Nvidia paid $6bn on a day buyers outspent funds

Nvidia signed a $6 billion deal to license Poolside's technology and move more than 100 of the startup's engineers onto Nemotron, its open-weight model effort, aiming to build a US rival to Chinese open models such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3, India Today reported. It is the largest figure on today's ledger, and no fund wrote it. It came from the company that sells the chips those models run on.

That pattern holds most of the way down the day's list.

The largest checks came from operating companies

• Nvidia also turned up in Starcloud's $250 million Series A extension at a $2.3 billion post-money valuation, led by Manhattan West with Cisco Investments, Benchmark and EQT participating, five months after the company raised $170 million at $1.1 billion (TechCrunch).
• Muon Space raised a $250 million Series C led by Eclipse Capital, with Google, Salesforce Ventures, Wellington Management, I Squared Capital and Toyota's Woven Capital, taking the satellite maker's total equity funding past $386 million (Payload).
• Ampaire secured a £14 million Series B from IAGi Ventures, the venture arm of International Airlines Group, alongside Alaska Airlines and DiamondStream Partners, for hybrid-electric retrofit propulsion systems for commercial aircraft (UKTN). Two airlines funding the company that would retrofit aircraft.
• Twin1 AI came out of stealth with a $20 million seed round co-led by Aramco Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Tribeca Venture Partners, building digital twins of professionals starting with lawyers at firms including Orrick and Linklaters (Forkast).

In three of those four, an investor is named alongside the customer or the supplier it already is. An airline group and an airline funded the retrofit company. A chipmaker funded the model team and the satellite operator. The law firms whose work Twin1 AI intends to copy are named in the same paragraph as its seed round.

What the $6 billion is chasing moved the same day

Nemotron's stated target is Chinese open models including Kimi K3. On the same day the Poolside deal was reported, Moonshot AI said on its official Weibo account that Kimi K2.5, its first-generation trillion-parameter multimodal model, retires at the end of August, leaving the 2.8-trillion-parameter K3 as the company's primary model (BiGGo). The model Nvidia is assembling a team to rival is now the only one Moonshot ships, at nearly three times the parameter count of the one it replaces.

Cloudflare did a version of the same trade on the same day, open-sourcing Cloudflare OS, an enterprise AI platform built on a capability-based security model that lets teams generate work grounded in a company's internal knowledge (InfoQ). Giving the software away is the cheaper half of selling what runs it.

The funds that closed were smaller and slower

• Crestline Management closed its second European Capital Solutions fund at $625 million, nearly 75% larger than its predecessor (ABF Journal).
• Makers Fund closed Fund IV at $250 million, taking assets under management to about $1.5 billion, and said it will now invest beyond games (PocketGamer.biz).
• ADM Capital closed its blended finance Asia Climate-smart Landscapes Fund at $48 million after two and a half years of fundraising, well below the pace it had planned for (Agri Investor).

Those three closes total $923 million, gathered over quarters and, in one case, two and a half years. Nvidia's single deal is more than six times that number and took one negotiation. Funds still led the day's other rounds, including Rillet's $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation (TechCrunch). But the money with the fewest steps between the investor and the product sat at the top of the ledger today.