Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Anthropic just pulled off one of the largest funding rounds in tech history… A massive $13B raise that nearly triples its valuation to $183B in just six months.

Despite the bubble warnings, the investor appetite for frontier AI labs is not drying up — and though Claude may not be the household name that ChatGPT has become, its rise in coding and enterprise circles is translating into dollar signs in a big way.

In today’s AI rundown:

Anthropic’s $183B valuation after massive funding

OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1B

Create product ads with Nano Banana

Tencent’s Voyager for 3D world creation

4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

💰 Anthropic’s $183B valuation after massive funding

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic just announced a new $13B funding round that values the company at a whopping $183B, nearly tripling its worth from six months ago and coming amid significant growth from Claude Code and enterprise accounts.

The details:

Anthropic now serves over 300,000 enterprise customers, with accounts worth $100k+ in annual revenue growing sevenfold in 2025.

The company’s Claude Code assistant now generates $500M in annual revenue, with usage up 10x in three months.

The investor list notably includes QIA, the first Middle East participant, as hinted at by CEO Dario Amodei in a leaked memo in July.

Anthropic’s last raise of $3.5B in March valued the company at $61.5B, marking a meteoric 3x rise in the last six months.

Why it matters: While there has been plenty of chatter about an AI investment bubble, the dollars don’t seem to be drying up yet, especially for leaders on the frontier of the industry. While Anthropic previously turned down investments from the Gulf region, the expensive race for global compute from rivals may have changed some perspectives.

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AI ACQUISITIONS

📊 OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1B

Image source: Statsig

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced a $1.1B all-stock acquisition of experimentation platform Statsig, bringing its founder Vijaye Raji aboard as CTO of Applications to lead ChatGPT and Codex engineering.

The details:

Raji will oversee product engineering across ChatGPT and Codex, reporting to Applications CEO Fidji Simo, who recently joined from Instacart.

Statsig's platform, which powers A/B testing and feature flagging for companies including OpenAI itself, will continue operating independently.

The deal marks OpenAI's second major acquisition attempt this year, following a failed $3B bid for coding startup Windsurf in July.

OAI also made several other executive moves, with Srinivas Narayanan shifting to CTO of B2B Apps and CPO Kevin Weil leading a new “AI for Science” team.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s last acquisition was a bumpy ride, but the leadership movement appears to have this one on solid ground. With the competition for talent at an all-time high in the AI race, the acqui-hire route may become an even more utilized tool for the giants of the space to bring in top leaders and teams in areas of need.

AI TRAINING

🍌 Create product ads with Nano Banana

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google’s new Nano Banana model (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) to turn product photos into professional marketing ads and transform sketches into animations — all for about 4 cents per image.

Step-by-step:

Go to gemini.google.com, click "Tools" and toggle on "Create Images" (that's Nano Banana/Gemini 2.5 Flash Image)

Upload your product image and prompt: "Create ads to fit various environments with the attached image — subway, train station, bus stop, luxury magazine"

Watch as it seamlessly integrates your product into realistic ad environments with appropriate lighting and perspective

Transform sketches by uploading black and white drawings — Nano Banana adds color while preserving exact character structure

Take it further: Toggle on "Create videos with Veo" to turn your generated images into animated videos with sound (takes ~2 minutes)

Pro tip: Mock up entire campaigns before spending real money — at 4 cents per image through the API, test different concepts on social media to see what resonates before committing to expensive production.

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TENCENT

🌎 Tencent’s Voyager for 3D world creation

Image source: Tencent

The Rundown: Tencent just released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, an open-source “ultra long-range” AI world model that transforms a single photo into an explorable, exportable 3D environment.

The details:

Voyager uses a "world cache" that stores previously generated scene regions, maintaining consistency as cameras move through longer virtual environments.

It topped Stanford's WorldScore benchmark across multiple metrics, beating out other open-source rivals in spatial coherence tests.

Users can control camera movement through keyboard or joystick inputs, with just a single reference photo needed to create the exportable 3D environments.

The system also remembers what it creates as you explore, so returning to previous areas shows the same consistent scenery.

Why it matters: World models have become one of the hottest frontiers in AI, with labs racing to build systems that understand physical spaces rather than just generating flat images. Between Genie 3, Mirage, World-Voyager, and more, the range of options (and the applications for these interactive 3D environments) is growing fast.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🍌 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview - Viral ‘Nano Banana’ AI editing model

🗣️ Hunyuan Translation Model - Open-source SOTA AI translation system

🍥 GenSpark AI Designer - Design anything with a single prompt

🔌 Le Chat MCP Connectors - Integrate Mistral with 20+ enterprise platforms

📰 Everything else in AI today

Mistral AI expanded its Le Chat platform with over 20 new enterprise MCP connectors, also introducing “Memories” for persistent context and personalization.

Microsoft announced a new partnership with the U.S. GSA to provide the federal government with free access to Copilot and AI services for up to 12 months.

OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil unveiled "OpenAI for Science," a new initiative aimed at building AI-powered platforms to accelerate scientific discovery.

Swiss researchers from EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS launched Apertus, a fully open-source multilingual language model trained on over 1,000 languages.

Chinese delivery giant Meituan open-sourced LongCat-Flash-Chat, the company’s first AI model that rivals DeepSeek V3, Qwen 3, and Kimi K2 on benchmarks.

ElevenLabs released an upgraded version of its sound effects AI model, with new features including looping, extended output length, and higher quality generations.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Cathy K. in Salt Lake City, Utah:

"I used ChatGPT and Claude to write complex Excel formulas. I was solving for a way to model assigning media spend (advertising dollars) to individual restaurants for a limited-time offer campaign. I needed a way to account for multiple variables and tiering, all while creating a bell curve distribution. Solution accomplished."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: AI gives paralyzed patients robotic control

Read our last Tech newsletter: Japan’s yen just went digital

Read our last Robotics newsletter: Nvidia’s palm-sized robot brain

Today’s AI tool guide: Create product ads with Nano Banana

RSVP to our next workshop @ 4 PM EST Friday: Template-first AI workflows

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown