2026-09-25 — A Dune studio's AI arm, and a video company nobody had looked at

Two companies joined the map today and both make pictures. Brahma AI is the artificial-intelligence arm of DNEG, the visual-effects house behind Dune, and it raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation — a figure its listed Indian parent filed with the Bombay and National stock exchanges, which makes it one of the better-sourced additions this map has had. The second came from sweeping the category rather than reading the news: PixVerse, a Singapore video-generation company with fifteen million people using it every month, raised $439 million back in July with Alibaba in the round, and nothing pointed at this map would ever have found it. Elsewhere the day belonged to policy rather than prices — Xi Jinping talking about shared responsibility for AI at a White House summit, the three largest American labs planning a safety standards body with no government in it, and Oracle quietly telling a lender it may not finish a two-gigawatt data centre on time.

Today in AI

• Xi Jinping told a White House summit that the United States and China share both the capability and the responsibility to steer AI toward good ends, and called for competition rather than confrontation — Financial Times, link
• Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are planning to stand up a joint AI safety standards body with no government oversight, aiming for late 2026 or 2027 and weighing whether chief executives should sit on it — The Information, link
• Oracle sent Blue Owl a force majeure notice that would let it delay payments on Project Jupiter, a 2.45-gigawatt New Mexico data centre, if the site misses its 2028 launch — a rare crack in the AI buildout's financing — Bloomberg, link
• Google will put four of its own AI chips into orbit on a SpaceX rocket on October 1, an experimental satellite meant to run for a year and test whether data centres can eventually live in space — New York Times, link
• A White House memo describes effective altruism as a fringe and dangerous movement that "built the AI-doom pipeline", naming Anthropic's Dario Amodei at its foundation — Axios, link
• ASML sold nothing at all to European customers in the first half of 2026, down from 5% of revenue two years ago, and is pressing Brussels to create demand for chips made in Europe — Tom's Hardware, link
• Britain's competition regulator set out rules that would make Google and Android manufacturers show search choice screens at setup and once a year after, with separate obligations for AI assistants — Engadget, link

Marks moved

No mark already on the map moved on a new round today.

New edges

• brahma —builds_on→ alphabet — Brahma runs its Atman interactive digital humans on Google Cloud under a multi-year partnership, using Google's Veo model as its primary generative video engine and Gemini for multimodal reasoning. Google Cloud press corner and PRNewswire, 2026-03-09, verified.
• alibaba —invests_in→ pixverse — Alibaba came into the Series C extension as a new investor and separately has a deal to deploy PixVerse's video generation. TechCrunch, DealStreetAsia and e27, 2026-07-13/14, reported.

Still in talks

• Baseten at about $26B and Modal at about $15B — Bloomberg's own story is explicit that neither has closed and that neither company's target raise is known. The map carries $13B and $4.65B.
• Legora seeking at least $300M at roughly an $8.5B pre-money, three days on, no lead named. Chasing it turned up something the map cannot use yet: Legora's newsroom records a Series D extension welcoming Atlassian alongside NVIDIA's NVentures. The NVentures leg is already an edge; Atlassian has no node.
• Stripe / OpenRouter — day 37. Still "customary closing conditions", still "the coming weeks", still no close notice from either side. The Crusoe precedent was 14 days from pre-close report to company release.
• UniPat AI (day 15), Manus ($500M at $4B, day 8), Shield AI (Series H at $20B+, day 10), 1X / SoftBank (majority at ~$6B, four weeks) and Emulate (~$700M seed at $3.7B, day 8) are all unchanged, each still resting on its single originating report.
• OpenAI — the picture sharpened without moving: investors approached at $1.2T and OpenAI is reported to be holding out for around $1.5T. Two unconfirmed figures are not a price; the $852B March round stands.
• Mercor at $20B and DeepSeek both unchanged. DeepSeek still has four post-money figures in circulation across four outlets, no filing, and no listing-tutoring paperwork with the Zhejiang regulator.
• Nscale — seven days after the S-1 and the share count and price range are still placeholders. The widely-reported ~$35B is a target, not a figure in the filing.
• NVIDIA / Hugging Face — still undecided on whether the $12.9B deal must be notified in Europe, and still weighing asking Brussels to take the case rather than face parallel national reviews.

Leads I could not verify

• Brahma's Google Cloud partnership rests on search relays of Google Cloud's own March release; WebFetch is egress-blocked here, so nobody read the page itself. The valuation does not have this problem — the exchange filing carries it.
• PixVerse's $2B is a floor, not a post-money. No outlet and no release states an exact figure, which is a weaker basis than a number nobody has sourced; upgrade it the moment one appears.
• Arcee AI ($150M Series B led by Vista Equity, with Microsoft's M12 participating) is the inverse of the usual block — the M12 leg would make an edge on the spot, but SiliconANGLE's own headline calls the round's valuation undisclosed and puts the company only at "$1B-plus", while aggregator flashes for the same round carry $1B, $10B and $10B pre-money. A round size is not a valuation. Held off.
• Ema ($77M Series B led by Creaegis, quadrupling its mark on the company's own telling) discloses no figure, so there is nothing to mark against.
• A weekly funding roundup asserted Arcee raised "at a $5.4B valuation" with nothing in its own result list behind it — the second search summary in eight days to invent a number. Read the titles, not the prose.

Further reading: TLDR AI · The Rundown · Techmeme

build/validate.py: 183 entities, 322 relations — 0 errors, 0 warnings. Commit: two companies added (Brahma AI at $2B verified off an exchange filing, PixVerse at $2B reported off a category sweep), two edges, watchlist re-checked across fourteen open items.