualized with over 90% US prediction-market share. Annualized revenue is above $1.5B. Valuation doubled in five months (from $11B in December 2025), and the company is now indisputably the prediction-market category leader. Founded 2018 by Tarek Mansour (CEO) and Luana Lopes Lara (President).
San Francisco satellite manufacturer Astranis raised $300M Series E equity (plus a $155M Trinity Capital debt facility for a $450M total) at a $2.8B post-money valuation, co-led by Snowpoint Ventures and Franklin Templeton. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, BAM Elevate, and Founders Fund all followed on. The company builds small geostationary (MicroGEO) spacecraft for telecom, broadband, and US/allied defense customers, with the new capital earmarked for expanded high-orbit spacecraft production. Total raised now above $1.2B.
London-based Quantum Motion raised $160M Series C co-led by DCVC and Kembara (Mundi Ventures' deep-tech fund), with British Business Bank, Firgun, and existing backers Oxford Science Enterprises, Inkef, Bosch Ventures, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, and Parkwalk Advisors. The largest VC quantum round ever for a UK company. The UCL plus Oxford spinout uses standard silicon transistor (CMOS) processes to build scalable quantum processors that fit in three standard server racks, claiming 100x cost and space reduction plus 1,000x energy reduction versus alternatives. CEO James Palles-Dimmock leads day-to-day operations.
Also Noted
Cambridge, UK biotech CellCentric raised an oversubscribed $220M Series D led by Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, with Fidelity, Sofinnova Partners, HBM Healthcare, RA Capital, Forbion, Pfizer Ventures, Avego BioScience, and ACS BrightEdge. The biggest European private biotech raise of 2026 to date. Funds pivotal trials of inobrodib, a first-in-class oral p300/CBP inhibitor for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. Based on the science of Cambridge's Azim Surani.
German trapped-ion quantum computing hardware company eleQtron raised €57M Series A led by Schwarz Digits (tech arm of Schwarz Group, Europe's largest retailer) with the European Innovation Council Fund, Earlybird, Ankaa Ventures, Precitec, NRW.BANK, and IFB Hamburg. The University of Siegen spinout's MAGIC technology controls atoms using magnetic field gradients and microwave signals. €60M+ order backlog into 2026 production scale-up. One of the largest quantum Series A rounds globally.
Paris-based AI real estate platform Davis raised $5.5M pre-seed co-led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital, with Yellow, Evantic, Entrepreneurs First, and angels from SpaceMaker, Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, Supabase, Cleo, and Spore.bio founding teams. Built Gaudi-1, a discrete-diffusion model that generates compliant architectural designs under real-world regulatory constraints. Founded 2024 by Mehdi Rais (CEO) and Amine Chraibi.
News & Signals
Anthropic + SpaceX/xAI sign Colossus 1 compute deal: 300+ MW, $1.25B/month
Anthropic locked in 300+ MW and 220K+ Nvidia GPUs at xAI's Memphis Colossus 1 data center under a contract reportedly worth $1.25B per month through May 2029, potentially $40B+ total. Anthropic immediately doubled Claude Code rate limits and removed peak caps, and floated multi-GW space compute as a follow-on. The setup is structurally interesting: Anthropic is buying compute from a competitor's overbuilt data center rather than waiting for its own Stargate-style buildout, while xAI monetizes spare Colossus 1 cycles ahead of Colossus 2.
Cross-rival MRC networking protocol released by OpenAI + Nvidia + AMD + Intel + Microsoft + Broadcom
A rare standards moment: OpenAI, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, and Broadcom jointly released the Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) networking protocol through the Open Compute Project. MRC spreads single GPU-to-GPU transfers across hundreds of paths and routes around microsecond-level failures. Already running on OpenAI's largest GB200 clusters and used to train GPT-5.5. The unusual cross-vendor cooperation underlines how acutely network is now the bottleneck on training cluster scale, ahead of raw chip count.
S&P 500 at fresh record 7,398.93, six straight weekly gains
S&P 500 closed at 7,398.93 (+0.84%) and the Nasdaq also at a fresh record, on six straight weekly gains, the longest streak since 2024. Driven by continued Iran de-escalation chatter and falling oil prices. WTI down to $102.27, Brent $109.87. The macro tape is now fully detached from the morning's missile and drone exchange in the Persian Gulf, with traders pricing in a negotiated end to the conflict rather than a sustained shock.
Parker (YC fintech) files Chapter 7 bankruptcy without warning
Parker, a YC fintech that raised over $200M for e-commerce corporate cards, filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy without notice to customers or sponsor banks. Founder Yacine Sibous had been in talks for a ~$90M acquisition that collapsed in the prior weeks. Assets and liabilities both reported in the $50M-$100M range with 100-199 creditors. Lands as a cold counter-narrative to the AI infra euphoria the same week: last-cycle fintech credit plays can vanish overnight regardless of investor name brand.
DeepSeek reportedly targeting $45B in first-ever funding round
Bloomberg reported China's CIC IC Industry Investment Fund ('Big Fund') is in advanced talks to lead DeepSeek's first ever priced funding round at a $45B valuation, with Tencent and Alibaba participating. The valuation jumped from $20B to $45B in weeks. Liang Wenfeng pivoted to raise as competitors began poaching researchers. Combined with Moonshot AI's $20B today, Chinese frontier AI is now being capitalized on a US-comparable curve.
VC Mood on X
The day the AI capital flywheel went into a higher gear. Kalshi doubled in five months to $22B. Moonshot doubled in roughly the same window to $20B. Anthropic locked in a 300 MW lease at SpaceX's underused Colossus 1 for roughly $5B per year. The recurring theme on X was that compute is the new oil and the deals are now structured like infrastructure projects, not software contracts: 15-year take-or-pay leases, multi-year $1.25B per month commitments, GPU clusters measured in city-block megawatts.
The euphoria has a flip side. Parker's quiet Chapter 7 ($200M raised, an $90M acquisition that fell through, customers and sponsor banks not notified before the lights went off) landed like a cold reminder that fintech without moats can vanish overnight regardless of brand-name investors. The pattern beneath the headlines is brutal bifurcation: AI infra and prediction markets are getting Series F-sized checks at doubling multiples, while last-cycle fintech credit plays are getting wound down without ceremony.
Geopolitically, the new normal in 2026 is "strike while you negotiate": Trump bombing Bandar Abbas in the morning and saying "the talks are going very well" in the afternoon, with the S&P closing at a fresh record anyway. VC Twitter mostly shrugged it off. Quantum computing also had its loudest day of the year: Quantum Motion's $160M Series C is the biggest UK quantum VC round ever, eleQtron's €57M is among the largest quantum Series A rounds globally, and CellCentric's $220M biotech print at the same time made the wider message clear: deep tech and biotech are catching the same updraft as AI infrastructure.
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.