This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $23 billion — a nearly threefold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached just six months earlier.

While the round was led by Tiger Global, a huge part of the new capital came from one of the company’s earliest backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley firm invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ latest round, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Benchmark first bet on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately keeps its funds under $450 million, the firm raised two separate vehicles, both called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to regulatory filings. According to the person familiar with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to fund the Cerebras investment.

Benchmark declined to comment.

What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip announced in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on each side and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To put that in perspective, the chip is manufactured from nearly an entire 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that serve as the foundation for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers; Cerebras instead uses almost the whole circle.

This architecture delivers 900,000 specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company says the design enables AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.

The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., gains momentum in the AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends through 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times for complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)

Cerebras claims its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.

The company’s path to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties to Chinese technology companies triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, bumping back Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even prompting the outfit to withdraw an earlier filing in early 2025. By late last year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras’ investor list, clearing the way for a fresh IPO attempt.

Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.

Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors was scrambling to raise a Series D funding round in 2017. It had courted Ford as a potential investor, but Jia Yueting, the founder of rival EV startup Faraday Future, had quietly amassed around a 30% stake and was essentially blocking new investors.

David Stern, a mysterious businessman and close advisor to former Prince Andrew, saw an opportunity to break the logjam: bring in Jeffrey Epstein. 

“Ford will likely be lead in $400m Series D in Lucid. Big strategic move,” Stern wrote to Epstein in emails released last week as part of the Department of Justice’s latest disclosure of 3 million documents related to Epstein. Jia “has massive cash issues” at Faraday, he wrote, and needs to “sell now to make payroll for his other business.”

It wasn’t the first EV startup Stern pitched Epstein, and it wouldn’t be the last, according to hundreds of documents reviewed by TechCrunch. 

At the time, legacy automakers and newly minted startups, fueled by the breakthrough success of Tesla and progress by Google’s self-driving project, were jumping into electric and autonomous vehicles. And Stern was apparently hungry to take advantage of the resulting deal flow. The documents show he also pitched investments in Faraday Future itself, and in another EV startup, Canoo. 

It’s unlikely Epstein invested in any of them. Lucid didn’t close its Series D until late 2018, when it raised more than $1 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Faraday ultimately received a major investment from Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande in late 2017. Epstein said in a 2018 message included in the Justice Department’s files that he had no “direct” or “indirect” interest in Canoo.

These discussions instead provide greater insight into the many connections Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had to Silicon Valley startups up until his arrest and death in 2019. They also provide a snapshot of a relationship that has not been explored in previous reporting.  

By the time of the Lucid emails, Epstein and Stern had been working together closely for nearly a decade, the newly released documents show.  To Epstein, Stern was “my china contact.” To Stern, Epstein was “my mentor, and I do what he tells me.”

A ‘Ghost’ of a businessman

Stern is a mostly digital ghost with little information available about him on the internet prior to the release of the files. 

He is perhaps best-known as the director of Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace startup contest, which ran for a few years until Andrew’s connections to Epstein were exposed. Andrew himself even referred to Stern as a “ghost” in one 2010 email. 

Stern appears to have first approached Epstein in 2008, according to the emails released by the DOJ — just one month before the financier pled guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida. Stern was creating a fund, called AGC Capital, to take advantage of the economic boom in China, and he wanted Epstein to invest. 

(It’s not clear how Stern was introduced to Epstein. Stern did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.)

Stern, who is German, attended the University of London and Shi-Da University in China in the late 1990s, and served as chairman of Millenium Capital China, the Chinese arm of Millennium Capital Partners, according to the bio section of the AGC Capital pitch deck, which is in the DOJ’s files.

Stern also worked for Siemens negotiating “industrial Joint Ventures with Chinese State Owned enterprises,” before joining the Shanghai office of Deutsche Bank. He started a company called Asia Gateway in 2001 that “advised blue chip companies, Chinese enterprises as well as the Chinese government in growth strategies and investments.” 

These jobs appear to have helped Stern make connections with powerful and wealthy Chinese businessmen, including Li Botan — the son-in-law of the fourth-most senior leader in China under Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao. (Li would eventually go on to become a founding investor in Canoo with Stern.) 

It’s not clear if Epstein invested in AGC Capital; the financier spent the next year serving his sentence. But Stern and Epstein remained in touch, and in 2009 Stern started pitching other ideas. 

The documents reveal a relationship that starts off formal and terse, with Epstein at one point excoriating Stern for not having properly prepared a potential business deal. 

“[I]f you want to do real deals you have to be precise and careful„ every error is a fortune,” Epstein wrote. “[Y]our first grade is an F.”

One of the first big projects the two men collaborated on was helping the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, with her miserable finances, according to the emails.

The relationship deepened over the following decade. The two men got close enough that Stern felt comfortable asking Epstein in 2016 to become the godfather of one of his children. (Epstein wrote that he was “flattered” but declined because he “made a promise to my goddaughter that I would not be godfather to anyone else.”) 

