February 5, 2026

Large and in charge

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Large valuations

This week, SpaceX and xAI merged at a combined valuation of $1.25T, creating the highest valued private company in the world.

Elon Musk cited AI as the rationale, with the merger securing capital for xAI to compete against OpenAI and Anthropic as they race to raise billions. 

See how these giants grew in our State of Venture 2025 report.

Not: Human-driven cars

Waymo just raised a $16B Series D round to accelerate its robotaxi rollout to more than 20 cities.

The raise comes as autonomous driving foundation models explode: companies in the space raised nearly $15.7B in full-year 2025 and rank within the top 1% of tech markets by Mosaic score (a CB Insights predictive measure of private company health and likelihood of success). 

See how 70+ companies are racing to control robot intelligence in our physical AI models market map.

Hot: Payments tech

6 of the top 10 financial services tech markets are payments-focused (by CB Insights’ Mosaic health and potential scores).

More specifically, agentic AI payments emerged as one of the sector’s hottest category last year: 

• Early-stage startups like Catena Labs, Crossmint, and Kira raised 80% more funding in 2025 (vs. 2024)
• Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal launched agentic payment solutions

Get the full breakdown in our State of Fintech 2025 report.

Not: AI agent tool libraries' commercial maturity 

The AI agent tool libraries market is the most nascent layer of the AI agent infrastructure stack, with a median Commercial Maturity score of level 1: emerging (aka beginning to develop a product). These 30+ startups connect agents to external tools.

Overall, three-quarters of companies in the space were founded since 2023. 

While the space has early commercial maturity, Y Combinator has backed a third of the market, signaling their conviction in the importance of this tooling for agent deployments. 

See the full AI agent tech stack to learn more. 

Spot emerging markets before they go big with CB Insights’ market index. Start your free trial. 

The +1

Super Bowl of missing data. Y axis doesn’t recognize 5’10”. 

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Want to know our 2026 digital health predictions? Register for our briefing here. 

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