January 10, 2026: Constructive Start To 2026

Last week, Dow Jones rose 2.3%, S&P 500 was up 1.6%, and Nasdaq composite gained 1.9%. As markets showed broad advances last week, risk appetite in technology and innovation themes remained constructive led by AI infrastructure, quantum, defense-adjacent procurement, and ongoing IPO/funding momentum. News chatter pointed to potential landmark listings for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, while Discord filed confidentially for an IPO. Anthropic is reportedly discussing a US$10 billion raise at ~US$350 billion valuation, and xAI announced a US$20 billion raise at a stated US$230 billion valuation. CrowdStrike agreed to acquire identity-security startup SGNL for ~US$740 million. MSCI opted to keep crypto-holding equities in indexes for now (with broader consultation to follow). Samsung flagged rising memory costs amid AI-driven HBM demand. Nvidia unveiled more details on its “Rubin” chip and open-sourced a new autonomous driving model family. Boston Dynamics presented a production-ready Atlas. Microsoft added in-chat checkout to Copilot. JPMorgan is set to take over Apple’s credit card program from Goldman Sachs. Prediction markets expanded further into geopolitics and housing-price contracts. In Canada, Sophic client Cybeats closed a shares-for-debt settlement, $1.2 million of secured debenture obligations were settled via 10.0 million shares issued at a deemed $0.12, subject to a four-month-and-one-day hold. The transaction was treated as a related-party transaction. MDA Space announced an IDIQ contract with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency under the SHIELD program, shares reacted positively to the headline. Vancouver-based Photonic raised $180 million in a first close (now $375 million total raised) as it targets enterprise commercialization of networked quantum computing. D-Wave announced a US$550 million agreement to acquire Quantum Circuits (US$300 million stock, US$250 million cash), aiming to combine gate-model capabilities with D-Wave’s quantum annealing footprint.

Sophic Client Cybeats Technologies Corp. (CYBT-CSE,CYBCF-OTCQB) and Scryb announce closing of shares for debt transaction.

Cybeats Technologies Corp. and Scryb Inc. (collectively, the “Companies”) are pleased to announce the closing of the debt settlement transaction previously announced on December 31, 2025 (the “Debt Settlement”). Under the Debt Settlement, Cybeats has settled $1,200,000 owing under a secured debenture held by Scryb through the issuance of 10,000,000 common shares of Cybeats (the “Common Shares”) at a deemed price of $0.12 per Common Share. The Common Shares issued in connection with the Debt Settlement are subject to a statutory four-month-and-one-day hold period in accordance with applicable securities laws. Completion of the Debt Settlement did not create any new control person of Cybeats. As Scryb is a control person of Cybeats, the Debt Settlement constituted a “related party transaction” under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 – Protection of Minority Securityholders in Special Transactions (“MI 61-101”). The Companies relied on the exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements under MI 61-101 pursuant to sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a), as the fair market value of the Debt Settlement and the Common Shares issued did not exceed 25% of the Companies’ respective market capitalizations. The Companies believe the completion of the Debt Settlement enhances Cybeats’ financial position and supports its ongoing operational and growth initiatives. https://tinyurl.com/4u4fmhwu

MDA Space (MDA-TSX) signs contract with US Department of War agency to potentially help with “Golden Dome” project.

MDA Space has signed a contract with the United States’ Missile Defense Agency, which operates through the US Department of War, to potentially help with President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” initiative. The Brampton, Ont.-based spacetech manufacturer announced on Thursday that it received an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract from the Missile Defense Agency for the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program. The contract “covers a broad range of work to strengthen defence against threats from land, sea, air, cyberspace, and space,” the company said in a statement. MDA Space’s stock price on the Toronto Stock Exchange jumped five percent on the news, from $27.79 per share to $28.54 per share, as of noon EST on Thursday. MDA Space was recently selected as one of the first procurements out of Canada’s new Defence Investment Agency to develop satellite communications capabilities in the Arctic. The company reported revenue growth in its Q3 earnings in November despite losing out on a $1.8 billion contract with American telecom EchoStar earlier in the year. https://tinyurl.com/yu46784r

Photonic says it’s ready to commercialize quantum with $180 million fundraise.

Vancouver-based Photonic has secured $180 million in the first close of its latest investment round as it plans to scale up its networked quantum computing technology and start serving enterprise customers. All existing investors, including strategic partner Microsoft, also participated. Founded in 2016, Photonic has now raised $375 million in its pursuit to develop a useful quantum computer and sell its services at scale. https://tinyurl.com/yanxh523

D-Wave strikes US$550 million deal to acquire Quantum Circuits.

Canadian-founded D-Wave Quantum announced yesterday that it has reached an agreement to buy fellow American quantum computing firm Quantum Circuits for US$550 million. That US$550 million price tag consists of US$300 million in D-Wave common stock and $250 million in cash. The acquisition, which is expected to close later this month, is set to combine Quantum Circuits’ gate model-based quantum computing tech with D-Wave’s expertise in quantum annealing. https://tinyurl.com/254eef9p

McRock Capital closes $120 million in third fund, backing industrial software startups.

McRock Capital, the Toronto-based venture capital firm, announced today it has surpassed $120 million (US$88 million) in total commitments in the final close of its third industrial tech-focused fund. Since launching this fund with an initial $111 million close in mid-2024, McRock has brought on two more strategic American limited partners (LPs) from the construction space in longtime investor Caterpillar and first-time LP Autodesk. This pair joins a group of Fund III LPs that already includes existing institutional backers EDC, BDC Capital, the Alberta Enterprise Corporation, Fonds de solidarité FTQ, and Aspen Technology (AspenTech), as well as newcomers like Bell Ventures, CIBC Innovation Banking, and Venture Ontario, and a slew of undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. While $120 million is a far cry from the $200 million McRock first set out to raise for this fund, it still makes Fund III its largest to date. https://tinyurl.com/3spzaps6

SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to launch landmark IPOs.

The three most valuable private US tech companies are preparing for public offerings as early as this year, raising hopes among their investors and advisers that they may enjoy their most lucrative year ever. Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and artificial intelligence labs OpenAI and Anthropic are working on listings expected to raise tens of billions of dollars in proceeds, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of their plans. Those three deals alone would outstrip the total haul from about 200 US IPOs in 2025 and represent a potential gold mine for investment banks, law firms and investors. The groups have yet to set IPO valuation targets. OpenAI, which is currently valued at US$500 bilion, is engaged in discussions with investors about a new fundraise at a valuation of US$750 billion or more. Those talks are at an early stage, but OpenAI is likely to raise tens of billions of dollars in new funds, the people said. SpaceX is working on a secondary stock sale that would value it at US$800 billion, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Anthropic is also in talks for new funding, which investors expect will value the company at more than US$300 billion. Figma, Klarna, CoreWeave and Chime were among the technology groups to list in 2025, contributing to a total of more than US$30 billion in US IPO proceeds in the first nine months, the bulk of it from technology groups, according to EY. This year’s total is likely to dwarf that sum, if even one of the three big start-ups goes public. SpaceX alone is widely expected to surpass Saudi Aramco’s US$29 billion raise in 2019 to become the largest public listing. Those plans could still be knocked off course by unexpected political or economic upheaval — and listings will expose these private groups to a new level of scrutiny. https://tinyurl.com/55wxn39j

Chat platform Discord files confidentially for IPO.

Discord Inc. filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter, adding to a rapidly growing pipeline of venture capital-backed tech listings. Discord, whose platform is popular with gamers and programmers, has more than 200 million monthly users, according to a statement in December. The IPO would join a slate of potential tech company listings as the US market for first-time share sales gains momentum. Tech IPOs on US exchanges raised US$15.6 billion last year, more than twice as much as in 2024, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Companies on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for possible IPOs include AI-enabled fleet management software firm Motive Technologies Inc. and Asia-based travel app maker Klook Technology Ltd. The company was valued at about US$15 billion in a 2021 funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, a Discord spokesperson said at the time. The chat platform rejected a US$12 billion takeover proposal earlier that year from Microsoft Corp., Bloomberg News reported. Discord has come under pressure from state governments over its safeguards around child safety. Its safety initiatives, which about 15% of its staff work on, include using machine learning to identify and remove offending content and equipping community moderators to uphold its policies, its website shows. https://tinyurl.com/3wkjm7k8

Anthropic to raise US$10 billion at a US$350 billion valuation.

Anthropic has told potential investors it is planning to raise US$10 billion at a valuation of US$350 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The valuation nearly doubles that of its last round in September. Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management are planning to lead the fundraising, said the person. The venture funding follows an acceleration of its business that was expected to encourage more private investment. Last summer it told investors it expects revenue could as much as triple this year, to US$15 billion, and to rise as high as US$70 billion by 2028. Because of that growth, the company was expected to target a valuation of between US$300 billion to US$400 billion in its next funding round. Anthropic’s compute needs are steep, totalling US$60 billion over the next three years. That could lead it to issue shares in an initial public offering as soon as this year. The Wall Street Journal first reported new details of the funding. https://tinyurl.com/yvrasabh

XAI raises US$20 billion from Valor, Nvidia.

XAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, said Tuesday it had raised US$20 billion from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, and Fidelity, as well as Nvidia and Cisco. That’s more money than the initial US$15 billion the company had targeted, at a US$230 billion valuation. At that level, the financing would more than double the last valuation of the AI business, which combined with X (formerly Twitter) last year. The round, the two-year-old company’s Series E, will help the company with ambitious goals to expand the comput clusters powering its AI models. XAI recently bought a building for a third supersized data center it’s planning outside Memphis. XAI said it has amassed chips with the computing capacity of 1 million Nvidia H100s. https://tinyurl.com/2kvs4u4j

CrowdStrike buys identity security startup SGNL for US$740 million.

CrowdStrike announced Thursday that it is buying identity management startup SGNL in a deal valued at nearly US$740 million as the cybersecurity provider beefs up defenses in the age of artificial intelligence cyberattacks. Shares fell 3%. 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. SGNL, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, raised US$30 million in an early funding round in February. The company’s backers include Cisco Investments and Microsoft’s Venture Fund. https://tinyurl.com/5adpaehz

MSCI decides to keep crypto-holding stocks in indexes.

MSCI, a major index provider, said Tuesday that it decided to keep publicly-traded stocks whose primary activities are buying crypto in its global indexes “at this time.” The decision removes for now a potential threat to battered companies like Strategy. The decision was highly watched because a potential exclusion of the stocks from MSCI indexes could force index-tracking funds to sell their shares, putting further downward pressure on crypto prices. Strategy, the biggest bitcoin holding stock, jumped 6.7% in post-market trading after MSCI’s decision. MSCI said it “intends to open a broader consultation” on these stocks, and that feedback so far confirmed that some institutional investors are concerned the stocks are similar to investment funds, which are not eligible for inclusion in the indexes. https://tinyurl.com/4whwav9h

Samsung says rising memory costs may drive up consumer product prices.

Samsung Electronics expects memory chip supply shortages to drive up prices across the electronics industry, including potentially for its own consumer products, according to the company’s head of global marketing, Wonjin Lee. Lee said in an interview with Bloomberg that memory prices are rising “even as we speak.” “There’s going to be issues around semiconductor supplies, and it’s going to affect everyone,” Lee said. “Obviously, we don’t want to convey that burden to the consumers, but we’re going to be at a point where we have to actually consider repricing our products.” The AI data center buildout boom has created unprecedented demand for high-bandwidth memory, constraining supply for smartphones, laptops, and other consumer devices. Lee said the company is optimistic about 2026, particularly for AI-enabled mobile phones, and expects Samsung to outpace the broader market despite industrywide supply pressures. https://tinyurl.com/5dppsuvd

Nvidia unveils Rubin and announces new open source autonomous driving model.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday announced a new autonomous driving model that aims to help cars reach Level 4 autonomous driving, in which a driver isn’t required to supervise the vehicle. Separately, Huang also announced more detailed specifications for the company’s upcoming next-generation flagship AI chips, known as Rubin. The family of chips are designed to reduce the cost of generating AI tokens by as much as tenfold, when compared with its previous generation chips, the company said. They also aim to cut the number of GPUs needed to train mixture-of-experts models by a factor of four. Those models use far less computing power by sending each query only to the most relevant parts of the model, rather than activating the entire model at once. Speaking in a keynote presentation at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huang said Nvidia’s new family of self-driving models called Alpamayo are the world’s first that can think and reason. “We imagine that someday a billion cars on a road will all be autonomous,” he said. Nvidia is making its Alpamayo models open source, which allows outside developers to build their own self-driving cars based on its tech. That could ultimately drive sales of more Nvidia chips. Huang said the first cars based on Nvidia’s self-driving tech would be made by Mercedes-Benz and be on the road by the first quarter of this year in the U.S. Those cars, however, will only offer Level 2 autonomous driving, which requires drivers to still supervise the vehicle. https://tinyurl.com/mvee7ke3

Boston Dynamics announces production-ready version of Atlas robot at CES 2026.

