xAI's massive new $20B raise

PLUS: Turn any UI into a landing page with Gemini 3 Pro

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI and Anthropic may be racing towards IPOs, but xAI is quickly climbing the ranks while staying private.

With a new $20B raise valuing Elon Musk's AI startup at $230B and deeper integrations with X, Tesla, and Optimus on tap, Grok is positioned for a major 2026 leap — if it can stop undressing people.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • xAI hits $230B valuation with Nvidia backing

  • Razer’s holographic AI gaming companion

  • Turn any UI into a landing page with Gemini 3 Pro

  • Stanford AI predicts 130 diseases from a night’s sleep

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

Image source: xAI

The Rundown: xAI just announced the completion of a new $20B Series E funding round, valuing the company at over $200B, with Elon Musk’s AI startup receiving backing from Nvidia, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and others.

The details:

  • The reported $230B valuation puts xAI third among frontier AI labs, trailing Anthropic ($350B) and OpenAI ($500B) but far ahead of most competitors.

  • The company is quickly scaling compute infrastructure in Memphis, with a third data center planned that would push total power capacity close to 2 gigawatts.

  • xAI also revealed that Grok 5 is currently in training, with plans to ship new products tying together the chatbot, X, and its Colossus supercomputer.

Why it matters: The AI funding wars show no signs of cooling, with xAI now joining OAI and Anthropic in the rarefied $200B+ valuation club. Musk's unique advantage of owning both the AI and the distribution platform (X), alongside expanded Tesla and Optimus integrations, positions Grok for a potential major leap up the AI ladder.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

The Rundown: Vanta’s Agentic Trust Platform helps fast-moving startups and security teams get audit-ready fast and stay continuously compliant, turning compliance into a deal accelerator, not a blocker.

Join the live demo to learn how to:

  • Accelerate compliance with agentic workflows across SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more

  • Build real security foundations, not check-the-box fixes

  • Show credibility faster with a public Trust Center and AI-powered questionnaires

  • Keep engineers focused with guided workflows and dev-native automation

Register here for the live demo and ask your questions in real time.

RAZER

Image source: Razer

The Rundown: Gaming tech company Razer debuted Project AVA at CES 2026, a Grok-driven hologram device that puts an animated AI assistant inside a glowing physical cylinder, teasing use cases like game coaching, brainstorming, and more.

The details:

  • AVA displays a 5.5-inch animated avatar inside a clear capsule, with options ranging from Grok personalities and anime characters to esports likenesses.

  • A built-in camera and dual microphones let the AI watch users’ screens and listen for voice commands, offering real-time gameplay tips or work assistance.

  • Razer is using xAI's Grok as the default brain for AVA, though the company says it's building for compatibility with other AI providers down the line.

  • Reservations are open now for $20 for U.S. customers, with shipments expected in late 2026 and final pricing still unannounced.

Why it matters: Move over OpenAI, there’s a new AI desk device rolling into town. AVA is a pretty cool take on bringing AI companions into a ‘physical’ form, though there is some irony in positioning it for gamers first when that user segment has been notoriously against nearly everything AI.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Gemini 3 Pro to study any UI design from video and turn it into a fully working landing page, complete with animations, interactions, and polished layouts that don't look AI-generated.

Step-by-step:

  1. Find UI inspiration on Dribbble, Behance, or any live SaaS site, then download a screen recording of the scrolling page (not just a static screenshot)

  2. Upload it to Gemini 3 Pro and prompt: "Study this video and write a prompt describing the UI—layout, colors, etc, then turn it into instructions for a dev"

  3. Ask Gemini to convert the analysis into markdown format for a clean handover document, then copy the full prompt into a new Gemini chat

  4. Adapt the prompt to your product and add: "Create a high-fidelity interactive landing page based on this design spec and show me a live preview"

Pro tip: Iterate on colors, sections, or animations before exporting to Cursor, Bolt, or Replit for deployment

PRESENTED BY UNFRAME

The Rundown: AI is a must-have for enterprises – but deciding when to buy versus when to build in-house can be tough. Unframe’s guide shares strategic insights for leaders to balance innovation, control, and speed.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • A practical framework for when to build vs. buy

  • Lessons from enterprise AI failures, and what to do differently

  • How to combine the speed of buying with the precision of building

Download the guide to make smarter AI investment decisions.

AI RESEARCH

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Stanford researchers just published SleepFM, a new AI foundation model that can predict over 130 health conditions like dementia, heart attacks, and Parkinson's from a single overnight sleep recording.

The details:

  • The model was trained on 600K hours of sleep data from 65K participants, analyzing brain waves, heart activity, breathing, and muscle signals.

  • When body signals fell out of sync, like a brain in deep sleep with a racing heart, the model flagged it as a warning sign for future disease.

  • The team linked 25 years of Stanford Sleep Clinic health records to sleep data, testing predictions across 1,000+ disease categories.

  • SleepFM predicted Parkinson's with 89% accuracy, dementia at 85%, heart attacks at 81%, and general overall risk of death at 84%.

Why it matters: We spend so much of our lives asleep, but there is still so much to learn about what data from that time might reveal. SleepFM shows overnight recordings could be an early warning system — and as wearables get more advanced, predictive health monitoring could move from sleep labs right onto your wrist.

QUICK HITS

  • 🔒 Incogni - Remove your personal data from the web so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off*

  • 📱 LFM 2.5 - Liquid AI’s new AI models for on-device speed and efficiency

  • 🎥 LTX-2 - Lightricks' new open-source foundation video model

  • 📦 Alexa.com - Amazon's AI assistant experience now on the web

*Sponsored Listing

Nvidia unveiled the Rubin platform at CES 2026, combining six new chips into a unified AI supercomputer that delivers 5x the training compute of its Blackwell line.

Liquid AI released LFM 2.5, a new SOTA open-weight model family for on-device AI across text, vision, and audio that tops benchmarks compared to similar-sized rivals.

Lightricks open-sourced LTX-2, an AI video model capable of generating native 4K footage and synced audio with granular camera and motion control.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said during a presentation at CES 2026 that global AI users will surpass 5B in the next five years, requiring compute to increase 100x to meet demand.

AI benchmarking platform LM Arena raised $150M in Series A funding at a $1.7B valuation, tripling its seed round value.

Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei appeared on an interview with CNBC, saying “the exponential continues until it doesn’t… and every year it has” in regards to AI scaling.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Tom G. in Nashville, TN:

"While running errands with my wife, our 2014 Honda Odyssey's ‘Check Engine’ light came on. I asked ChatGPT for help, providing my car's make, model, and engine size. ChatGPT told me to go to AutoZone and ask for a free code-cypher and to tell her what code(s) the car was sending out.

I provided the codes I got from AutoZone to ChatGPT, who proceeded to diagnose the problem, told me how to fix it, and helped me order the replacement items needed."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

Before you go we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Reply

or to participate.