This week’s capital flows extended the AI-infrastructure theme into less familiar territory, with money moving toward orbital and offshore data centers, AI-native security operations, and open-source inference platforms. The largest single check came from a strategic backer doubling down on a struggling chipmaker, while the rest of the lineup signals where investors believe the next layer of differentiation will be built. The five rounds below are ranked by deal size.
Graphcore
Round: Strategic Investment | Sector: Semiconductors
SoftBank poured more than $450 million into Graphcore through a single-share issuance valued at roughly $457 million, with a person familiar with the matter telling CNBC that this is only a portion of what the chipmaker will receive in 2026. The infusion lands less than two years after SoftBank acquired the Bristol-based company, and reflects how thoroughly the AI accelerator market has consolidated around a handful of well-capitalized players. For enterprise buyers, the practical takeaway is that meaningful Nvidia alternatives now require sovereign-scale balance sheets to remain in the game.
Cowboy Space
Round: Series B | Sector: Cloud / Data Center Infrastructure
Cowboy Space closed a $275 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures with participation from NEA and IVP, to build orbital data centers for AI workloads. The thesis is that terrestrial grids cannot keep pace with AI compute demand, and that putting servers in low-Earth orbit sidesteps the power, cooling, and permitting constraints that increasingly throttle ground-based capacity. The valuation is aggressive given the engineering risk, but it underscores how much investors are now willing to pay for any credible answer to the AI power problem.
Panthalassa
Round: Series B | Sector: Cloud / AI Compute Infrastructure
Panthalassa raised $140 million in a Series B led by Peter Thiel, with John Doerr, TIME Ventures, Fortescue Ventures, and Super Micro Computer also participating, to scale its offshore AI computing nodes powered by ocean wave energy. The pitch parallels the orbital approach: relocate compute to where energy and cooling are abundant rather than fight scarcity on land. Pilot deployments are planned for the northern Pacific this year, with commercial systems targeted for 2027, putting the company among a small but growing cohort treating data center placement as a physics problem first.
Exaforce
Round: Series B | Sector: ITSM / AIOps / Security
Exaforce raised $125 million at a $725 million valuation to extend its agentic security operations platform, with HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures participating. The round, one of the largest in the emerging AI SOC category, lands just twelve months after the company’s $75 million Series A and brings cumulative funding to $200 million. The pace reflects an investor view that traditional SIEM and SOAR stacks are not going to absorb agentic threats without a substantial rebuild of the operational layer underneath them.
RadixArk
Round: Seed | Sector: AI Infrastructure
RadixArk emerged from stealth with $100 million in seed funding at a $400 million valuation, led by Accel and co-led by Spark Capital, with NVentures, AMD, and MediaTek among the strategic backers. The company is commercializing SGLang, the open-source inference engine already used inside Google, Microsoft, and xAI, into a managed platform for training and serving frontier models. With both Nvidia’s and AMD’s venture arms on the cap table, the round is a notable signal that open-source inference tooling has crossed from research project to procurement-grade infrastructure.
The Weekly Funding Pulse tracks the most significant IT infrastructure, cloud, semiconductor, networking, and ITSM funding rounds each week. Coverage is curated for enterprise IT professionals and decision-makers.
