OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026, in Washington.

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OpenAI on Thursday announced it’s acquiring Astral, a small startup that builds popular open source tools for software developers.

Astral’s team will join OpenAI and help build out its artificial intelligence coding assistant called Codex. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.

“Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it feels like to build software,” Astral’s founder and CEO Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post.

AI coding assistants have exploded in popularity over the last year, and OpenAI has been racing to grab users and market share from rivals like Anthropic and Cursor, which have their own buzzy offerings for developers.

OpenAI said Thursday that Codex has more than 2 million weekly active users, and that the tool has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year.

The company’s acquisition of Astral is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.

OpenAI has made a number of recent acquisitions, including the $6.4 billion deal in May 2025 for Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io. The company announced earlier this month that it will purchase the cybersecurity startup Promptfoo, and it bought the health-care technology startup Torch in January.

In December, OpenAI hired Google’s Albert Lee to lead corporate development, a signal that the company will continue to hunt for M&A targets that can help it gain an edge. 

 WATCH: OpenAI renews focus on enterprise in all-hands meeting amid IPO push

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Brex co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras.

Brex

Capital One said Thursday that it was acquiring payments startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the latest splashy deal undertaken by the bank’s CEO, Richard Fairbank.

The firm, which disclosed the deal in its fourth-quarter earnings statement, said the deal is made up of 50% cash and 50% stock. Brex was previously valued at $12.3 billion.

Shares of the bank fell about 3%.

Under Fairbank, a rare founder-CEO of a major U.S. bank, Capital One acquired rival card firm Discover Financial last year for about $35 billion. That deal was Fairbank’s crowning achievement, giving the credit card lender access to one of the only payment networks of any scale.

“Since our founding, we set out to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution,” Fairbank said in a release. “Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace.”

Fairbank said that Brex pioneered the combination of corporate cards, banking and spend management software: “They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.”

Still, the more than 50% decline in valuation for Brex from its 2023 level shows the headwinds that even successful fintech companies have encountered.

Brex is among a class of fintech firms that rose to prominence during a period of low interest rates; it was known initially as a startup that made loans to other startups via its cards.

But the company expanded beyond technology into other sectors and now services larger established firms and startups alike, including Robinhood, Zoom and Anthropic.

Capital One, which has offered business credit cards for decades, became increasingly convinced that it was Brex’s model that would be the winning offering, according to a person with knowledge of the lender’s strategy.

“We didn’t have to pursue this acquisition, our growth was incredibly strong,” Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi told CNBC in an interview.

Combining Brex’s technology with Capital One’s reach and resources would grow the startup’s scale faster than as a standalone firm, he said.

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Pictured here is Moonshot AI’s Kimi chatbot displayed on a smartphone.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — An Alibaba-backed AI startup is currently being valued at $4.8 billion in a fresh funding round, two people with knowledge of the deal said, just weeks after it was valued at $4.3 billion.

Moonshot AI is the company behind the Kimi chatbot, which surged in popularity in China months before DeepSeek’s release last year.

Since Moonshot’s previous in December, rival Chinese AI companies — Zhipu and MiniMax — surged after going public in Hong Kong.

The sources told CNBC that Moonshot was closing a funding round that will value it at least $500 million higher than the December round. The sources said the round would likely close soon due to high demand.

Both asked to remain anonymous while discussing private information. Moonshot AI had not responded to a request for comment as this article went live.

The sources added that the company could be valued even higher in subsequent rounds that could follow, due to a surge of interest in Chinese AI IPO candidates.

Chinese AI companies have particularly boomed as U.S. AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, aren’t officially available in mainland China.

Beijing restricts access to many U.S.-based internet services, while American companies have faced growing restrictions from the White House on doing business with China.

The previous funding round was announced on Dec. 31. IDG, Alibaba and Tencent participated in it, according to Chinese financial news outlet LatePost.

Moonshot AI has not commented on any plans for an IPO.

Zhipu, listed under the name Knowledge Atlas, had a market value of $13 billion as of Monday’s close, according to Wind Information data. MiniMax was worth $15.2 billion, the data showed.

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Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike George Kurtz speaks during the Live Keynote Pregame during the Nvidia GTC, or GPU Technology Conference, in Washington, Oct. 28, 2025.

Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images

CrowdStrike announced Thursday that it is buying identity management startup SGNL in a deal valued at nearly $740 million as the cybersecurity provider beefs up defenses in the age of artificial intelligence cyberattacks.

Shares fell nearly 4%.

The acquisition will help users of CrowdStrike’s Falcon cloud security platform better manage human and AI identity access requests and real-time risks, the company said. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of the 2027 fiscal year.

“This is a massive opportunity for our customers to be able to protect themselves, and a massive opportunity for us to disrupt the identity market,” CEO George Kurtz said in an exclusive interview with CNBC.

He said the deal will help advance CrowdStrike’s foothold in the multibillion-dollar identity security business, which totaled $435 million at the end of the second quarter and has become one of the most significant attack vectors.

Companies have been bolstering identity security defenses as AI heightens the sophistication of cyberattacks.