After years of testing its humanoid robot (and forcing it to dance), Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is entering production. The robotics company says the final product version of the robot is being built now, and the first companies that will receive deployments are Hyundai, Boston Dynamics’ majority shareholder, and Google DeepMind, the firm’s newly minted AI partner. This final enterprise version of Atlas “can perform a wide array of industrial tasks,” according to Boston Dynamics, and is specifically designed with consistency and reliability in mind. Atlas can work autonomously, via a teleoperator or with “a tablet steering interface,” and the robot is both strong and durable. Boston Dynamics says Atlas has a reach of up to 7.5 feet, the ability to lift 110 pounds and can operate at temperatures ranging from minus 4 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Boston Dynamics has been publicly demoing its work on humanoid robots since at least 2011, when it first debuted Atlas as a DARPA project. Since then, the robot has gone through multiple prototypes and revisions, most notably switching from a hydraulic design to an all-electric design in 2024. Later that year, Boston Dynamics demonstrated the robot’s ability to manipulate car parts, which appears to be one of the first ways Atlas will be put to work. Hyundai plans to use Atlas in its car plants in 2028, focused on tasks like parts sequencing. In 2030, the car maker hopes to have the robot’s responsibilities “extend to component assembly, and over time, Atlas will also take on tasks involving repetitive motions, heavy loads, and other complex operations,” Hyundai says. Google DeepMind, meanwhile, is receiving Atlas robots so it can work on integrating its Gemini Robotics AI foundation models into Boston Dynamics’ system. https://tinyurl.com/393e2u4w

Microsoft adds checkout features to Copilot.

Microsoft is adding a buy button to its Copilot chatbot, the company said Thursday, making it the latest AI app to allow users to make purchases without leaving the chatbot window. The company said that shoppers will be able to purchase from retailers including Urban Outfitters and Etsy. Shopify merchants will automatically be enrolled in the feature following an opt-out window, Microsoft said. Merchants wanting to enroll via PayPal or Stripe can apply for access, which Microsoft said it will provide on a rolling basis. To help Copilot complete transactions and communicate with merchants, the feature will use the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a standard developed by OpenAI and Stripe to establish rules for how AI apps, merchants and payments firms communicate and complete transactions. Other AI-powered commerce features like OpenAI’s Instant Checkout have been rolling out slowly, in part due to the need to work hands-on with merchants on structuring and sharing accurate product data. OpenAI said it is trying to learn from early uses and incorporate feedback from merchants and payments firms. https://tinyurl.com/7yd7mx2r

JPMorgan to acquire Apple’s credit card program.

JPMorgan has struck a deal to replace Goldman Sachs as the provider of Apple’s credit card program, The Wall Street Journal reported. The largest U.S. bank will take over about US$20 billion in customer balances from Goldman at a slight discount, which is rare for branded credit card programs, the report said. JPMorgan last year emerged as Apple’s preferred choice to take over the program following extended negotiations with the bank and other potential acquirers, including Capital One and American Express. The Apple partnership represented one prong of Goldman Sach’s ill-fated expansion into retail consumer banking. Goldman Sachs was fined in 2024 by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for mishandling the program. https://tinyurl.com/hyw88j92

Polymarket trader made 1,242% return on Venezuela bet.

An account on prediction market Polymarket drew attention on social media for correctly building up a position betting Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro would be out, making a return of 1,242% in just four days. The account, created in December 2025, spent a total of US$32,537 over the past four days betting that Maduro would be out by Jan. 31. As President Donald Trump confirmed the U.S. had captured Maduro early Saturday morning, the account made profits of US$404,222, or a 1,242% return. It’s unclear who’s behind the account, or if the person has other accounts or positions. The account is also currently betting that the U.S. will invade Venezuela and Trump will invoke War Powers against Venezuela by the end of this month. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets in the U.S., generally forbids contracts related to events such as war, terrorism and assassination, which are contrary to the public interest. Polymarket’s global platform, where the account made its bets, is not open to U.S. users and therefore not subject to U.S. regulations. Polymarket has launched a separate platform for U.S. users. Kalshi also offers bets on when Maduro would be leaving office, though there’s currently no bet on potential U.S. invasion of Venezuela. https://tinyurl.com/mr5msmcj

Polymarket launches bets on housing prices.

Polymarket said Monday that it is launching prediction markets on U.S. housing prices, using data from Parcl, a real estate data and trading platform. Users can bet, for example, on the median home value in San Francisco on a given date. The outcome will be based on Parcl’s data. Parcl, backed by crypto venture firms including Archetype and Dragonfly, allows people to bet on housing prices without owning physical properties. Prediction markets are trying to diversify the categories of bets they offer. On Polymarket, sports betting currently makes up about half of its trading volume, followed by bets related to crypto prices. “Real estate should be a first-class category in prediction markets,” said Polymarket’s chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber in a release. Kalshi also offers real estate-related bets, such as rent increases in San Francisco and New York, based on data from Zillow and StreetEasy. https://tinyurl.com/4yz2pupd