It’s hard to say how fruitful the relationship was on the business side. But between 2009 and 2019, Stern brought Epstein a number of potential deals across various industries. 

Early on, he seems to have been dead set on starting a “secret” new fund with Epstein to invest in Chinese businesses together, which he referred to as JEDS – the two men’s initials combined. (It was also referred to in some emails as “Serpentine Group.”) Stern later pitched buying farmland in Russia, suggested purchasing the news organization Al-Jazeera and taking it public, discussed buying troubled music publisher EMI, and considered acquiring an apparently distressed (and unnamed) undersea cable company.

They also had their eyes on banks. Stern and Epstein attempted to buy Luxembourg-headquartered private bank Sal. Oppenheim, the emails show. In 2016, they even discussed a buyout of Deutsche Bank, which had for years transacted with Epstein.

Stern repeatedly flaunted his connections with high-profile businessmen and politicians in his emails to Epstein and his other contacts. In February 2012, Stern suggested Epstein introduce Jes Staley — the head of J.P. Morgan’s investment bank at the time – to Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim. 

“I know Anwar well,” Stern wrote. “If he becomes prime minister of malayisa [Staley] will clean up and it could be a gold mine for JPM.” (Ibrahim lost a contested election in 2013 but became prime minister in 2022.)

Stern also claimed to have had dinner with Jack Ma, had a planned meeting “alone” with UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and said he was “friends” with the grandson of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.

Going Electric

By 2017, Stern was apparently eyeing the rush to build new mobility companies.

He tried to get Epstein to meet Faraday Future founder Jia to discuss an investment. It’s not clear if that ever happened; the company and Jia did not respond to requests for comment. 

But former BMW and Deutsche Bank CFO Stefan Krause, who had been brought in to save Faraday Future, made a direct appeal to Epstein in April 2017.

“Faraday Future (FF) is a great story in itself, regretfully surrounded by a lot of noise around Jia Yueting (YT) and his other enterprises (LeEco, LeMall, LeSports, to name a few). These businesses are not working, so he run out of cash. FF is starving,” Krause wrote to Epstein. “Great chance to build a better Tesla.” 

(Krause is described as a “friend” and a business partner of Stern’s in the documents. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.) 

It appears those conversations petered out. Soon after, Stern suggested the Lucid Motors investment. 

In May 2017, a pitch deck landed in Epstein’s inbox. It was put together by a fund called Monstera that Stern had created. “Monstera can gain a 32% shareholding in Lucid through the acquisition of the stake currently controlled by Yueting Jia,” one slide reads. Other emails show that Stern expected to spend around $300 million to acquire the 32% stake.

He referred to it as a “fire sale” in emails. Monstera could either hold the position or “[o]ffload” it “when Ford comes in.”

Ford ultimately pulled out, and Lucid had to wait to close its Series D until August 2018, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested more than $1 billion. (SEC filings show the Saudi sovereign wealth fund repurchased Jia’s shares over the next few years. Lucid did not respond to a request for comment.)

When Krause left Faraday Future to start a new EV company in late 2017 — first called Evelozcity and later, Canoo — Stern was one of the original backers. He contributed just $1 million alongside larger sums from Li, the CCP-connected Chinese businessman, and Michael Chiang, a billionaire who runs Taiwanese electronics giant TPK. (Li’s involvement later triggered a national security review when Canoo went public in 2020.) 

In June 2018, Stern sent Epstein a document about the startup, to which Epstein responded: “fun.” 

But Epstein never invested in Canoo, either. He did, however, pitch powerful people on Stern’s behalf. Epstein emailed Deepak Chopra in May 2018 and told the self-help guru that “david has a new electric car co in los angeles.” He told Chopra “they are going to build the next gen health sensors into the car. you guys should talk.” 

In June 2019, Epstein sent a message to Eduardo Teodorani, an Italian businessman who is a senior vice president of agriculture machinery giant CNH. “My friend David stern… has a electric car co that I think you should explore before he sells it to another co,” Epstein wrote. Epstein also connected Stern with Sheikh Jabor al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, on June 29 so he could “hear more about your car co.” 

One week after he sent that message, Epstein was arrested. He died in prison a month later.

It’s not clear when Stern last spoke to Epstein. But in March 2019, he forwarded a story to Epstein titled: “Warren Buffet: Electric Cars Are Very Much in America’s Future.” In the body of the email, Stern wrote: “How do we get him ??”

People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code.

While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators.

Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a San Francisco startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micro-payment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the AI agent decide what to buy and when without human intervention.

“In the future, apps are going to consume services which require payments. Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.

Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial layer for enterprises, rather than consumers, is what’s truly needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes that its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe-coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, anyone who has vibe-coded an app with SMS capabilities won’t have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of that in the background, and the person building the micro-app will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe-coding platform.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib believes that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, which is why he’s focusing on creating financial layers for businesses instead.