September 18, 2025

Shopping spree

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: AI agent acquisitions

Workday just acquired Sana Labs, marking its third agent acquisition in the past month after snagging Paradox and Flowise AI.

The $1.1B deal underscores how legacy enterprise players are racing to buy their way into the agentic AI future.

According to CB Insights' proprietary M&A probability and Mosaic health data, several high-scoring AI agent startups are the next prime acquisition targets: 

• Dust
• Kore AI
• Aisera
• Lyzr
• Hercules

Check out CB Insights' AI agent market map to get a full outlook on AI agents’ progress, limitations, and future directions.

Not: Unicorn diversity

The United States and China dominate the global unicorn landscape, representing 86% of the top 50 private companies.

The US leads with 35 companies (70%), while China has 8 companies (16%), showing how concentrated tech innovation and capital remains within these two tech regions. 

The remaining 6 countries — Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, Sweden and the UK — each have only 1-2 representing startups.

Learn more about how AI, geographic concentration, and secondary markets are shaping the private market in our analysis of the world’s 50 most valuable private companies.

Hot: Materials development

Materials development platforms — which help create new materials for products like batteries and computer chips — raised over $1B last year. 

We identified the leading startups driving momentum in the material development platforms market, including: 

• Radical AI — combines AI, quantum mechanics, and automated chemical characterization into a single platform
• Uncountable — offers a complete platform that handles experimental data collection, management, and visualization
• Quemix — develops quantum algorithms and molecular simulation capabilities through its cloud platform

See CB Insights' full Mosaic analysis of which materials development platforms are positioned to lead this $1B+ market expansion.

Not: Early-stage deal activity

The venture market's post-ZIRP hangover is getting worse.

Quarterly early-stage deal activity in 2025 so far has returned to 2019 levels.

See where activity is concentrating today, from aerospace to blockchain, in our recent Early-Stage Trends Report.

The +1

Source: u/danaday1309 via Reddit

The height of fame. Taylor Swift is almost 2x taller then Nicki Minaj.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Want in-depth data on industrial AI agents and copilots? Check out our Book of Scouting Reports here.

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