December 18, 2025

Size matters

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Industrial mega-rounds

November's 40 mega-rounds totaled $34.6B, with industrial companies claiming over a fifth of the funding.

Two investment clusters dominated: 

• Defense AI: NestAI’s $115M Series A, Quantum Systems’ $209M Series C
• Humanoid robotics: Apptronik’s $331M Series B, Robotera’s $141M Series A

Learn more about last month’s biggest deals in CB Insights’ monthly mega-round report.

Not: Oversized language models

The small language model (SLM) market ranks in the top 2% of all tech markets by average Mosaic score, a CB Insights predictive measure of private company health and likelihood of success. 

The edge: lower inference costs, on-premises deployment, and more visibility over AI decision-making. 

That's resonating in regulated industries, highlighted by notable relationships forged over the last 2 years: 

• EdgeRunner.ai partnering with the US army to develop SLM capabilities for robotic platforms
• Dnotitia partnering with Fainders.ai to apply SLMs to insurance analytics
• Arcee partnering with Activeloop to develop PatentPT, a SLM-based system for patent search and generation

Track the SLM developers and use cases driving momentum in our recent report.

Hot: AI in Hollywood

Disney just made a $1B investment in OpenAI. 

The 3-year deal grants the AI giant access to 200+ Disney characters for use in Sora video generation and ChatGPT Images.  

This also makes Disney a major OpenAI enterprise customer, deploying ChatGPT company-wide and using OpenAI APIs to build new Disney+ experiences.

CB Insights customers can learn more about Disney's AI strategy and interact with Disney's live strategy map here.

Not: Unicorn success

Across 1,300+ unicorns, 53% are worse off today than a year ago based on Mosaic score trajectory, a CB Insights measure of company health and growth potential.   

But AI-era unicorns are pulling ahead of their ZIRP-era peers, driving the average Mosaic score across all companies valued $1B+ up 1.5%.

See which unicorns are winning (and losing) across the full cohort in CB Insights' $1B+ market map.

The +1

Growing pains. The legend needs a legend.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Want to learn what this year’s venture landscape means for 2026? ? Register for our 2025 State of Venture briefing here.

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