Last year, Microsoft was hit with a wave of attacks targeting its SharePoint collaboration tool and large language model startup Anthropic disclosed the first documented AI-led cyberattack in November.

SGNL, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, raised $30 million in an early funding round in February. The company’s backers include Cisco Investments and Microsoft‘s Venture Fund.

The company was founded in 2021 by Scott Kriz and Erik Gustavson, whose previous startup was acquired by Google in 2017. Both founders worked at the search giant for more than four years.

Cybersecurity providers such as CrowdStrike have ramped up acquisitions in recent months to offer a fuller suite of capabilities to customers in an increasingly competitive market.

Businesses are also leaning into more autonomous agent-powered AI solutions to manage cybersecurity tools.

Last year, competitor Palo Alto Networks scooped up Israeli startup CyberArk for $25 billion in a big bet from CEO Nikesh Arora and Google landed cloud security startup Wiz for $32 billion.

In 2025, CrowdStrike announced plans to buy AI agentic security platform Pangea and Spanish data startup Onum.

Kurtz said the company’s acquisition strategy is to buy successful teams and innovative technology over legacy tools.

“We want to offer the most value to our customers where they can consolidate on CrowdStrike — less vendors, less complexities, less cost and with a better outcome of stopping breaches,” he said.

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Artificial intelligence startup Cursor on Thursday announced it has closed a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly triple what it was worth as of its last raise in June.

Tune in at 4:30 p.m. ET as Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins “Closing Bell: Overtime” to discuss the funding round. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.

Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code. It initially launched as a product within the applied research lab Anysphere, which was founded in 2022.

Cursor is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines, that are valued at over $10 billion.

Investors including Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia and Google participated in its latest funding round, according to a blog post.

“This funding will allow us to invest deeply in our research and build Cursor’s next magical moments,” Cursor said.

Since the tool first launched in 2023, Cursor said it has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and swelled to more than 300 employees.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the company his “favorite enterprise AI service” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October.

The company said its in-house models generate more code than “almost” any other large language models in the world.

The coding tool market has grown more crowded in recent months as it’s proved to be a lucrative AI use case. Cursor competes with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cognition, which acquired the AI coding startup Windsurf in July.

OpenAI approached Anysphere earlier this year about potentially purchasing Cursor, but the deal failed to gain traction, as CNBC previously reported. OpenAI was also briefly in talks to acquire Windsurf before ultimately introducing its own coding tool called Codex in May.

In September, Anthropic said its coding tool Claude Code has already generated more than $500 million in run-rate revenue for the company since its full launch in May. As of July, Windsurf was generating $82 million in annual recurring revenue, Cognition said in a blog post at the time.

“Internally, we often talk about how high the ceiling is for how great Cursor can become, and how much work still remains to get there,” Cursor said.

WATCH: Every engineer is being turbocharged by AI, says Macroscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour

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Code Metal co-founders (L-R): SVP of technology Alex Showalter-Bucher, and CEO Peter Morales

Courtesy Code Metal Inc.

Peter Morales started Code Metal two years ago, jumping into the market for artificial intelligence coding tools at a time when AI companies were rapidly changing the market for software development.

Now he’s got $36.5 million in the bank, thanks to an investment led by venture firm Accel Partners, known for early bets on Facebook, Dropbox and Atlassian.

Code Metal’s technology allows software engineers to write code once, then automatically translate it into any other programming language so they can ship new features faster and to a wider swath of users. Morales, who was previously technology chief at a gaming company, said Code Metal’s offering is particularly appealing to developers working on software to run appliances, consumer electronics, factory robotics, autos and medical devices.

Those are industries with products that contain a wide array of chips, which come with different software development kits, operating systems and code libraries. Morales gave the example of an automaker creating a feature for a new model sports car running on the latest Nvidia chip, and the challenge of porting the code behind the feature to the company’s older line of minivans. Code Metal’s AI would automatically handle the translation.

Morales is positioning the company as distinct from so-called vibe-coding platforms like Cursor or Anthropic’s Claude Code, which allow users to automate much of the process of writing software with text prompts.

“Vibe coding is all about explaining an initial idea in text, and generating code that will get you started developing your minimum viable product,” Morales said. “This is not where most companies spend their time. Code Metal focuses on bringing code to production. That requires strong guarantees the code we’re converting is accurate, compliant and working as expected.”

Morales said large language models alone can’t provide this level of certainty, so Code Metal employs what computer scientists call formal methods to check the code and make it’s been translated correctly.

The company, based in Boston, says it’s already struck contracts worth tens of millions of dollars with commercial and public sector clients, including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris and Raytheon as well as some automotive suppliers and consumer electronics brands.

Accel’s Steve Loughlin, who led the deal, said Code Metal is the fastest growing company in his firm’s portfolio of early-stage startups, and that demand for its technology is surging.

“The market opportunity is practically uncapped here,” Loughlin said, “to help people develop on the edge much faster and modernize legacy code.”

Code Metal’s earlier backers J2 ventures and Shield Capital also participated in the round, along with Bosch ventures and Raytheon’s RTX Ventures.

WATCH: The rise of AI ‘vibe coding’

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