AI 100 equity rounds.

Airwallex's AI-native finance stack.

Anthropic poaches again.

 

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July 2, 2026

Poaching season

Hi there,

 

Here’s what we’re watching this week:

  1. Assort Health and 7 other AI 100 winners raise funding
  2. Airwallex’s AI-native finance stack
  3. Anthropic grabs Google talent

Let’s get into it.

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Assort Health's $120M Series C is one of 8 AI 100 raises in two months. Here's who's next.

Healthcare voice AI platform Assort Health just raised a $120M Series C, the latest in a string of raises from companies on our AI 100 2026 list.

 

Eight AI 100 winners have now raised funding since the list published just 2 months ago.

 

According to our Funding Window data, 27 other AI 100 winners are currently in their funding window and are slated to raise next, including another healthcare player: care management agent developer Ellipsis Health.

 

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To see how the rest of the AI 100 stacks up, click here.

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Airwallex builds toward an AI-native finance stack.

Airwallex just raised a $320M Series H and announced two new products: Airi, a consumer wallet for agentic commerce across fiat and stablecoins, and T:0, an AI-powered stack for business finance.

 

The launches point to a broader shift in Airwallex’s strategy.

 

The company is extending beyond cross-border payments into the infrastructure for autonomous finance and agentic commerce: wallets, stablecoin rails, spend management, and business finance automation.

 

Startups like Catena Labs, Skyfire, and Basis Theory are also building pieces of this infrastructure, from agent identity to payment authorization to programmable vaults.

 

Airwallex’s recent activity suggests it wants to sit across more of that stack.

 

Its strategy map shows moves across payment networks, embedded finance, business software, e-commerce, and tokenized finance, including its recent investment in Metal, an institutional L1 for stablecoins and tokenized assets.

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The open question: how much of the agentic commerce stack Airwallex builds itself versus where it partners with, invests in, or acquires emerging infrastructure players.

 

For more on the rise of agentic commerce, our fintech analyst Aisha Chandraker breaks down what she’s seeing in the latest episode of On The Ground Podcast.

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Anthropic stocks up on Google’s AI talent as it bolsters technical team ahead of IPO.

Anthropic is quietly edging out OpenAI as the top destination for senior Google DeepMind researchers.

 

Three Google DeepMind researchers recently left for Anthropic in the span of a month as the AI giant prepares to IPO:

  • Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, key Gemini contributors
  • John Jumper, Google DeepMind Director and 2024 Nobel laureate for AlphaFold

CB Insights data puts the total at 5 DeepMind hires for Anthropic. OpenAI has attracted just 3 hires over a longer window, with only 1 in the past year.

 

Headcount increased 183% over the past year, with technical roles making up over a third of its roughly 5,000-person workforce.

Analyst perspective white
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“OpenAI used to be where researchers went for the comp, Anthropic where they went for the mission. Those have quietly traded places: Anthropic is now the comp play, OpenAI the place you go to have an impact. DeepMind, losing people to both, is increasingly an expensive science project for Google.”

 

Thomas Hodson

Intelligence Analyst

Track who Anthropic hires next with CB Insights’ People Search.

Teal More CBI Research
  • The State of Venture Q2’26: Midyear Review
  • The Money Awards 2025 Winner Performance Tracker
  • Book of Scouting Reports: Anthropic AWS Agentic AI Accelerator

 

We love you.

    The CB Insights Newsletter Team

     

    P.S. Want to know where digital health is heading in 2026? Get the recording of our Highway to HLTH presentation here.

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