Analysis
Add up just the rounds Pulse has verified this week and the total already clears $3.5 billion: Base Power's $1B Series D at a $13B valuation for home batteries, Pulse previously covered Valar Atomics' $1B Series B at $6B for factory-built nuclear reactors, ICEYE's 1B EUR (roughly $1.08B) Series F at a valuation above 10B EUR for radar satellites, Olix's $312M Series B at $3.3B for photonic AI inference chips, Obsidian Security's $85M Series D at $1.1B for AI-agent identity security, and Faye's $50M Series C at $500M for AI-assisted travel claims.
The composition is the story, not the total. Four of the six rounds -- Base Power, Valar Atomics, ICEYE and Olix -- are physical infrastructure: batteries, reactors, satellites and inference chips, not application-layer software. That's roughly $3.4B of this week's $3.5B, or about 97%, going to companies that pour concrete, launch hardware or build silicon rather than ship code. Software still raises money -- Obsidian and Faye prove that -- but the megarounds this week are almost entirely picks-and-shovels plays underneath the AI buildout, not the AI applications sitting on top of it.
“That's roughly $3.4B of this week's $3.5B, or about 97%, going to companies that pour concrete, launch hardware or build silicon rather than ship code.”
For LPs benchmarking sector exposure: if your fund's AI thesis is concentrated in application-layer software, this week's data says the largest checks in the market are moving somewhere else. The physical-infrastructure rounds also carry a different risk profile entirely -- nuclear licensing timelines, satellite manufacturing scale-up and battery factory buildouts run on years, not product-release cycles, which is a very different diligence conversation than the one most software-focused partners are used to having.