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Startups & Venture·September 1, 2026·1 min read

Sources: AfterQuery, which sells coding and finance training data to AI labs, has hit a valuation of $3.2B, up from $300M in April, and is profitable

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A jump from $300 million to $3.2 billion in months for a training-data vendor shows that high-quality, rights-cleared corpora are becoming a core economic choke point. If you own differentiated data — especially code or finance — you’re no longer just a SaaS or services company, you’re in the model supply chain.

Startups & Venture

Wafer, which makes AI agents that optimize open-source models for a business's workload, raised a $40M Series A, a source says at a $200M+ valuation

A $40M Series A at a $200M+ valuation for Wafer’s AI agents that tune open-source models on non-NVIDIA chips is a bet that inference optimization itself is a profit center, not just a feature. If you’re building on open models, assume your cost and latency advantage will be competed away—start benchmarking against specialized optimizers now.

Startups & Venture

Aslan, which offers AI agents for the FBI and wider intelligence community that can pose as analysts and undercover spies in online forums, raised $20.8M

Aslan raising $20.8M for AI agents that act as undercover operatives in online forums shows national security is moving from human-heavy monitoring to synthetic personas at scale. Any platform with user-generated content should assume they’re already hosting AI-driven accounts and adjust detection, policy, and trust models accordingly.