3 in Finance

1/20: Oosto (Israel), a real-time facial recognition platform, was acquired by Metropolis, an AI-based parking lot operator, for $125M. This represents less than a third of the $379M that Oosto raised from investors. (Link)

1/15: Synthesia (United Kingdom), an AI-powered communications platform that is able to generate videos featuring multilingual human avatars, raised $180M of equity. New Enterprise Associates led the deal, which places the company’s pre-money valuation at $1.9B. (Link)

1/13: Alterya (Israel), an AI-powered fraud detection solution that utilizes agents to identify scams, was acquired by Chainalysis for $150M. (Link)

3 for Fun

Trump announces ‘Stargate’, a $500B investment in AI infrastructure over four years. (Link)

DeepSeek’s R1 model, only costing $6M, causes tech stocks to plummet. (Link)

OpenAI releases ‘Operator’ agent, which can automate tasks such as planning vacations, filling out forms, making restaurant reservations, and buying groceries. (Link)

Big movers — month over month stock performance:

IBM gains 17%; Meta gains 17%; Qualcomm gains 12%

SoundHound AI falls 29%; ON Semiconductor falls 16%; BigBear.ai falls 7%