December extended the infrastructure buildout while frontier labs tightened product and go-to-market execution. OpenAI reportedly pursued up to ~$100B of new capital at an implied ~$800B+ valuation, alongside potential strategic deepening with Amazon and a ~$1B Disney licensing deal to support Sora-enabled video workflows. The firm accelerated iteration with GPT-5.2 under a rapid “code red” cadence, agreed to acquire Neptune.ai to strengthen training observability and debugging, and appointed Denise Dresser as its first Chief Revenue Officer. Anthropic advanced IPO readiness with Wilson Sonsini and open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), while Nvidia broadened transparency with open-source Nemotron releases and secured U.S. policy clearance to resume H200 exports to approved Chinese buyers under a 25% revenue-sharing construct.
Financing stayed active with $10.3B raised across 108 transactions, led by a handful of scaled rounds that reinforced capital concentration. Databricks topped the month with a $4.0B Series L, followed by Kraken’s $1.0B growth raise. Black Forest Labs and BOOM each closed $300M Series B rounds, while later-stage checks extended to Tebra ($250M), Harness ($240M), Parloa ($200M), Harvey ($160M), and fal ($140M). Deal count moderated versus October and November, but dollars continued to track toward platform scale and infrastructure leverage into early 2026.
Stepmark Partners 