DeepSeek is in talks to raise $10B at a $45B valuation — the largest first-time fundraise by a Chinese tech startup. Founder Liang Wenfeng is focused on AGI, not short-term profit, as sovereign backers rush to fund China's open-source AI champion.
As hyperscalers pour $600 billion into compute, Elon Musk builds orbital data centres, and OpenAI prepares its IPO, the second half of 2026 will cement a new technological feudalism where sovereignty is leased from lords of cloud.
The AI gold rush is shifting from dazzling tools to industrial infrastructure. As inference becomes the engine room of finance, cyber security and enterprise decision-making, the real winners will be those that make intelligence fast, reliable, scalable and affordable, not merely impressive
New York's Reflexivity raises $30M Series B backed by Interactive Brokers, bringing AI co-pilot investment research to millions of traders globally.
The latest funding round for Reflexivity is more than another venture capital headline. The New York-based investment intelligence company, formerly known as Toggle AI, has raised US$30 million in Series B funding led by Greycroft and Interactive Brokers, with participation from investors including Stanley Druckenmiller, Greg Coffey, General Catalyst and SoftBank Investment Advisers LatAm.
What makes the round strategically important is not simply the capital. It is the distribution. Interactive Brokers has signalled that it will integrate Reflexivity’s AI capabilities into its electronic trading platform, giving traders access to deeper analytical tools inside the environment where they already research, monitor and execute. For a brokerage with global reach, this shifts AI from being a separate research assistant into part of the operating layer of modern investing.
Reflexivity’s platform combines market analytics, asset intelligence, knowledge graphs and large language model interfaces to help investors test scenarios, interrogate charts, explore data and generate investment ideas more rapidly.
The promise is seductive: fewer hours lost in fragmented dashboards, faster synthesis of market signals, and a more conversational interface between the investor and the market. The danger is equally obvious. Once everyone has access to a polished AI co-pilot, the advantage may move from information access to judgement, verification and behavioural discipline.
This is the broader story now unfolding across financial services. AI is no longer sitting on the edge of finance as a novelty tool. It is being embedded into research, portfolio monitoring, compliance workflows, payments, fraud detection, customer service and decision support. The next phase is not about whether financial institutions will use AI. They already are. The more important question is who controls the interface between data, interpretation and action.
The rise of vertical AI companies reinforces this point. EliseAI, for example, raised US$250 million in Series E funding in 2025 to automate complex workflows across housing and healthcare, showing how specialist AI systems are attracting capital when they solve industry-specific operational problems. Xelix secured US$160 million in Series B funding to scale AI-powered accounts payable and fraud-prevention tools for finance teams, another example of AI moving into high-volume, high-risk financial workflows.
Forus has also raised more than US$160 million to build an AI-powered network for healthcare payments, authorisation and fulfilment processes, showing how the same infrastructure logic is spreading across regulated sectors.
For financial markets, the implications are profound. AI co-pilots could democratise access to institutional-style research, particularly for retail investors, boutique funds and smaller advisory firms that historically lacked the resources of major banks. A trader using Interactive Brokers, for example, may soon have access to research and scenario tools that would once have required expensive terminals, analyst teams or proprietary models.
But democratisation does not automatically mean better outcomes. If thousands of investors are prompted by similar models, trained on similar data and responding to similar market signals, the result may be more crowding, faster feedback loops and sharper bursts of volatility. The market could become more informed and more reflexive at the same time. Price discovery may improve in calm conditions, but become more fragile when AI-generated consensus turns into herd behaviour.
This is where governance becomes central. AI in finance cannot be treated like a consumer productivity tool. A hallucinated paragraph in a report is embarrassing. A hallucinated signal inside a trading platform can become expensive, misleading or systemically dangerous. Financial AI must therefore be judged not only on speed and elegance, but on auditability, source integrity, model governance, explainability and human override.
The strategic lesson is clear. Brokerages, banks and wealth platforms that fail to embed AI intelligently risk losing relevance. But firms that embed AI too quickly, without guardrails, may import a new class of operational and market risk. The winners will not be those that simply add a chatbot to a dashboard. They will be the institutions that can fuse trusted data, workflow integration, regulatory discipline and investor education into a single operating system.
Reflexivity’s funding round matters because it captures the next stage of AI in financial services. The technology is shifting from analysis to infrastructure, from assistant to interface, and from optional advantage to competitive necessity. That is the real signal for markets: AI is not just changing how investors read the market. It is beginning to change how the market thinks.
To understand the broader implications of AI in financial systems and infrastructure, review Cyber News Centre's insights on The AI landlords are here, and the recent analysis of the $293M Kelp DAO Bridge Hack highlighting vulnerabilities in modern financial technology.
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DeepSeek is in talks to raise $10B at a $45B valuation — the largest first-time fundraise by a Chinese tech startup. Founder Liang Wenfeng is focused on AGI, not short-term profit, as sovereign backers rush to fund China's open-source AI champion.
The AI gold rush is shifting from dazzling tools to industrial infrastructure. As inference becomes the engine room of finance, cyber security and enterprise decision-making, the real winners will be those that make intelligence fast, reliable, scalable and affordable, not merely impressive
Liquid Instruments has raised $70 million to scale its AI driven Moku platform globally, backing Australia’s deep tech ambitions while helping engineers in defence, space, semiconductors and quantum computing replace rigid hardware with adaptable software defined tools.
Atlanta-based Stord has announced a $250 million Series F funding round at a $3 billion valuation, cementing its position as
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