Daily Funding Roundup:
Apr 29, 2026
Mag 7 earnings night, capex on trial. Alphabet won the room with Google Cloud +63% and a $460B backlog; Amazon's AWS reaccelerated to +28%; Meta and Microsoft were punished on capex even as both beat. Rogo raised $160M Series D for agentic banking AI. Hightouch hit $2.75B on $150M. Parallel went $740M to $2B in five months. And Anthropic is in talks at $900B+.
Rounds
Agentic AI platform for investment banking Rogo raised $160M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins, with Sequoia, Thrive, Khosla, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, BoxGroup, Mantis VC, and Jack Altman. Rogo's core agent Felix runs multi-step deal workflows: deal screening, CIM generation, buyer outreach, data room diligence, and financial modeling. Used by 35,000+ professionals across 250+ institutions including Rothschild & Co, Jefferies, and Lazard. Founded 2022 by three Princeton classmates (Gabriel Stengel, John Willett, Tumas Rackaitis) with banking backgrounds at J.P. Morgan and Lazard. Total raised: $242M.
Composable Customer Data Platform Hightouch raised $150M Series D at a $2.75B valuation, co-led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures, with ICONIQ, Sapphire, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator, and TD7 (The Trade Desk's VC arm). The company crossed $100M ARR with 100%+ YoY growth two years running. Customers include Domino's, PetSmart, DraftKings, Ramp, and Whoop. The thesis: the marketing stack is collapsing into an AI-orchestrated layer on top of the data warehouse, and the company that owns customer-data activation owns the enterprise AI workflow.
Parag Agrawal's Parallel Web Systems raised $100M Series B at a $2B valuation just five months after its $100M Series A. Sequoia led; the entire Series A syndicate (Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Khosla, Spark, First Round, Terrain) followed on. The Palo Alto company builds web infrastructure and search/research APIs purpose-built for AI agents, with a proprietary high-quality web index used by 100,000+ developers and customers like Clay, Harvey, Notion, Opendoor, Sourcegraph, and Genpact. Going from $740M to $2B in five months is one of the fastest valuation jumps of the cycle.
AI travel and expense intelligence platform Clarasight (formerly Climate Club) raised $11.5M Series A led by AlleyCorp. The platform unifies enterprise T&E data on programs representing $5B+ in spend, with recurring revenue up 10x in the past year. Founded by Adam Braun (Pencils of Promise, MissionU) and Philip Charm. Total raised: ~$21.1M. The category bet: corporate T&E data has remained fragmented across travel, card, and expense systems, and an AI layer that unifies it can extract material spend savings without process change.
Also Noted
AI context platform for commerce brands Chord (the team that scaled Glossier) raised $7M led by Equal Ventures, with M13, Chingona Ventures, and CEAS Investments. Founders Bryan Mahoney and Henry Davis. Total raised now ~$45M. The pitch: connect commerce brand data into a context graph that AI agents can act on across catalog, marketing, and customer support.
San Francisco AI-driven revenue platform Actively raised $45M Series B co-led by TCV and First Harmonic, with Bain Capital Ventures, First Round Capital, and Alkeon. Total raised: ~$68M. The product replaces traditional human SDR teams with 24/7 AI agents that automate prospecting and pipeline work end to end.
NYC gamified collectibles platform Packz raised $10.7M from Makers Fund, The Raine Group, Courtside Ventures, Sharp Alpha Advisors, and RiverPark Ventures. Users open digital packs and receive matching physical trading cards. Founded 2025, sitting at the intersection of consumer gaming, sports cards, and engagement-driven retail.
NYC holistic retirement planning fintech Retirable raised $3.8M, bringing total to ~$28.8M. Pairs dedicated human advisors with software for the segment of pre- and early-retirees who want more guidance than a robo-advisor and less cost than a private wealth manager.
Acquisitions
Cognizant Technology Solutions agreed to acquire AI infrastructure and managed services firm Astreya for ~$600M in cash. Astreya runs data center, AI lab, network, and workplace tech for six of the seven largest hyperscalers, with 2,400+ employees across 35+ countries. The deal folds Astreya's proprietary AI OpsHub platform and Tech Innovation Office into Cognizant's global delivery infrastructure. Cognizant frames it as accelerating the company's transition into an 'AI builder.' Closes Q2 2026 subject to regulatory approval.
