November 14, 2026

Hi there,

Here is this week's top research.

ICYMI

Uber is on an acquisition spree. Here are 4 companies it should buy next.

After nine deals this year, the next targets are in employee meals, ground travel, drones and sidewalk robots.

Which Fintech 100 winners are likely to raise next?

Casap raised $56M within the window our model predicted. Here’s who else we’re watching.

14 robotics founders who’ve already built a $1B company

We profile founders who have already scaled companies to $1B+ valuations and are now building humanoids, drones, and robotic training data.

New-Robotics-Unicorn-Founders-110926-v1 (1)

14 of the 30 most valuable vertical AI companies now train their own models

Healthcare AI companies lead on model ownership, while Harvey’s push into legal models shows how that investment translates into a cost advantage as customer usage grows.

State of Insurtech Q3’26

Insurtech deal count fell to its lowest level since 2016. Here’s what happened.

Shield AI just agreed to pay $5.3B for Echodyne. Here are 6 more companies it should buy to become a prime.

Shield AI built its business on software that flies drones and jets. Its deal for radar maker Echodyne shows it now wants to sell the aircraft, the autonomy, and everything around them.

Customer-Exclusive Research

The oil & gas value chain market map

We mapped 235 companies across 24 markets in the oil & gas value chain and leveraged our predictive signals to identify where advantage is forming, capital is accelerating, and strategic partnerships should be prioritized.

One more thing: catch us at HLTH USA 2026

We’re heading to HLTH next week, and early detection is a big focus for the pharma companies attending. It stood out in this year’s pharma deals, which we tracked in the Insights Hub we built with HLTH.

Some standouts:

UCB: piloted MPIRIQ’s AI on routine GP records in Germany to flag axial spondyloarthritis, which takes nearly 6 years to diagnose there.
Eli Lilly: licensed speech and biomarker data from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation to build voice-based Alzheimer’s screening.
Sanofi: is working with Kakao Healthcare on federated AI, trained on Korean medical records, to diagnose the rare disease Fabry earlier.
AstraZeneca: partnered with Alpro to subsidize blood tests in 500 Malaysian pharmacies to catch kidney disease risk earlier.

Where does care still reach patients too late? Our healthcare and life sciences analyst Ellen Knapp will ask Mattias Wieloch (Sanofi), Samer Ansari (Takeda) and Joy Bhosai (Pluto Health) at the Pharma Townhall on Tuesday, Nov. 17, on the Pharma Force Stage.

Visit us at booth #853 for a demo of the Insights Hub and to find out who you should be connecting with. Save $250 on registration with code H26PAR_CBI250. Register here.

Have a great weekend.

We love you,

The CB Insights Newsletter Team

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