ServiceNow, Moveworks, Anysphere, Reflection AI, Turing, SpecterOps
The pace of AI-driven funding and M&A continues to ramp up. While activity was slow to pick up in the new year, momentum is definitely growing. Let’s jump in.
ServiceNow to Acquire Moveworks for $2.85 Billion
ServiceNow has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Moveworks for $2.85 billion in a combination of cash and stock, marking the software maker’s largest acquisition to date. The deal comes as enterprises increasingly invest in artificial intelligence to enhance their IT operations and workflow automation.
The acquisition will combine ServiceNow‘s workflow automation platform with Moveworks‘ front-end AI assistant and enterprise search technology. This strategic move aims to extend ServiceNow’s agentic AI capabilities across key growth areas, including customer relationship management (CRM).
“With the acquisition of Moveworks, ServiceNow will take another giant leap forward in agentic AI-powered business transformation,” said Amit Zavery, president, chief operating officer, and chief product officer at ServiceNow.
Moveworks, founded in 2016, has built a team of more than 500 AI experts focused on agentic AI architecture. Its platform has grown to nearly 5 million employee users in about 18 months, with approximately 90% of its customers deploying the technology to all employees. The company’s AI assistant is used by major corporations including Hearst, Instacart, Palo Alto Networks, Siemens, Toyota, and Unilever.
The acquisition appears strategically aligned, as the majority of Moveworks’ current customer deployments already use ServiceNow as a system of action, with approximately 250 mutual customers. Integration plans will initially focus on delivering a unified search and self-service experience for employees across all workflows.
Founded in 2016, Mountain View, California-based Moveworks previously raised $305 million in venture funding. Its last financing round was a $200 million Series C in 2021 led by Tiger Global and Alkeon Capital, which valued the company at $2.1 billion. Early investors included Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, with later rounds seeing participation from ICONIQ Growth, Kleiner Perkins, and Sapphire Ventures.
ServiceNow has been aggressively investing in AI capabilities, with its AI solution already becoming the fastest-growing product introduction in the company’s history. As of December 31, 2024, ServiceNow reported nearly 1,000 AI customers and surpassed $200 million in annual contract value for its Pro Plus AI solution.
Anysphere Seeks New Funding at Nearly $10 Billion Valuation
Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor, is in discussions to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation approaching $10 billion, according to Bloomberg News and other sources.
Thrive Capital is expected to lead the funding round.
The AI coding assistant has experienced extraordinary growth since its founding in 2022. Anysphere raised a $60 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with Thrive Capital‘s participation in late 2023, valuing the company at $400 million. Just four months later, in January 2025, the startup secured a $100 million Series B funding round led by Thrive with Andreessen Horowitz also participating, which valued the company at $2.6 billion. This represented a staggering 6.5 times leap in valuation in only a few months.
Anysphere’s revenue growth has been equally impressive, with figures skyrocketing from $4 million ARR in April 2024 to $4 million in monthly revenue by October 2024, translating to $48 million ARR at that time. Recent reports suggest the company’s ARR may have already climbed to $150 million. The startup’s freemium model offers tiered pricing with pro subscriptions at $20 per month and business subscriptions at $40 per month, attracting notable customers including OpenAI, Midjourney, Perplexity, Replicate, Shopify, and Instacart.
The potential investment highlights the accelerating pace at which promising AI startups are raising substantial funding rounds. Anysphere’s other backers include venture firm Neo, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. The company was co-founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger while they were students at MIT and went through OpenAI’s accelerator program, raising its seed funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund.
This deal would join a trend of investors placing increasingly high valuations on AI coding tools. Codeium, a company behind AI coding editor Windsurf, is reportedly raising capital at a valuation of nearly $3 billion, while investors have also been approaching poolside, another AI-powered coding company that is developing its own large language model.
Former DeepMind Researchers Raise $130 Million for AI Coding Startup Reflection AI
Bloomberg News reports two ex-researchers from Google DeepMind have secured $130 million in funding for their new venture, ReflectionAI, which aims to develop superintelligent AI-powered coding agents capable of autonomous operation.
The startup, founded by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Alexandros Antonoglou, is emerging from stealth mode with a $25 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital and CRV plus a $105 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and CRV. Additional investors include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, SV Angel, and Nvidia’s venture capital arm. The financing values Reflection AI at $555 million.
Both founders bring impressive credentials to the venture. Antonoglou was a founding engineer at DeepMind who helped create AlphaGo, the groundbreaking AI system that defeated human champions at the board game Go. Laskin served as a research scientist at Alphabet’s AI unit, where both founders helped lead reinforcement learning efforts for Google’s Gemini model.
