Last month, AI news pivoted from trade-war logistics to ambitious roll-outs and transformative partnerships. Major acquisitions stole the spotlight: OpenAI secured Windsurf for $3B and hardware start-up io for $6.4B, while Salesforce and Palo Alto Networks closed their own high-impact AI deals. In the Middle East, AWS and Saudi-backed HUMAIN unveiled a $5B+ investment into a Middle East North Africa (MENA) AI Zone, as other U.S. tech leaders forged additional regional alliances.
Investment activity stayed strong, with $4.9B deployed across 110 financings. Standouts included Perplexity’s $500M growth round, Pathos’s $365M Series D and Quantum Systems’ €180M Series C, alongside late-stage checks spanning IT, life sciences, cybersecurity, fintech, healthcare and legal-tech.
On the product front, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4; OpenAI embedded its Codex coding agent directly into ChatGPT; and Google rolled out Imagen 4, Veo 3 and Flow—underscoring the shift toward enterprise-grade controls and end-to-end creative toolsets.
Stepmark Partners 