June highlighted AI leaders locking in compute, advancing IPO optionality, and facing sharper pressure from lower-cost open-source challengers. SpaceX raised a record $75B IPO, later expanded to $86B after exercising the greenshoe, completed a $25B bond sale with nearly $90B of demand, and exercised its option to acquire Cursor in a $60B all-stock transaction. Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1, launched Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after U.S. restrictions were lifted, and faced allegations that Alibaba extracted Claude capabilities across ~29M exchanges. OpenAI filed confidential IPO paperwork but reportedly leaned toward delaying until 2027 while previewing GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Open-source pressure intensified as DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Coinbase highlighted the adoption of cheaper models.
Financing totaled $47.6B across 184 transactions, led by large rounds in physical AI, open-source research, and infrastructure. Prometheus topped the month with a $12.0B Series H backed by Jeff Bezos and former Google executive Vik Bajaj, followed by DeepSeek’s $7.4B Series H and $2.0B rounds for Kling AI, Mistral AI, and Lila Sciences. Baseten raised $1.5B from Sands Capital and Wellington Management, while NEURA Robotics secured $1.4B from Tether. Etched ($800M), Cyera ($600M), and Flourish ($500M) rounded out the top ten, reinforcing investor appetite for AI infrastructure, chips, security, and physical AI.