Welcome to a new-look CB Insights newsletter, where we break down the week's biggest stories and feature perspective from our analysts on what's driving the signals.
Here’s what we’re watching this week:
AI’s $21B fraud problem
3 mega-IPOs?
Ramp triples its valuation
Let’s get into it.
AI created a $21B fraud problem, and now it's building the solution
The FBI's IC3 reported $21B in fraud losses last year as AI-generated deepfakes, synthetic identities, and LLM-powered phishing attacks scaled faster than legacy controls could respond.
Capital followed the threat. Fraud detection & prevention equity funding grew 3.5x from 2024 to 2025. Digital identity funding more than doubled. The highest-momentum segment was fraud orchestration & case management, driven by integrated platforms replacing fragmented point solutions.
When AI agents initiate transactions autonomously, conventional fraud controls built to verify humans don't apply. Companies in this category posted 99% average YOY headcount growth, and 2026 YTD funding has already surpassed all of 2025.
“Emerging agentic identity and authorization tools will be crucial to realizing agentic payments in practice and at scale. It's the fastest growing category on the market map by headcount by far. I also included it in the agentic commerce market map, since I view it as the future connective tissue bridging payments fraud prevention with agentic commerce infrastructure.”
SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic target trillion-dollar IPOs with zero profits
SpaceX is targeting a $75B raise at a projected $1.77T valuation, roughly 95x its 2025 revenue. Anthropic filed IPO paperwork days after closing a $65B round at a $965B valuation, eclipsing OpenAI's $852B. OpenAI followed with its own confidential SEC filing, though it acknowledged its debut "may be a while."
The financials complicate the enthusiasm:
SpaceX posted a $4.28B net loss through its latest quarter.
OpenAI doesn't project profitability until 2030.
Anthropic targets net positive profits by 2028 at the earliest.
S&P kept its profitability rules unchanged, delaying an estimated $14B in passive buying for SpaceX alone, per Bloomberg Intelligence.
Three simultaneous debuts at this scale could also strain markets' capacity to absorb new shares without pricing pressure, especially as CB Insights data shows global exits already fell to a two-year low in Q1'26, even as venture funding hit a record $286B.
"SpaceX at 94x trailing revenue sounds insane, but annualizing its 2026 projections drops the forward multiple closer to 30x, albeit on optimistic run-rate estimates. Meanwhile, the LLM leaders face no moat and a retreat from "tokenmaxxing" with a potential pullback in enterprise AI spend. Oddly enough, SpaceX may be the most reasonably priced, with OpenAI and Anthropic carrying the most risk."
Benjamin Lawrence, Senior Lead Analyst
Ramp raised $750M at $44B as companies scramble to get AI token spend under control
In tandem with the raise, Ramp launched an AI token spend management product to help companies track, forecast, and route LLM usage to cheaper models as frontier model vendors are incentivized to maximize usage rather than help customers optimize it.
Ramp's own data shows the stakes: among its 70K+ clients, those spending AI budgets efficiently grew revenue 12%, while the least efficient saw flat growth.
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