Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

AI Infrastructure Mega Rounds and a Healthcare Unicorn Built in Three Years - The Raise - Week of July 13, 2026

Startups and venture newsletter for the week of July 13, 2026. A firehose of AI infrastructure capital, a $1 billion chip round closing five months after the last one and a $3.5 billion French lab raise, with the founder story going to Assort Health, which reached a $1.2 billion valuation three years from launch.

The Raise

Week of July 13, 2026: The Three-Year Unicorn

A busy week for capital: a $1 billion chip round closed just five months after the last one, a French AI lab set out to raise $3.5 billion, Jeff Bezos backed a company that learns from video games, and a healthcare startup went from idea to a $1.2 billion valuation in eighteen months. This week's founder story comes from that last one.

This Week's Rounds

  • SambaNova Systems, $1B at an $11B valuation (Series F, first close). Led by General Atlantic, with T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, BlackRock, Battery Ventures, Vista Equity Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority and chip giant Intel all joining. SambaNova builds hardware and systems for "inference," the work of actually running a trained AI model to answer questions, as opposed to training it in the first place. The eye-opening part is the timing: this comes barely five months after a $350 million Series E in February. CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Liang told the show even more money is on the way: "In the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up." He also revealed that JPMorgan Chase has picked SambaNova to power secure, in-house AI running on the bank's own servers, which he framed as a signal to everyone else: "Banks of the caliber of JPMorgan are now building their own private, secure infrastructure to run inference on their most sensitive models." Notably, SambaNova had been in acquisition talks with Intel late last year at a roughly $1.6B price, per a Bloomberg report Liang was asked about, and he stayed noncommittal on selling, but said momentum "will most likely drive the company toward being public at some point." (TechCrunch Startup News, "AI chip maker SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, 5 months after last mega round; plus, popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M," 2026-07-10)
  • Mistral AI, raising $3.5B at a $23B valuation. The French AI lab's new price is nearly double what it was worth at its last raise in September 2025. The growth behind it is real: recurring revenue hit about $400 million in February, roughly 20 times the $20 million it had a year earlier, and the company is targeting $1 billion in recurring revenue this year. Mistral is leaning hard into "AI sovereignty," the idea that European countries want their own AI they can run on their own soil rather than depend on American firms, and is committing $4 billion to build data centers in France and Sweden plus a new NVIDIA-powered platform called Mistral Compute. Its revenue skews to enterprise and government, and the podcast noted it is "copying Palantir's playbook" with a team of engineers embedded inside customer companies. (AI Chat: AI News & Artificial Intelligence, "Mistral's $3.5B Raise, Samsung Profit up 18x from AI Memory," 2026-07-07)
  • General Intuition, $320M at a $2.3B valuation. Led by Khosla Ventures, with Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt among the backers, for a New York company that is only a few months old. The bet is unusual: General Intuition spun out of Medal TV, a service sitting on hundreds of millions of hours of video-game clips, and, crucially, the button-by-button record of what players did and when. Founder and CEO Pim de Witte argues that games capture something plain text can't: how things move through space and time. "We were able to raise such a large round in part because we have pretty much the only dataset that has this diversity and skill represented at the level where you could take an internet-scale pre-training bet in the trillions of tokens." He says he deliberately courted investors "directionally aligned in the research" (Bezos and Schmidt are both focused on physical, real-world AI), and that closing got easier as the models improved mid-raise: "as the round progressed, the models just kept getting better and better and better, which just made closing easier." (Equity, "Your gaming data could be the secret to AGI, according to this Bezos-backed startup," 2026-07-08)
  • Prime Intellect, $130M at a $1B valuation (Series B). Co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser announced the round live on the show, saying the money will "build the Open Super Intelligence stack," tools that let companies train, deploy and continuously improve their own open-source AI models. The number that stunned the hosts was the efficiency: Prime Intellect had raised just $20 million before this and used that to reach a revenue run rate now north of $100 million. "I think we've actually got to this run rate on less than $20 million in spend," Weisser said, adding they doubled revenue to $100 million around the time the round closed. The company is running roughly 15,000 GPUs and expanding toward 30,000. (TBPN, "GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, Coatue Bets Big on Blue Origin, Cheaper Vision Pro Delayed," 2026-07-08)
  • Assort Health, $120M at a $1.2B valuation (Series C). AI voice agents that answer the phone for doctors' offices and handle the whole patient journey: booking, referrals, intake forms, payments. This is the week's headline founder story; full arc below. (The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast, "Building A Healthcare Unicorn In Three Years | Assort Health Founders Jeff Liu and Jon Wang," 2026-07-06)
  • Ollama, $65M (Series B), $88M raised in total. Led by Theory Ventures, following a $15 million Series A led by Benchmark's Peter Fenton. Ollama is a free, open-source tool that lets developers download and run open AI models directly on their own computers "in minutes." The traction is remarkable for its size: over 8.9 million developers use it every month, it sits inside 85% of the Fortune 500, and the whole thing runs on just 14 employees. Co-founders Jeff Morgan and Michael Chiang previously helped build Docker Desktop; Morgan describes Ollama as doing "for AI what Docker did for cloud." (TechCrunch Startup News, "AI chip maker SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation... plus... Ollama raises $65M," 2026-07-10)

Founder Story of the Week

Assort Health: from a $5,000 pilot to a $1.2 billion valuation in three years

If you want a picture of how fast a company can be built right now, listen to co-CEOs Jeff Liu and Jon Wang on The Heart of Healthcare. Their company, Assort Health, just closed a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, its third round in 18 months, for a product that does something deeply unglamorous: it answers the phone at the doctor's office.

