October 2026 Market Update
October’s deal activity highlighted three connected shifts across AI and data software. Chipmakers and infrastructure vendors are acquiring research capability and securing long-term compute commitments; established software platforms are buying agent capabilities to deepen their customer relationships; and security and identity providers are extending controls to govern what those agents can access and do.
The largest moves came in infrastructure. AMD agreed to acquire World Labs for $8.2bn in stock, bringing spatial-model research in-house to help shape its compute roadmap, with founder Fei-Fei Li becoming chief scientist. Anthropic’s reported draft IPO prospectus illustrated the financial commitments behind model development: at least $518bn of infrastructure commitments over ten years, roughly 80% non-cancellable, alongside a 2025 net loss of $42bn and a targeted valuation above $2tn. The scale and duration of these obligations make access to capital and sustained utilisation increasingly important competitive factors.
Independent infrastructure suppliers also attracted substantial funding. Nscale secured $3.36bn in pre-IPO convertible financing, including $1bn from NVIDIA, while Positron raised $875m at a $5bn valuation to develop more efficient inference hardware. Further up the stack, Temporal raised $550m at $12.55bn and Snorkel AI raised $350m at $3.5bn, demonstrating continued investor appetite for orchestration and training-data infrastructure. Demand was also reflected in Anthropic’s $11.6bn agreement with Akamai and new AI contracts that lifted Oracle’s backlog to $664bn.
Activity in DataOps and data platforms highlighted continued investment in the tools used to store, access and analyse enterprise information. Snowflake raised $3.75bn in convertibles, Databricks acquired Row Zero, and Supabase raised $150m and agreed to buy Turso. The transactions span different parts of the market, but reinforce the strategic importance of the data infrastructure supporting application development, analytics and AI deployment.
In customer experience, established platforms continued to bring agent capabilities into their product portfolios. Salesforce completed its $3.6bn acquisition of Fin, adding more than 30,000 customers to Agentforce, and agreed to buy Listen Labs. Its selection for HMRC’s CRM programme, worth up to £2bn, also highlighted the scale of enterprise and public-sector opportunities. Marketing activity increasingly targeted discovery through AI search: Profound raised $180m at $1.8bn, Zeta Global agreed to acquire Senso, Yext agreed to acquire Flamel.ai, and Swap Commerce bought Vizby.
Security, identity and governance provided another focus for investment and consolidation. Cyera raised $400m at a valuation above $12bn to map sensitive data and access rights. Okta added runtime controls for agents and formed the Blueprint Alliance with AWS, CrowdStrike and Google Cloud, while Omada bought EmpowerID for agent authorisation. These developments address a practical constraint on enterprise adoption: controlling agents’ access and actions once they enter production. Private equity activity was also visible in security services, where the KKR-backed NetSPI–Synack merger completed with more than $200m of combined revenue.
Model releases maintained competitive pressure. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5, Mistral’s Large 4 preview and OpenAI’s DevDay announcements emphasised capability and inference economics, while Google restricted Gemini 4 Argon to trusted cyber defenders. Pricing pressure therefore sits alongside continued differentiation in capability and access.
Across these segments, control remained the common strategic objective: securing compute, owning agent workflows, governing enterprise data and retaining access to customers. For independent vendors, the investment and M&A case increasingly rests on how difficult their technology, data or customer relationships would be for a larger platform to replicate.
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This analysis is drawn from our proprietary monthly market update across AI Development & Research Infrastructure, DataOps & Governance, Trust & Risk Intelligence, Customer Experience & Intelligence and Data & Intelligence Platforms.
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Alexis Scorer, Partner, GP Bullhound
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GP Bullhound is a leading technology advisory firm providing transaction advice to the world’s best entrepreneurs and founders. Founded in 1999, the firm today has 10 offices spanning Europe, the US and Asia.
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