Core Automation raises $432.1M in a venture round

A private-offering filing dated July 30, 2026 showed a target raise of about $635.2M, with $432.1M raised so far. Third-party profiles put the pre-money valuation at $3.2B and the post-money at $3.62B. Crunchbase does not list participants for this round. Forge lists the investors as undisclosed. The April round of $100M at a $1B valuation included Accel, Nvidia, Scribble Ventures, Spark Capital and Threshold Ventures. The company was founded in late March 2026 by Jerry Tworek, a former OpenAI VP of research. The Information reported on May 7 that it was seeking $300M to $500M at roughly a $4B valuation. It is building models that keep learning after training. It is described as pre-revenue, with no public product, API, pricing or customers disclosed. For AI founders, the round shows how much capital a small research team can raise on a founding team and a thesis alone. The valuation roughly tripled within about three months, and the lab has no commercial traction. Founders pitching alternatives to the dominant architectures should expect investors to compare them with this benchmark, and founders competing for the same researchers and GPU capacity face a better-funded rival.