Why the phone. Their whole thesis starts with the first call a patient makes. As Wang put it: "The first call a patient makes is the most important part of their journey. We cannot mess that up. If we do, that patient might never engage in care again." Owning that "front door," they argue, earns the right to handle everything downstream: referrals, fax and document processing, intake forms, check-in kiosks, payment collection and follow-ups.

How they met. The origin is a good reminder that rejections can be gifts. In early 2023 the two were separately hunting for co-founders and asking VCs if they knew anyone thinking about voice and healthcare. A VC introduced them, and "before you ask, they didn't end up investing," Liu laughed, calling it internally "the most valuable cold email ever." What followed sounded less like a business plan and more like courtship: Liu in San Francisco, Wang in New York, "almost like long distance dating at first." Wang eventually flew out, they hung out as friends to test whether they could stand each other under stress, and then "whiteboarded the first agent flow." Liu's running joke: "I'm married to John. And we have this kid called Assort."

Customer before capital. Asked which came first, funding or a customer, the answer was immediate: the customer. "We got a 5K pilot," Wang said, and only then did the hard part force their hand: "we're like, well, now we have to integrate with Epic and do all these hard things. So it's a good reason to go out and raise some money."

The co-CEO experiment. Assort runs on an unusual two-CEO structure, which they credit for their speed. Wang owns everything before a contract is signed: sales, marketing, finance. Liu owns everything after: engineering, product, design, implementation. Liu describes it as "a one plus one equals 10 dynamic," and says of his partner: "I've never had someone push me harder and allow us to move faster together." They point to the fintech company Ramp adopting a similar model, and are candid that it only works because they stay "super tight and locked in" to avoid mixed signals about who decides what.

Growth that outruns tenure. The company went from about 15 employees a year ago to a planned 250 by year-end, meaning most of the staff are brand new. Their hiring filter is three traits: high agency ("heat-seeking missiles for pain," running at the hardest problems), high humility, and genuinely caring about the mission of patient access.

The moat question every investor asked. Both founders said the recurring challenge from investors was blunt: why won't the big "God models" from the frontier labs just flip a switch and do this themselves? Their answer is data and breadth. Assort has accumulated more than 190 million patient-facing interactions and over 70,000 care protocols, which it feeds into a proprietary system it calls Assort Synapse, the "brain" powering its agents. "Their product is the model," Wang said of Anthropic. "Their product is not the context or... all the nuanced things that could happen in healthcare." He noted that both investors in their last two rounds had been early backers of Anthropic, "They invested over a billion dollars each into Anthropic," and bet on Assort precisely because the models getting better helps, rather than threatens, a company that owns the industry-specific data and workflows. More than $70 million of the new capital is earmarked for R&D over the next two years to deepen that system.

Does it actually work? Across more than 350,000 patient ratings, Assort averages 4.4 out of 5, and, surprisingly, older Medicare-age patients rate it highest of all. Early on, building an agent for a single practice took roughly six months; the founders compared their approach to Palantir's, building heavy tooling so that what took months now takes weeks.

There's also a very human footnote to the grind. Wang is a UCSF med-school dropout, and he says COVID was the turning point, when sitting in class felt unbearable next to what he thought technology could fix in healthcare. And Liu admitted, sheepishly, that he used to sleep at the office in the early days (the two even lived together for two years). His advice now: don't. "Getting a good night's sleep is really important for your mental health and well-being."

Also Heard

  • The SpaceX-Cursor deal dominated the AI podcasts. Cursor, the AI coding tool made by AnySphere and founded by four MIT students in 2022, was reportedly the target of a $60 billion acquisition by SpaceX, or, alternatively, a $10 billion compute-sharing partnership. What makes it a cautionary tale rather than a pure victory lap: Cursor hit a $2.7 billion annualized revenue run rate in about three years, but in its latest fiscal year reportedly lost nearly $900 million on $700 million of actual revenue. Before SpaceX came knocking, Cursor had been in the middle of raising a $2 billion round from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, NVIDIA and Battery Ventures. The hosts framed the whole thing as a signal about the shaky economics of the AI coding market, even as it delivers real productivity gains: Anthropic's rival Claude Code, they noted, reached $1 billion in annualized revenue just six months after launch, "faster than any enterprise software product in history." (AI to ROI, "The AI Coding Wars, Inflection Point and the Cursor-SpaceX Deal," 2026-07-07)
  • Europe's startup factory adds a cohort. Station F's FAI Accelerator in Paris is launching its second cohort this September. Its first batch of 20 AI startups collectively raised $34 million in pre-seed funding, and the program is targeting €1 million in revenue per startup within six months, an explicit answer to critics who say European startups commercialize too slowly. (AI Chat: AI News & Artificial Intelligence, "Mistral's $3.5B Raise, Samsung Profit up 18x from AI Memory," 2026-07-07)

One theme tied the week together: capital is flowing overwhelmingly toward the picks-and-shovels of AI, the chips (SambaNova), the training stacks (Prime Intellect, Mistral), the developer tools (Ollama), with the clearest application-layer winner, Assort Health, standing out precisely because it owns something the models can't buy: years of messy, real-world healthcare data.