September 25, 2025

Chip wars

Hi there,

CB Insights has partnered with Money20/20 to dive into the data on the 60+ Money Awards finalists driving the industry forward across financial services, spanning specialized AI tools to B2B fintech to financial inclusion.

Explore the finalists here.

And now, here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Brain-computer interfaces

Funding to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has tripled to $867M in 2025, with Neuralink securing a massive $650M at a $9.7B valuation.

Top players are taking vastly different approaches to commercialization:

Neuralink designed an R1 surgical robot that precisely inserts the device
Precision Neuroscience received the first FDA clearance plus 22,000-square-foot Texas microfabrication facility for medical-grade production
Synchron is partnering with Apple to let paralyzed patients control iPhones through thought

See how 7 BCI leaders stack up in our market breakdown here.

Not: Human coders

AI coding agents are racing ahead in adoption, with the top 6 companies in the space generating $873M in annual revenue:

Cursor — $500M
Replit — $150M
Lovable — $100M
Cognition — $73M
Stackblitz — $40M
Emergent — $10M

These coding agents also demonstrate capital efficiency, averaging $1.4M revenue per employee compared to $594K across all AI agents.

See the top AI agent startups ranked by revenue in CB Insights' latest analysis.

Hot: Legal AI

Legal AI revenue projections are climbing.

Corporate legal teams are using legal AI tools to speed contract review and cut outside counsel spend — saving two to three days and significantly reducing outside counsel costs.

For instance, Harvey doubled its revenue to $100M this year, while Legora expects revenue to grow from $1M to $70M in a single year as teams bring AI into contract and research workflows.

See all 140+ legal tech companies in our latest market map.

Not: AI investors not named Nvidia

Nvidia is the most active investor in LLM companies.

CB Insights data shows Nvidia leads with investments in 12 LLM developers — nearly double runners-up AWS, Microsoft, or SV Angel.

Most recently, the tech giant announced it's investing $100B in OpenAI.

Check out our analysis on tech giants' AI moves.

The +1

Source: u/PGH_LOVER via Reddit

Y-axis with no numbers. Meteorology ≠ math.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. We profile 103 AI drug discovery startups in this Book of Scouting Reports.

Exclusive Startup Access: 75% Off CB Insights

Learn more

CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech.