Databricks Raises $5 Billion, and SpaceX Completes Its Cursor Takeover
Updated: 6 days ago
Title: Databricks Raises $5 Billion, and SpaceX Completes Its Cursor Takeover
Date: 18 August 2026
Type: Blog
Author: SAASiQ (contact@saasiq.ai)
Word count: 1365 words
Reading time: 6 min
Published: 18-08-2026
Databricks raised $5 billion at a $190 billion valuation on 13 August and said its revenue run-rate had passed $7 billion. The following day SpaceX completed its $60 billion all-stock takeover of Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor coding assistant. In the same week Thrive Holdings, which buys service businesses and rebuilds them around AI, raised $2 billion, and Cisco reported $9.3 billion of AI infrastructure orders for its financial year.
Databricks' second round of 2026
This is Databricks' second funding round this year. Bloomberg reports that the previous one, about six months earlier, valued the company at $134 billion. Coatue led the new round, with Blackstone, MGX and T. Rowe Price taking part, and Sixth Street Growth, BOND, Clearlake Capital, Point72, Premji Invest and TPG coming in as new investors. Existing backers include a16z, Fidelity, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Temasek and Thrive Capital.
With the round, Databricks said its revenue run-rate is above $7 billion, up more than 80 per cent year on year in the second quarter, and adjusted free cash flow has been positive over the past 12 months. More than 1,000 customers pay at a run-rate above $1 million a year. More than 100 pay above $10 million.
Where the money is going
Databricks says the money goes to three products for AI agents. Lakebase is a serverless Postgres database built for agents, and it has passed a $100 million run-rate on its own. Genie is what Databricks calls an 'AI coworker', an agent that works over a company's business data. Unity AI Gateway governs how an organisation uses several AI models at once and controls what they cost.
Ali Ghodsi, the chief executive, said enterprises want agents that remember context and give accurate answers, and that get their work done without overrunning budgets. Thomas Laffont, co-founder of Coatue, credited Databricks with cutting research and development timelines from years to months.
The gateway is the product aimed at finance and IT buyers. Once an organisation runs agents on models from more than one supplier, the spend arrives on several bills. A gateway that every model call passes through is the point where limits can be set and the total seen in one place.
SpaceX completes the Cursor deal
SpaceX's acquisition of Anysphere took effect on 14 August, according to the Form 8-K it filed with the SEC. The merger agreement was signed on 16 June, and Anysphere is now a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary. The deal is valued at $60 billion and paid entirely in shares. Press coverage has called it the largest acquisition of a startup on record, which is a media description rather than an audited figure.
According to the filing, Anysphere shareholders received 389,289,254 SpaceX Class A shares, priced on a volume-weighted average over seven trading days, and vested restricted stock units converted into another 1,752,426, which is where the figure of about 391 million shares in coverage comes from. Unvested awards became about 29.1 million SpaceX restricted stock units and about 44.4 million options. SpaceX Class A shares trade on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas as SPCX, and Investing.com reported them up 1.5 per cent at $143.45 on the news.
Cursor now sits in a new division, SpaceXAI. AI Weekly, citing Bloomberg, reports that the combined team has access to Colossus, the cluster of about 200,000 Nvidia GPUs in Memphis. Investing.com reports that Morgan Stanley kept its $300 base price target and estimated the deal could bring SpaceX up to $13 billion of revenue by 2027. The same outlet said the Cursor brand was expected to be phased out in favour of Grok. No primary source confirms that.
Thrive Holdings raises $2 billion
Thrive Holdings raised more than $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation on 12 August, bringing in SoftBank Group, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital as new investors. It has now raised more than $3 billion in total. The firm was spun out of Thrive Capital, one of OpenAI's major investors, and OpenAI took an ownership stake in December 2025 under an arrangement that put OpenAI staff to work inside Thrive's companies.
Its model resembles private equity. Thrive buys traditional service businesses and rebuilds their workflows around AI, and it now owns and operates more than 70 of them. Current, its accounting platform, covers more than 50 firms and 2,000 professionals, and Shield, its IT services platform, has about 20 companies. The round adds a third area, technical and regulatory work for infrastructure in the built environment, covering approval, certification and operation.
In figures reported by TechCrunch, Thrive says its TaxAI tool has processed more than 7,000 tax returns at 98 per cent accuracy, that tax preparation time has fallen by more than 30 per cent, and that help-desk tickets are resolved 36 times faster. It also says the number of custom agents deployed doubled in the past month. None of these figures has been audited. Thrive describes its engineers working alongside the practitioners in each business to learn how the work is done before building AI products for it.
TechCrunch compares Thrive with The Deployment Company and with Ode, a venture between Anthropic and Blackstone. The sources report no Thrive acquisitions in the UK.
Cisco's AI orders and margins
Cisco reported results on 12 August for its fourth quarter and its financial year to 25 July. Quarterly revenue was $17.3 billion, up 18 per cent. Non-GAAP earnings per share rose 23 per cent to $1.22, and GAAP earnings per share rose 52 per cent to $0.97. Revenue for the year was $63.3 billion, up 12 per cent, with non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.33.
The AI numbers are orders from hyperscalers, the largest cloud providers. They came to $4 billion in the quarter and $9.3 billion for the year, about four and a half times the year before. One secondary report treated the $4 billion as revenue already recognised, but Cisco's release describes it as orders. Cisco expects $7.5 billion of AI infrastructure revenue in its 2027 financial year.
Guidance for that year is revenue of $72.2 billion to $73.4 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $5.05 to $5.11, with $18.0 billion to $18.2 billion of revenue in the first quarter. The shares fell in after-hours trading on concerns about gross margin as the sales mix shifts toward hardware.
Mark Patterson, the chief financial officer, said: "In fiscal 2026, Cisco achieved its highest productivity metrics in 30 years measured by revenue, non-GAAP operating margin, and earnings per employee." The release also refers to the restructuring plan Cisco announced on 13 May, due to be substantially complete by the end of the 2027 financial year. It gives no headcount figure.
Tencent's second quarter
Tencent's second-quarter revenue was RMB 204.8 billion, up 11 per cent. Gross profit rose 13 per cent to RMB 118.4 billion and non-IFRS operating profit rose 9 per cent to RMB 75.6 billion. Capital expenditure was RMB 52.8 billion, up 176 per cent on a year earlier, according to Tencent's own results release.
Hunyuan 3, Tencent's own model, went into production in July. WorkBuddy, a productivity agent, and CodeBuddy, a coding tool, are both growing, and Tencent is testing an agent prototype called Xiaowei inside Weixin.
For buyers
For Databricks customers, Lakebase, Genie and Unity AI Gateway are where the new money is going. Any organisation running agents on more than one model should be able to see spend by model and by team before usage grows, whether through Unity AI Gateway or by other means.
For organisations whose developers use Cursor, the supplier is now a SpaceX subsidiary. Contracts, data processing terms and subprocessor lists agreed with Anysphere should be checked for change-of-control terms, and for any notice the supplier owes if the product or its brand changes.
Thrive's model means a firm that provides accounting or IT support can change owner and then change how it does the work, with AI tools handling client data. Organisations buying those services should make their contracts require notice of a change of ownership, and of any new AI tools used on client work.
The share conversion terms for the Anysphere deal are set out in SpaceX's Form 8-K for 14 August.
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