This week in SaaS: 13 rounds, 8 deals and Anthropic's IPO filing

SaasBuzz covered 13 funding rounds and eight acquisitions announced from Monday, October 26, to Friday, October 30, 2026, a week in which Anthropic filed to go public and the biggest cloud businesses grew several times faster than the software companies that reported beside them. The 11 venture rounds in our funding ledger, leaving out Cohere's open Series E and Kling AI's completed July round, raised $911 million. Microsoft's bond sale alone was $25 billion.

The week's biggest stories

Anthropic files for its IPO

Anthropic filed its S-1 publicly on October 26 to list on the Nasdaq as ANT, showing $16.3 billion of revenue for the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, and an $80.7 billion net loss, most of it a $72.4 billion non-cash charge tied to Amazon's convertible notes, as we reported. The filing also names seven compute suppliers with commitments of $637 billion on our count, which makes the offering a test of those suppliers too, as our analysis of the compute deals sets out.

Cloud infrastructure outgrew the apps

Azure grew 48% to $33.2 billion in Microsoft's first fiscal quarter, Google Cloud's revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion at Alphabet, and AWS grew 39% to $46.0 billion, its fastest since 2021. Inside Microsoft, the Microsoft 365 cloud business grew 17%, which is why we wrote that the money companies spend on AI appears to reach infrastructure first.

Alphabet's worst day as a public company

Alphabet lost about $500 billion of market value on October 29, its worst day since Google went public in 2004, after results showed it spent $1.21 on capital projects for every $1 of operating cash, by our analysis. On October 28, after the results, Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's chief executive, had opened his post on the results with the company's half-trillion-dollar revenue run rate, and went on to Google Cloud's growth:

Big Tech borrows for the build-out

Microsoft priced $25 billion of notes in 10 series, its first US investment-grade bond sale since 2017, and Amazon's quarterly report disclosed a secured facility to borrow up to about $80 billion from 2027 against the infrastructure it buys. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta spent 90% of their operating cash on capital projects in the four quarters to September, up from 61% a year earlier, our analysis of their filings found.

Software forecasts cool, and the shares fall

ServiceNow topped its own third-quarter forecast but expects cRPO growth to slow to 18.5%, and its shares were down 23% early on October 29, Reuters reported. F5 fell about 20% after forecasting slower growth for fiscal 2027, Fortinet fell 25% after hours as it cut its service revenue forecast, and Twilio fell 18% after hours on an organic growth forecast of 11% to 12%. All four reported quarters above the midpoint of their own guidance; the outlooks were what investors sold.

DoorDash agrees to buy Instacart

DoorDash agreed to acquire Instacart for $65 a share, an equity value of about $17 billion and a 26% premium to Instacart's October 22 close, at least 75% in cash. For the grocers that run their online stores on Instacart's software, the companies said DoorDash expects to keep Instacart's enterprise products; they expect to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028.

TRM and Chainalysis tie Binance's theft to North Korea

TRM Labs and Chainalysis both attribute the theft to TraderTraitor, the North Korean unit known for getting in through developers and suppliers. Binance has named no attacker. It first said the attack may have started on a DevOps engineer's laptop, then found further points of breach, and it has reserved more than $6.34 billion of its own funds to cover losses. Jonathan Levin, Chainalysis' co-founder and chief executive, gave his firm's assessment on X:

Funding

Thirteen rounds in our ledger were announced from October 26 to October 30. SaasBuzz calculated the totals from the ledger, and they count only rounds we covered. Cohere's amount is a target, not money closed, so it stays out of the totals, and Kling AI's $2.9 billion completes a round first disclosed in July, so it is listed apart.

Source: SaasBuzz funding ledger, rounds announced October 26 to 30, 2026. The median round was $45 million.

• Upwind, cloud security: $400 million Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners at a $3.8 billion valuation.

• Serval, IT and HR help-desk software: $150 million Series C led by Sequoia at $3 billion.

