Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Saturday, November 7, 2026
OpenAI closes eleven billion dollars at a one point two five trillion dollar valuation, markets bounce back from Thursday's rout, Moonshot's open-weight Kimi beats GPT-6 Astra on finance, and Shield AI raises two point five billion dollars.
OpenAI closes $11B first tranche at $1.25T valuation (Bloomberg/Reuters, Nov 6)
- originally sought up to $30B at up to $1.5T
- round may reach ~$20B
- SoftBank, MGX, Coatue, T. Rowe Price in
- CFO Sarah Friar on CNBC Nov 6
- IPO eyed for 2027
- March round was $122B at $852B valuation
Markets Friday rebound after Thursday rout
- Nasdaq +1.1% to 24,579.42, S&P 500 +0.32% to 7,376.86, Dow -0.46%
- AMD +11.04%, Intel +7.71%, Nvidia +2.78%
- week: Nasdaq -3.4%, S&P -2.7%, fourth straight weekly Nasdaq decline
- Oct jobs +165k vs 59k forecast
- 10-year Treasury yield 4.86%
- ~$3T wiped Thursday
Moonshot Kimi K3.1 Pro open weights
- 2.8T-parameter model, 1M-token context
- Frontier Finance 58.6 vs 45.0 for OpenAI GPT-6 Astra (vendor-reported)
- licence not standard open source — companies over $20M revenue need separate deal to sell as a service
- largest publicly downloadable open-weight model
Shield AI raises $2.5B to fund $5.3B acquisition of radar maker Echodyne
- $1B Series H at $28.8B valuation, $1B structured equity from Blackstone, $500M debt from JPMorgan
Applied Compute $350M at $3.25B valuation led by Elad Gil
- founded by three former OpenAI researchers
- $100M annualised revenue run rate in under 18 months
Traversal $120M at $1B valuation for AI agents that diagnose and fix software outages
Claude Personal Finance beta (US Pro/Max/Ultra)
- up to 16 US banks via Plaid, reads up to 2 years of transactions, read-only — cannot move, manage or invest money
Thinking Machines Inkling 2 Small
- 594B-parameter MoE (17B active), 1M-token context, 86.3% on SWE-Bench Pro v2 Hard
- weights promised next week under Apache 2.0
Rapid-fire
- Agility Robotics begins trading on Nasdaq as AGLT (~$465M gross incl. $201M PIPE led by Foxconn)
- Google acquires Crusoe's pre-developed Wyoming data centre site
- Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash GA — 15-second clips, $0.07/sec 720p, ~30% cheaper
- PSI AI-assisted proof of Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture (Lean-checked, no peer review, internal audit)
- DeepMind research vs legacy 1024-bit RSA
- Bank of England: AI lifted UK productivity ~0.5% over 3 years
- Perplexity Teammates always-on work agents
- Grok API text watermarking default across 7 models