Unlike many AI coding assistants that function as co-pilots, Reflection AI is developing fully autonomous agents. The company is initially targeting tedious engineering tasks such as migrating software databases and refactoring code. Laskin compared typical AI assistants to cruise control, while Reflection’s approach is more akin to Waymo’s fully autonomous driving technology.
The startup has already secured paying customers in sectors with large coding teams, particularly in financial services and technology.
Reflection AI joins a competitive field of well-funded AI coding startups (see above!) The company is currently expanding its team across offices in New York, San Francisco, and London.
Turing Secures $111 Million to Power Next Wave of AGI Infrastructure
Turing, a key partner in advancing large language models (LLMs) and enterprise AI applications, has secured $111 million in Series E funding, doubling its valuation to $2.2 billion. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $225 million since its founding in 2018.
The financing round was led by Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad, with participation from WestBridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, UpHonest Capital, and several other investors. Current ARR stands at approximately $300 million, according to company sources. The round was priced when Turing reached $167 million in ARR, highlighting the company’s blistering growth.
Turing has strategically positioned itself across two complementary business lines that form what the company describes as a “closed-loop AI infrastructure.” The first, Turing AGI Advancement, collaborates with leading AI labs to enhance frontier model capabilities in reasoning, coding, and multimodality. The second, Turing Intelligence, applies these advancements to develop mission-critical AI systems for Fortune 500 enterprises.
The Palo Alto-based company’s evolution represents a significant expansion from its origins. Turing initially gained prominence as a platform for vetting and hiring remote coding talent—a business that flourished during the pandemic as organizations sought better ways to manage distributed teams. While this remains a substantial revenue source, the company has increasingly focused on its role in advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Turing now works with approximately 4 million coders worldwide through its platform, though its direct employee count remains in the hundreds. The company has been profitable for about a year, demonstrating a sustainable business model despite its aggressive growth.
In conjunction with its funding announcement, Turing introduced a new suite of AI benchmarks designed around practical, high-impact tasks across five categories: software engineering, data science, mathematics, multimodal reasoning, and industry-specific challenges. These benchmarks aim to provide more realistic assessments of AI capabilities compared to traditional academic metrics.
The demand for specialized AI data continues to surge, while falling inference costs are making advanced AI more accessible. Turing’s funding will support expanded research and development initiatives, accelerated go-to-market strategies, and broader enterprise AI adoption across industries.
SpecterOps Secures $75 Million Series B to Bolster Identity Security Platform
SpecterOps, a cybersecurity company specializing in adversary-focused solutions, has secured $75 million in Series B funding to accelerate the growth of its identity focused BloodHound Enterprise platform. The round was led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from Ansa Capital, M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Ballistic Ventures, Decibel Partners, and Cisco Investments.
The Virginia-based firm, which launched BloodHound Enterprise (BHE) in 2021, focuses on addressing identity-based attack paths—a critical but often overlooked vulnerability in enterprise security architectures. The platform specifically targets weaknesses in Microsoft Active Directory and Azure Active Directory/Entra ID, which are used by more than 90% of companies for identity and access management.
The investment comes amid strong growth for SpecterOps, with annual recurring revenue increasing 100% year-over-year in 2024. The company has expanded its customer base to nearly 200 BHE clients, with new customer acquisition rising over 60% year-over-year in Q4 2024.
The company plans to use the funding to support its research initiatives, consulting services, and sales and marketing efforts. SpecterOps maintains a significant presence in the open-source security community through BloodHound Community Edition, a penetration testing tool that has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and is recommended by both Microsoft and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Also Read
- LlamaIndex, a provider of agentic knowledge management solutions, has secured $19 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor GreylockPartners. The financing brings LlamaIndex’s total capital raised to $27.5 million and coincides with the general availability launch of LlamaCloud, the company’s enterprise platform for secure, accurate knowledge agents.
- Sawmills , a telemetry management platform for observability data, has emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding led by Team8, with participation from Mayfield and Alumni Ventures. Founded by enterprise software veterans from New Relic, CloudBees, and Tricentis, the company’s AI-powered platform helps enterprises manage telemetry data flowing to observability tools, addressing the dual challenges of unsustainable costs and data quality issues.
- Aryon Security, a cybersecurity startup founded by veterans of Israel’s Matzov unit, has emerged from stealth with $9 million in seed funding led by Viola Ventures and Blumberg Capital. Industry leaders including Shlomo Kramer, Maty Siman, and Reuven (Rubi) Aronashvili also participated in the round. The company’s Cloud Security Enforcement Platform aims to transform enterprise cloud protection by preventing misconfigurations and security gaps before they reach production environments. The company was founded by CEO Ron Arbel, CTO Ariel Litmanovich, and VP of R&D Yair Ladizhensky, whose experience includes securing Israel’s national cloud infrastructure.
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