News & Signals
Alphabet wins the night: Cloud +63%, backlog $460B+, 'compute constrained'
Alphabet posted Q1 revenue of $109.9B (+22%, 11th straight DD-growth quarter) and EPS of $5.11 (+81% YoY). Google Cloud was the standout: revenue up 63% to $20.0B, backlog nearly doubled QoQ to over $460B, cloud op income tripled to $6.6B, cloud margins expanded to 32.9% from 9.4% YoY. Sundar Pichai told the call 'we are compute constrained in the near term.' Capex guide came in at 'as much as $190B' for the year, with CFO Anat Ashkenazi telling investors 2027 capex will 'significantly increase.' Gemini App paid subs hit 350M. Stock up as much as 6% after-hours, the cleanest print of the four reporters.
Amazon prints AWS reacceleration: +28%, $20B Trainium run rate
Amazon reported revenue of $181.5B (vs $177.3B est) and EPS of $2.78 (vs $1.64 est). AWS grew 28% to $37.6B, the fastest growth in three-plus years, with operating income of $14.2B. Cash capex hit $43.2B in Q1 alone. AWS backlog reached $364B (excluding the recent $100B+ Anthropic compute deal). Trainium and Inferentia chip revenue is now at a $20B+ annual run rate, growing triple-digit YoY. Stock up after-hours. Combined with Alphabet, the night's framing: cloud is reaccelerating, hyperscaler chip strategies are working, and AI capex is converting to revenue.
Meta and Microsoft punished on capex even as both beat
Meta posted revenue of $56.3B (+33%) and EPS of $10.44 (+62%) but lifted full-year capex range to $125B-$145B from $115B-$135B. Reality Labs lost $4.0B on $402M revenue. Stock down 7-9% after-hours on the capex ceiling and a user-growth miss. Microsoft reported revenue of $82.9B (+18%) and EPS of $4.27, with Microsoft Cloud at $54.5B (+29%) and Azure +40%. AI annualized revenue hit $37B, commercial RPO doubled to $627B. But CY2026 capex was lifted to ~$190B (+$25B from rising component prices), and Q3 capex plus finance leases came in at $31.9B (+49%). Stock down ~3.9% after-hours on capex sticker shock.
Anthropic in talks at $900B+ valuation, more than double Feb mark
Bloomberg and CNBC reported Anthropic is weighing offers at over $900B, more than double its February $380B-$420B mark. The round could be $40B-$50B in size with a board decision targeted for a May meeting. The contrast with Wednesday's public-market reaction was stark: while public investors were re-pricing Mag 7 capex commitments, Anthropic's potential round implies private capital is still happy to pay the next leg up on AI conviction.
Fed holds at 3.50-3.75% with rare 8-4 dissent, oil rips on Trump blockade
FOMC held rates at 3.50-3.75% with four dissents (last 4-dissent print was October 1992). Three dissenters wanted the easing bias removed. Inflation flagged as elevated partly due to global energy. Brent jumped roughly 6% to $118 and WTI roughly 7% to $107 after Trump told Axios he will keep the US naval blockade against Iran in place until Tehran agrees to a nuclear deal: 'The blockade is somewhat more effective than the bombing.' Powell said separately he intends to remain on the Board of Governors indefinitely, beyond his chairmanship, until the Fed-renovations investigation concludes.
VC Mood on X
A two-screens day. One screen showed the Fed dissent and Brent ripping through $118; the other showed VCs frantically refreshing for Mag 7 prints. After the close, sentiment bifurcated immediately. Alphabet was the night's hero. Cloud +63%, $460B backlog, op income tripling, Pichai saying the words "we are compute constrained" out loud. The AI-capex bear case looked silly for one company on one night, and VC X tilted celebratory: "this is what AI revenue actually looks like."
Then Meta and Microsoft, which technically both beat, ran into the buzzsaw on capex. Meta's $145B ceiling and Microsoft's $190B CY26 guide reignited Tuesday's WSJ-OpenAI-revenue-miss debate that had already tanked Oracle and CoreWeave. Cynics on X called it "the year capex finally outran revenue." Bulls used the Alphabet print as proof the spend converts. The consensus take by midnight: AI capex is not slowing, but the market is now grading it on a curve. Show us the revenue, or get sold like Meta.
Underneath all that, the Anthropic-at-$900B headline gave the day its "private market is on a different planet" vibe. Public markets sweating $145B capex; private markets contemplating doubling Anthropic's valuation in 10 weeks. And the daytime tape kept printing in the same direction: Rogo $160M, Hightouch at $2.75B, Parallel at $2B in five months. Apr 29 was the day private capital got another reason to believe and public capital got another reason to scrutinize, and the wedge between the two screens widened by a full notch.
Rounds and signals sourced from SEC filings, press releases, and verified news reports. All amounts in USD unless noted. Reporting reflects information available at time of publication.