$40 Billion for a Chipmaker, $1 Billion for a Construction App

Good morning, Mason here,

This week the money went back to things you can touch.

Etched is reportedly getting offers of up to $50 billion, about double its price from August.

FieldAI signed a term sheet at $10 billion to build brains for robots.

GMI Cloud borrowed twice as much as it raised in equity to buy more GPUs.

And a construction software company from Georgia quietly crossed $1 billion.

Six deals. One direction.

The money is going to the stuff AI runs on.

Read time: 5 mins

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FOLLOW THE MONEY

Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti. Photo: Etched

TechCrunch reported Monday that the AI chip startup is fielding offers that would value it at $40 billion to $50 billion. Nothing has been announced, and Etched declined to comment.

The speed here is wild. Etched was worth about $5 billion last December. It raised $300 million at $10.3 billion in July, then $700 million at $21 billion in August with Jane Street leading. Now it's looking at roughly double that again.

Etched makes chips built for one job, running AI models, instead of general-purpose GPUs like Nvidia's. Etched said in July it had $1 billion in customer orders, and Jane Street, which led the August round, is also a customer with a system already running. About 400 people work there, and around 15 percent of them came from Nvidia, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The math is what I'd push back on. $1 billion in orders against a $40 billion price is 40x, and orders aren't revenue yet. The three founders, Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen, left Harvard to start it four years ago. If the chips ship on time, this could still look cheap. If they slip, it's a long way down.

Photo: FieldAI

Business Insider reported last Friday that FieldAI signed a term sheet to raise $700 million at a $10 billion valuation. It hasn't closed yet.

FieldAI doesn't build robots. It writes the software that lets them get around on their own, one general-purpose brain meant to run humanoids, robot dogs, drones and industrial rovers. CEO Ali Agha spent almost a decade at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before starting it. Bezos Expeditions, Nvidia's NVentures and Intel Capital are already investors.

In August 2025 it raised $405 million at $2 billion, so this is 5x in a little over a year. Business Insider reports it now has at least $135 million in revenue and customer contracts across more than 30 customers in industries like construction.

Skild AI is valued above $14 billion and Physical Intelligence at around $11 billion. Add FieldAI and that's about $35 billion across three companies chasing the same idea. At $10 billion, FieldAI is priced at roughly 74 times its revenue and contracts combined.

Photo: GMI Cloud

GMI Cloud announced $668 million in new funding. Only $223 million of that is equity, a Series B led by ARCHIV with Nvidia participating. The other $445 million is a credit line led by Taiwan's CTBC bank. GMI didn't share a valuation.

GMI rents out GPUs and runs AI models for customers like Fireworks, OpenRouter and Trend Micro. It's based in Mountain View and run by founder Alex Yeh, with operations in the US, Taiwan and Japan. Its contracted annual revenue just passed $600 million, nine times where it ended 2025.

The debt is the part to notice. GPU clouds borrow against their contracts because the chips cost too much to pay for with equity alone. That works while demand holds. And while contracted revenue is up 9x, revenue from infrastructure actually running today is up about 4.5x, so a lot of that $600 million still has to show up.

Photo: Vinci

No, not the French construction giant. This Vinci is a 70-person Palo Alto startup that just raised $250 million at $1.5 billion. Advent, Temasek and Xora Innovation led, with Eclipse, Khosla Ventures and Madrona also in.

Vinci uses AI to simulate physics for chip design. It started with heat, which has become a huge problem as AI chips get bigger, and just added chip packaging. Vibration and electromagnetics are next. CEO Hardik Kabaria says it runs simulations up to 1,000 times faster than standard tools without losing accuracy. Nobody outside the company has confirmed that yet.

Vinci came out of stealth last December with $46 million. It has two pilot deployments today and wants to get to 20. That's $1.5 billion for a company still proving the product. The bet makes sense if you believe heat is the bottleneck for every AI chip being designed right now. It's still a bet.

Photo: Supabase

Supabase raised $150 million led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, with Alphabet's CapitalG, IronArc and SquarePeg also in. That's four months after a $500 million Series F at $10.5 billion. There's no new valuation this time, and part of the money lets employees sell shares.

Supabase is also buying Turso, a startup building a faster version of SQLite. Turso's founder Glauber Costa is joining as head of agentic services. Neither company shared a price.

The number I'd remember: Supabase says around 70 percent of new databases on its platform are now created by AI agents or AI tools. It's adding about 4 million databases a month for more than 13 million developers. The customer isn't really the developer anymore. It's the AI the developer is using.

Photo: Kahua

Bain Capital's Tech Opportunities fund put about $250 million into Kahua for a minority stake, valuing the Georgia company at more than $1 billion. Bloomberg reported the amount, and Kahua confirmed the deal.

Kahua makes software for running big building projects from start to finish. More than 2,500 customers use it to manage over $400 billion in capital programs, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, JFK Airport and the New York City School Construction Authority. Kahua says the money goes into AI features and hiring.

This is my favorite deal of the week. Kahua says it's doing $100 million in annualized revenue, so Bain paid around 10x. After a 2019 funding round it was valued at about $100 million. No hype cycle, just a company whose value went up 10x the slow way.

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THE PATTERN: THE MONEY IS GOING TO THE STUFF AI RUNS ON

Six deals, and they split into two clear lanes.

Lane one is the hardware stack: Etched designing the chips, Vinci simulating them, and GMI Cloud renting them out.

Lane two is the software that runs real things: FieldAI for robots, Supabase for the databases agents spin up, and Kahua for billion-dollar building projects.

The speed is the story. Etched went from about $5 billion to offers of $40 billion or more in under a year. FieldAI went 5x in a little over a year. GMI's contracted revenue grew 9x since the end of 2025.

The pattern: proof and price barely line up right now. Kahua has $100 million in revenue and got about 10x. FieldAI has $135 million in revenue and contracts and signed a term sheet at about 74x. Etched has $1 billion in orders and is hearing offers around 40x to 50x. Vinci has two pilots and got $1.5 billion.

For investors: Don't just ask how big the market is.

Ask how much of the price is already proven.

Mason's take: The boring deal is the best one in this issue. Kahua spent years getting to $100 million in revenue and sold a slice at about 10x, while Vinci got $1.5 billion with two pilots. When the boring companies are the cheap ones, that usually tells you more about the market than about the companies.

Founderscrowd Newsletter | Wednesday, October 7, 2026 | The money is going to the stuff AI runs on

$50B for a chipmaker. $10B for a robot brain. $1B for construction software.