AI Startups Rack Up Billions in New Funding: Thrive Holdings, Lovable, and Cognition All Raise This Week

Three separate AI companies posted eye-popping valuation numbers this week, and the pattern is hard to ignore. Money is pouring into anything that promises to bolt AI onto existing business models, whether that's accounting firms, coding platforms, or software agents.

Thrive Holdings, a spinout of Thrive Capital, raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation from SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital, according to TechCrunch, which credited the New York Times with first reporting the deal. Thrive isn't a typical AI company. It buys traditional businesses, mostly accounting and IT firms, and rewires their workflows with AI. OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings back in December 2025 and has been sending its own employees to work directly inside Thrive's portfolio companies.

That arrangement has apparently worked well enough to become its own business line. Thrive's tax-prep AI, called TaxAI, has processed more than 7,000 returns at 98% accuracy and cut prep times by over 30% at participating firms, the company told TechCrunch. Its IT services arm, Shield, says it has sped up help desk resolution times by 36 times. Thrive now plans to launch a third platform aimed at the regulatory grind behind physical infrastructure: permits, inspections, compliance paperwork, the stuff that slows down data centers, power plants, and manufacturing projects. Anuj Mehndiratta, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, told TechCrunch that AI won't replace field work or professional sign-off, but it can chew through the paperwork.

Lovable Doubles in Seven Months

Stockholm-based Lovable announced on August 12 that it raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, according to unite.ai and confirmed by Business Insider. That's more than double the $6.6 billion valuation the company posted in December 2025, just seven months earlier.

Menlo Ventures led the round alongside the Scaleup Europe Fund, a vehicle managed by EQT specifically built to keep fast-growing European tech companies from getting bought out or relocating to Silicon Valley. Victor Englesson, the fund's co-head, called Lovable's founders "some of the most ambitious and fastest-growing" he's seen, according to the company's own announcement.

The revenue numbers back up some of the hype. Business Insider reported Lovable hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue in March, up from $200 million at the end of 2025, and CEO Anton Osika said ARR has nearly tripled since December. Unite.ai reported the company now claims 60 million projects built on its platform and 900 million monthly visits, with customers including Adidas, NVIDIA, and Deutsche Telekom.

Lovable's new valuation puts it just under French AI model-maker Mistral's roughly $14 billion mark and ahead of rival Replit, which was valued at $9 billion in March, according to Business Insider.

Cognition Wants $40 Billion, Less Than Three Months After Its Last Raise

Cognition AI, the company behind the autonomous coding agent Devin, is reportedly in early talks for a new round that would value it at $40 billion or more, according to Bloomberg sources cited by Silicon Republic. That would be a 50% jump from the $26 billion valuation Cognition secured less than three months ago, when it closed a $1 billion round.

Cognition's annualized revenue run rate is reportedly nearing $1 billion, roughly double where it stood at the last raise, per Silicon Republic's sourcing. The company counts Mercedes-Benz, NASA, and Goldman Sachs as customers, and says enterprise usage of Devin has grown 50% month-over-month for six straight months.

Cognition may not actually raise at these terms. Sources told Bloomberg the company could walk away from the deal entirely or negotiate different terms. Nothing is finalized.

The Skeptical Read

These valuations are moving faster than most companies' actual product maturity. Lovable doubled its valuation in seven months. Cognition wants to jump 50% in under three months. None of these are publicly traded companies subject to standard disclosure requirements, and the investor rosters overlap heavily, the same venture funds chasing the same category of deal, often within weeks of each other.

Coinalertnews framed the trend as a signal for "capital rotation toward AI infrastructure" that could indirectly benefit AI-linked crypto tokens, but that's speculation dressed up as analysis. There's no hard evidence in any of the reporting connecting these valuations to crypto markets. Investors should treat that link as unproven.

Whether the revenue run rates being cited—$1 billion for Cognition, $400 million for Lovable—are sustainable subscription revenue or front-loaded enterprise pilot deals that could churn is a key question. Annualized run rate is a snapshot, not a guarantee. Business Insider noted that Anthropic was recently valued at $1.2 trillion on secondary markets and OpenAI at roughly $933 billion, according to Caplight data, figures that reflect private-share trades rather than priced funding rounds. That distinction matters. A lot of this AI valuation surge is happening in illiquid private markets where price discovery is thin and every new deal resets the comp for the next one.

None of these companies have filed for IPOs. No public disclosure requirements apply. The next real test comes if and when Cognition's round actually closes, and at what terms, versus the $40 billion number now floating around Wall Street.