R136 Ventures Growth Digest #12: IPOs Pop 40%+, SpaceX Pushes to $1.75T, Infrastructure Wins Again
Your monthly snapshot of late-stage venture: top rounds, valuations, exits, and market insights
The Operator’s Lens
Welcome to May’s growth newsletter, where we track what matters in late-stage venture.
What's interesting is who got through the IPO window. Cerebras, Fervo...both traded up 40% on day one, both infrastructure plays that need years to scale. Market is pricing inevitability. If you're building software that improves margins by 10%, you're still fundraising in 2021 terms. If you're building energy or silicon that reshapes cost curves for next decade, you're getting 100x multiples and clearing exits. Maybe that's same thing as saying only hard problems get liquidity now.
Let’s get into it.
Top 5 Tweets
The smartest takes on tech and venture capital this month, pulled from X chaos.
Top 5 Growth-Stage Rounds
Here's a snapshot of where the late-stage VC money went the past month:
Series B
$300M for Amca, an El Segundo, CA-based enterprise technology company, with funding from Caffeinated Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz.
$275M for Cowboy Space Corporation, a San Carlos, CA-based orbital infrastructure builder, with funding from Index Ventures, IVP, and Blossom Capital.
$230M for Armada, a San Francisco, CA-based modular AI data center company, with funding from Overmatch, BlackRock, and 8090 Industries.
$200M for Blitzy, a Cambridge, MA-based autonomous software development platform, with funding from Northzone.
$170M for Radar, a New York, NY-based RFID-powered inventory platform, with funding from Gideon Strategic Partners, Nimble Partners, and Align Ventures.
Series C
$355M for Modal Labs, a New York, NY-based AI infrastructure startup, with funding from Redpoint Ventures, General Catalyst, Accel, and Menlo Ventures.
$300M for Decart, a San Fran and Tel Aviv-based generative AI frontier lab, with funding from Radical Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, and Andrej Karpathy and others.
$250M for Exa Labs, a San Francisco, CA-based AI search tools company, with funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
$150M for Oishii, a Jersey City, NJ-based indoor vertical farming company, with funding from SPARX Asset Management, Nomura Real Estate Development, and MISUMI Group.
$100M for Nourish, a New York, NY-based metabolic health clinic, with funding from Menlo Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Index Ventures.
Series D
$550M for ElevenLabs, a New York, NY-based AI voice and audio technology company, with funding from BlackRock and NVIDIA.
$200M for Mercury, a San Francisco, CA-based banking platform for startups, with funding from TCV, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, and CRV.
$150M for Farther, a New York, NY-based AI-integrated wealth management platform for high-net-worth clients, with funding from General Atlantic, Bessemer, MassMutual Ventures and others.
$120M for Elliptic, a London, UK-based crypto compliance and analytics company, with funding from One Peak Partners with participation from Nasdaq Ventures and Deutsche Bank.
Top-10 Market Makers
The 10 companies whose valuations dictate what everyone else thinks they're worth
Our Take
SpaceX surged another 40% to $1.75T - now worth more than the next three combined, driven by Starlink’s commercial traction and the xAI vertical integration narrative fully pricing in. The middle compressed, Databricks flat and Stripe slightly upwhile ByteDance and Ant Group anchor the bottom with 3x multiples, reminding us that not everything trades like AI.
How to Play It
SpaceX at $1.75T is the obvious winner but hardest to access; Databricks at $134B remains the clearest entry with real revenue and institutional liquidity. Waymo's 315x multiple screams bubble, but if robotaxis scale, it's the cheapest exposure to post-Uber mobility. Stripe and xAI are the underpriced sleepers: Stripe's AI-native payments infrastructure is still trading at 32x (half of xAI's 66x), and xAI at $250B standalone is a bet on Grok eating search share from Google.
Top 5 M&A Deals
Here’s five of the M&A deals from the past month that we think matter:
Stainless - acquired by Anthropic for an undisclosed amount
Weights.gg - acquired by OpenAI for an undisclosed amount
Symmetry Systems - acquired by Zscaler for an undisclosed amount
ARI (Assured Robot Intelligence) - acquired by Meta for an undisclosed amount
Jit - acquired by Torq for an undisclosed amount
Top Venture-Backed IPOs
$6.85B raised across 2 major venture-backed tech IPOs in May 2026. Cerebras' $5.55B debut was one of the largest AI infrastructure IPOs on record and a direct signal that the compute buildout trade is very much alive.
Cerebras Systems (CBRS) | Sunnyvale, CA-based AI chip maker with wafer-scale processors built for large-scale inference. Raised $5.55B.
Fervo Energy (FRVO) | Houston, TX-based enhanced geothermal systems developer backed by J.P. Morgan and BofA. Raised $1.3B.
This Month at R136 Ventures
That’s all for this month. See you in June!