November 6, 2025

Spaced out

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Fintech 100

CB Insights is launching the 8th annual Fintech 100 list — a ranking of the world’s top emerging fintech companies. 

This year’s cohort at a glance: 

• 26 countries represented
• Average Mosaic score of 775 (top 2% of private companies) 
• 61% average headcount growth over the past year

We selected the winners from over 15K companies using deal activity, industry partnerships, investor strength, hiring momentum, and CB Insights’ predictive scores for success and commercial traction.

See the full Fintech 100 2025 list here to dive deeper. 

Not: Q3’25 AI deal count

Deals were down 22% QoQ, but funding remained above $45B for the fourth consecutive quarter.

You can do the math: AI rounds are getting even bigger. 

The average deal size in 2025 YTD is $49.3M — up 86% from 2024.

Investors are funneling capital into fewer, larger bets, driven by the massive infrastructure costs.

In Q3’25, the top 3 $1B+ rounds went to LLM developers, reflecting the high cost of frontier model development: 

• Anthropic ($13B, Series F)
• OpenAI ($8.3B, PE)
• Mistral AI ($1.5B, Series C)

See the full breakdown of AI funding trends in our State of AI Q3’25 report. 

Hot: AI agent exits

Q3’25 marks the second highest quarter on record for AI startup M&A (172 deals). 

Three of the top 5 exits in the quarter were related to AI agents: 

• Workday acquired Sana Labs, a company focused on enterprise workflows, for $1.1B
• NiCE acquired customer support startup Cognigy for $955M
• Atlassian acquired The Browser Company, the maker of the Arc and Dia AI browsers, for $610M

Learn more in our State of AI Q3’25 report.

Not: Space cyberattacks

SpaceX is set to build a $2B satellite constellation for Trump's Golden Dome missile defense system.

As space infrastructure is evolving into critical commercial applications, space cybersecurity is now a necessary defense.

Using our proprietary Mosaic score — a predictive measure of private company health and success — we identified the leading companies driving momentum in the space cybersecurity market.

The +1

Source: u/belfaj26 via Reddit

Grocery wars. Couldn’t use a bar chart? 

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Want to learn even more about this year’s Fintech 100 winners? Check out our Book of Scouting Reports here. 

Get started with CB Insights

CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech. 

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here