• OpenAI just raised $8.3 billion in a fresh round led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The AI startup is well on its way to raising $40 billion by year’s end.

Back in March, OpenAI announced a plan to raise up to $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation by the end of the year, with $10 billion becoming immediately available (thanks to SoftBank, which footed 75% of the bill), and the remaining $30 billion arriving by the end of the year.

On Friday, OpenAI made strong headway on its financial plans, raising another $8.3 billion at that same $300 billion valuation, the New York Times’ DealBook was first to report. Demand for the round was off the charts—five times oversubscribed, according to the NYT—which meant many early investors participating in the new round were reportedly frustrated by getting smaller allocations so OpenAI could prioritize new backers. 

OpenAI’s latest fundraising round was led by Marc Stad’s Dragoneer Investment Group, an early investor in Spotify and Uber. Dragoneer wrote a massive $2.8 billion check, which means OpenAI now represents roughly 10% of the firm’s funds.

The round also included new investors, including T. Rowe Price, as well as a pair of giants from the private equity world, TPG and Blackstone. Other participants in the round included Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Fidelity Management, Thrive Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Coatue Management, and Tiger Global.

The New York Times’ DealBook reports OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue, which was reported as $10 billion in June, now exceeds $13 billion almost two months later, and may pass the $20 billion mark by year’s end. 

To offer some context: Anthropic, OpenAI’s nearest rival in terms of revenue and capital raised, has $14.3 billion in lifetime fundraising, and its valuation is $61.5 billion as of March—though it is currently in talks to raise another $5 billion at a $170 billion valuation. Perplexity AI, another rival, raised $100 million last month, bringing its valuation to $18 billion. Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has raised $10 billion at a reported $80 billion valuation, though current fundraising efforts could bring that number up to $200 billion. 

Of course, all of this money brings OpenAI closer to an initial public offering. The company is currently in the midst of restructuring itself to become a for-profit company (which requires a green light from Microsoft), so there is still no announced timeline for an IPO. But the latest round means OpenAI has raised more than any other AI company by a wide margin, which gives it the upper hand in the red-hot sector.

OpenAI might face a true challenge, though, from some of the more established Silicon Valley giants, such as Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pouring billions into AI resources, including talent; its $72 billion AI infrastructure spend is almost 80% higher than OpenAI’s entire fundraising round this year. Meta is also the sixth-most valuable company in the world with a market cap approaching $2 trillion.

OpenAI did not wish to comment further on the news, or on its future plans.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Kevin Dietsch—Getty Images

• Delian Alliance Industries, founded by former Apple engineer Dimitrios Kottas, announced Tuesday it’s raised $14 million in Series A funding to accelerate production of its affordable and autonomous defense systems. Kottas, who spent five years working in Apple’s secretive robotics lab, said he applied many learnings from his time in Silicon Valley to his four-year-old defense startup.

Dimitrios Kottas spent years at Apple working in its secretive “Special Projects Group” (SPG), working on autonomous systems for robots—and, for many years, was the team most closely associated with Project Titan, Apple’s since-canceled car project. But a few months after leaving Apple in 2021, he began work on Delian Alliance Industries, a defense startup designed “to protect Europe and its allies.”

On Tuesday, Kottas wrote a blog post announcing Delian had raised $14 million in a Series A funding round, led by Air Street Capital and Marathon Venture Capital, to “accelerate the production” of affordable and autonomous systems that “defend against invasion and incursion at nation scale.”

“We started Delian with a pilot of a single surveillance tower, but after just a few years we are now pursuing multiple nationwide deployments for our autonomous surveillance networks,” Kottas told Fortune. “Beyond this, we’re also helping allies to strike threats, as well as sense them. Our product lineup ranges from autonomous detection to autonomous one way effectors”

Rather than partnering with other defense companies and startups, Delian is borrowing a page from Apple, as well as Tesla, in that it’s choosing vertical integration as its key strategy around production. It makes its own hardware—targeting systems, surveillance towers, drones, and more— as well as the software and systems, which are all “designed to be low cost, deployed in mass, and sovereign,” according to the company’s website. 

“Why do we pursue vertical integration? Speed,” Kottas told Fortune. “Look at the speed that Tesla moved versus its European competitors who sub-contracted out everything to hundreds of different suppliers. By bringing everything under one roof we can move at the speed we need to equip our allies in the face of a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.”

Kottas, who graduated from the University of Minnesota after years of studying computer science and researching machine learning, said Silicon Valley also taught him about the importance of embracing “moonshot” projects, which are ambitious ideas that may result in revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change. Some of its prototypes reflect this concept, including explosive-laden high-speed boats that launch out of concealed locations to deter attacks by air or by sea. (Kottas told The Financial Times Delian is focused on “the maritime domain,” as airborne drones are a “very saturated market.”)

“Our adversaries are arming themselves with emerging technologies at a rapid industrial scale,” Kottas wrote in a company blog post. “We’re in a race against time and should measure deployments in days, not decades. We’ve proven our systems in mission critical environments and will now ramp up production internationally.”

Delian, which has offices in Athens and London, says it’s built to integrate with “Europe’s evolving defense priorities.” The EU is having a defense boom right now: Ever since President Trump signaled that Europe is no longer a security priority for the U.S., several EU countries have accelerated their own investments as they attempt to reduce their dependency on U.S. support.

At the NATO summit in June, all 32 member countries committed to raising security-related spending to 5% of GDP by 2035; separately, 18 EU countries have applied for billions of euros from The Security Action for Europe (SAFE) fund, which is a new $173 billion defense program aimed at providing cheap loans for member countries so they can buy military equipment together. As you might imagine, defense companies and startups like Delian are reaping the benefits of these policy shifts.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy Delian Alliance Industries