Jevons Weekly
Issue #002 · Oct 27, 2026
Week of Oct 19 to 26, 2026 · 6-min read · Startups, AI and frontier tech through an investor's lens
The Jevons take
Tokens got 25% cheaper in four weeks, and companies bought 52% more of them. Spend rose only 23%. That is the Jevons paradox in one line. The open question is who pays: 80.4% of the heaviest AI buyers are VC-backed. Starting this week, we track that number.
Startups and their business
Image: Jevons Weekly. Data: Tenstorrent, TechCrunch, SpaceNews, PR Newswire
Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation
Image: Tenstorrent
Jim Keller's chip company closed a $1.5B Series E at $6.2B post-money, more than double its $2.6B mark of December 2024. Trace Capital and Innovation X led, with ARK, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk and Tether. It sells RISC-V chips and Galaxy servers that run open-weight models.
What this means for investors
Cheaper open models need cheaper hardware. Tenstorrent is the bet that inference buyers will pay for an alternative to Nvidia's margin.
Source: Tenstorrent · Reuters via Investing.com
Flapping Airplanes raises $1B, nine months after its seed
The year-old lab raised a $1B Series A co-led by Index and Lux, with Sequoia, GV, Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia. TechCrunch reports a $6B valuation. Nine months earlier it raised a $180M seed at $1.5B. The goal: models that learn from far less data.
What this means for investors
The price quadrupled in nine months on a research thesis. Data efficiency attacks the biggest cost line in AI, and investors are paying lab prices for it.
Source: TechCrunch · Index Ventures
Tractian becomes a unicorn: $130M at $1.4B
Founded in Brazil in 2019 and now based in Atlanta, Tractian raised a $130M Series D at $1.4B. Sapphire led and M&G's Catalyst co-led, with Monashees, General Catalyst, Bosch Ventures and Y Combinator. Its sensors and AI monitor machines in about 2,000 industrial sites. Next stops: data centers, defense and Europe.
What this means for investors
Brazil exported the founders and the US priced the company. The move into data centers puts Tractian inside the AI capex cycle.
Source: PR Newswire · Tractian · BNamericas
AI
Anthropic files its S-1: $16.3B of revenue in six months
Anthropic made its IPO filing public on Oct 26. Revenue reached $16.3B in the first half of 2026, up 1,300% year on year. Compute fell from 251% of revenue in Q1 2025 to 48% in Q2 2026. Net revenue retention is about 900% after one year, excluding Pro and Max. The $80.7B net loss includes $72.4B of non-cash fair-value marks on convertibles, derivatives and SAFEs. The operating loss was $693M in H1 2026. In Q2 alone, GAAP operating profit was $974M, an 8% margin (19% adjusted).
What this means for investors
Unit economics flipped in a year. The risk now sits with the clouds: about $269B in minimum commitments to Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and 48% of revenue in H1 2026 came through cloud marketplaces.
Source: SEC, Anthropic S-1
OpenAI seeks up to $30B at a $1.25T valuation
CNBC reports OpenAI is raising up to $30B at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, led by UAE investors and Coatue. TechCrunch describes it as a round ahead of an IPO.
What this means for investors
Private marks this high leave less upside for whoever buys at the listing. The price of entry is now set by sovereign money.
Source: CNBC · TechCrunch
Token prices fell 25% in four weeks. Volume rose 52%
Image: Jevons Weekly. Data: Ramp AI Index
Ramp's spending data, week ending Oct 11 versus Sep 13: token volume up 52.4%, spend up 23.0%. The blended OpenAI and Anthropic price fell from $0.86 to $0.64 per million tokens. Anthropic's share of token spend rose from 53.8% to 60.1%. Chinese labs keep cutting: MiniMax M3.1 Flash lists at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens.
What this means for investors
Price down, use up faster. The value moves to whoever controls the volume, and this month that was Anthropic.
How much of AI revenue is organic?
Baseline: 80.4% of the top AI spenders are VC-backed
Image: Jevons Weekly. Data: Apollo
Our new recurring metric, first reading. Apollo's Torsten Slok, Oct 22, 2026: 80.4% of the top 1% of AI spenders are VC-backed, against 13.1% of median spenders. Ramp adds that the top 1% of firms drive about 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic spend. Outside tech, Apollo still sees no AI payoff in the margins of the S&P 493.
How we read it: the data counts firms, not dollars, so we do not convert it into a revenue share. Baseline dated Oct 22, 2026. There is no prior reading to compare yet.
What this means for investors
A large part of the heaviest AI demand runs on venture money. If funding slows, that demand slows with it. We will update this reading every week.
Source: Apollo, Oct 22 · Ramp · Apollo, Oct 24
From the lecture hall
What Blade Runner got right about AI
On Oct 23, João spoke at LAUDCINE, at Mackenzie in São Paulo, about Blade Runner (1982). Ridley Scott imagined a mind with a body. He got the mind right and the body wrong.
The film imagined machines that move. The ones that arrived perceive, through language, with no body and no face. In a 2025 three-party Turing test, GPT-4.5 with a persona was judged human 73% of the time. Without the persona: 36%.
What this means for investors
Capital went first to perception: language, compute, tokens. This week it went back to bodies, with Eka's robot hands and Tractian's sensors. The next cycle funds machines that perceive and then move.
Source: Jones and Bergen, 2025
Frontier tech
Xona raises $250M for a GPS alternative in low orbit
Image: Xona Space Systems, via SpaceNews
Xona Space Systems raised a $250M Series D at $2.45B, led by Future Ventures. The round comes as the company begins deploying its satellites.
What this means for investors
Jamming and spoofing turned navigation into a security purchase. The valuation prices a constellation still being deployed, so execution risk stays high.
Source: SpaceNews
Washington takes stakes in fusion: $389M in CHIPS awards
Commerce signed letters of intent for $389M in CHIPS R&D awards, taking non-voting equity. Helion gets up to $175M, plus $50M from private investors. Commonwealth Fusion Systems gets up to $85M, Vertical Semiconductor $73M and Sibelco $56M.
What this means for investors
The state now co-invests as a shareholder in power and materials. That lowers financing risk for fusion and gives the government a share of the upside.
Source: Reuters via Investing.com · Helion
Eka Robotics: $150M Series A at $1.45B for robot hands
a16z and F-Prime led a $150M Series A at $1.45B post-money. Founders Pulkit Agrawal (MIT) and Tuomas Haarnoja (ex-DeepMind) build a vision-force-action model for dexterous robot hands.
What this means for investors
A unicorn at Series A shows the price of physical AI talent. The model reads force as well as sight, the data that robots still lack.
Source: TechCrunch · Eka Robotics
Event note
On November 17 in São Paulo I'll talk about how to invest in the decade AI arrived: "A próxima década começa agora" (in Portuguese). Reply IA to this email and I'll send you the invite.
João's take
I spent 20 years in markets watching flows before prices. This week the flows came with an SEC filing. Anthropic's S-1 shows customers spending about 9x more after one year, while compute fell from 251% of revenue in Q1 2025 to 48% in Q2 2026. Cheaper to serve, and far more used. That is Jevons in black and white.
The catch is still the payer. Ramp counted token volume up 52% in four weeks with spend up 23%, and Apollo shows 80.4% of the heaviest AI buyers are VC-backed. The S-1 does not say how much of that 9x is venture money buying tokens from a lab funded by venture money.
The company says the gap between what Claude can do and how much it is used is one of its biggest growth opportunities. I agree, with one filter. When the payer has its own revenue, demand is organic. Everything else, I price as funding.
João Piccioni, editor
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