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JPMorgan Leads AI's $12B Series B, 40 Unicorns & IPO Surge | H1 2026
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JPMorgan and BlackRock co-lead Prometheus's $12B Series B at a $41B valuation — a signal that AI infrastructure is now a long-duration institutional asset class. Plus: Bending Spoons' Nasdaq pop, SK Hynix's $28B filing, Mistral's €3.5B raise, and cybersecurity AI breaks out.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Prometheus just raised twelve billion dollars in a single Series B round, hitting a forty-one billion dollar valuation, and the lead investors weren't a16z or Sequoia. They were JPMorgan and BlackRock.
Prometheus isn't an isolated data point. Nearly forty AI unicorns were minted in the first half of twenty twenty-six, spanning valuations from one billion to Prometheus's forty-one billion.
The IPO market is moving too. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based software acquirer that assembled AOL, Vimeo, and Evernote under one roof, debuted on the Nasdaq this week at a market cap north of twenty-five billion dollars.
Across the AI stack, South Korea's SK Hynix is filing for a twenty-eight billion dollar Nasdaq listing. Their first-quarter twenty twenty-six revenue was up one hundred and ninety-eight percent year over year.
Not everything in this cycle is AI infrastructure. Jersey Mike's, the sandwich franchisor with over three thousand three hundred locations across the US and Canada, filed for a NYSE listing targeting a valuation above twelve billion dollars.
Cybersecurity is the quieter part of this cycle worth noting. Tenex.AI closed a two hundred and fifty million dollar Series B for autonomous security operations.
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