• Nevis, wealth management software: $70 million Series B led by EQT Ventures.

• Casap, payment dispute software: $56 million Series B, with Experian and Synchrony investing.

• Collective, back-office software for solo businesses: $40 million Series B plus a separate $60 million facility.

• Fragment, procurement automation: $56 million across seed and Series A.

• Hyphenate, finance automation: $45 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners.

• Avante, employee benefits software: $30 million Series A led by Frist Cressey Ventures.

• Easol, booking software for experience businesses: $20 million Series A extension.

• Plato, AI training environments: $16 million Series A led by Nava Ventures.

• Numeracle, caller verification: $28 million growth investment from Edison Partners.

• Cohere, enterprise AI models: initial close of a Series E targeting up to C$7 billion at C$35.7 billion, with Ottawa committing up to C$1.6 billion.

• Kling AI, Kuaishou's video-generation unit: about $2.9 billion paid in, completing July's round.

Deals and IPOs

Eight acquisitions were announced in the week, five of them with a price. Their headline values add up to $29.1 billion, though the bases differ: DoorDash's and Thrive's are equity values, SITA's is an enterprise value, Guidewire's is a base price, and Intel's was reported rather than disclosed. Anthropic's S-1, the week's IPO filing, leaves the price range and share count blank.

• Thrive Holdings to acquire ADT for $10 a share, $7.6 billion in equity or $15.3 billion including debt.

• Intel to acquire Classiq, a quantum software company, for a reported $2.3 billion.

• Guidewire to acquire hyperexponential for $1.7 billion in cash, 34 times its revenue on our calculation.

• SITA to acquire Flightscape from CAE for an enterprise value of $500 million.

• Salesforce to acquire Rune Technologies, a military logistics startup, price undisclosed.

• Deepgram to acquire Daily, maker of the open-source Pipecat framework, price undisclosed.

• Harvey acquires Aida, an AI sales startup and its fifth deal of 2026, price undisclosed.

Also this week: Cloopen completed its take-private at $2.96 per ADS, and we covered Proofpoint's agreement to buy Varonis, which was signed on October 15 and so is outside the count.

Launches

• OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.

• Mistral released the weights of Large 4, its 1-trillion-parameter model.

• GitHub made Copilot Fusion generally available to route coding prompts across AI models.

• Oracle bills Fusion AI agents' work in 1-cent AI Units, on top of seat subscriptions.

• Monte Carlo launched Bayes to find and fix failing AI agents, and Dayforce unveiled Build, a plain-language HR app builder due in 2027.

People

• Microsoft offered voluntary exits to about 60,000 employees, about 27% of its full-time staff.

• Cognizant formed an OpenAI delivery group of more than 25,000 staff.

• New Relic named Boomi CEO Steve Lucas chair of its board.

• ModMed named Joe Harpaz CEO, and Xsolis named Lee Rivas its chief executive.

Number of the week: 27

Microsoft's $25 billion bond sale was 27 times the $911 million raised by the 11 venture rounds SaasBuzz covered this week, by our calculation from the funding ledger. One company's borrowing in a single day outweighed a week of the software startup funding we tracked.

Chart of the week: who grew how fast

The ten software companies in our earnings ledger that reported this week grew revenue by a median of 9.6% from a year earlier. The three cloud businesses grew between 39% and 103%.

Source: SaasBuzz earnings ledger and our earnings coverage, results reported October 27 to 29, 2026. Growth is from a year earlier. ServiceNow's figure is subscription revenue; Coveo's quarter is the second of its fiscal 2027 and F5's the fourth of its fiscal 2026.

Next week

• November 3: Varonis reports third-quarter results after the market closes, without a call because of the pending sale.

• November 4: Datadog reports before the market opens, with a call at 8 a.m. ET, and Microsoft's new notes settle.

• November 5: hotel room blocks close for AWS re:Invent, which runs November 30 to December 4 in Las Vegas.

• Further out: Microsoft Ignite runs November 17 to 20 in San Francisco.