Four funding announcements went out on October 29 and 30. Three were private rounds. The fourth, and by far the biggest, rang the New York Stock Exchange opening bell and then never traded.
Collective, Wabi and AvalonX announced up to $165 million between them, debt included. OPay priced a $304 million IPO and pulled it the same day. The common thread in the three private rounds is the small customer: AI sold to people and businesses too small to pay for the human version. The split between private and public money says a lot about what investors want right now.
Wabi gets a unicorn price for a product weeks old
Wabi raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation. IVP led, with Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner and the Amazon Alexa Fund joining, plus angels including Shopify’s Tobi Lütke, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Marissa Mayer and Dick Costolo. Wabi is the new company from Eugenia Kuyda, who built the AI companion app Replika. It started as a tool for building mini apps from prompts, relaunched as a messenger in late September and went public on iOS, Android and Mac on October 19. A personal agent sits in your chats and builds small shared tools as you need them: a couple’s restaurant list, a family meal plan, a trivia game for a friend group. Windows comes next, and the money goes to product and expansion.
There’s no user count. The app is free, with no stated business model. IVP partner Alex Lim said Kuyda has “a track record of great taste” in building AI, and that’s what the check is for. It’s a bet on the founder.
Collective and AvalonX sell the expensive expert, cheaper
Collective’s $100 million comes in two pieces. A $40 million Series B was led by General Catalyst, QED Investors and Gradient Ventures, with Intuit Ventures, FT Partners and SemperVirens taking part. The other $60 million is a growth facility from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, set aside for customer acquisition. The venture bet is the $40 million.
The company handles bookkeeping, payroll, taxes, entity setup and insurance for one-person businesses, with AI handling much of the work. It says annual recurring revenue is growing 120 percent a year and that its AI support resolves half of member requests on its own. It gave no valuation and no revenue figure. CEO Hooman Radfar’s pitch is simple: accounting firms grow by hiring people, Collective grows with software. Next it wants to serve businesses with employees and add banking and insurance products.
AvalonX, based in Alpharetta, Georgia, came out of 18 months in stealth with up to $10 million from Ridown Capital, the investment firm of Onecom co-founders Aaron Brown and Darren Ridge. Its product, Artemis, runs continuous penetration testing for small and midsize businesses. Autonomous agents probe a network the way an attacker would, and human testers check the findings that need an expert. The company says it runs on Aether, its own 400-billion-parameter security model, and maps results to SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, PCI DSS 4.0 and HIPAA. CEO Craig Goodwin was previously CISO at Fujitsu, Monster and CDK Global. AvalonX didn’t say how it will spend the money. The more useful asset may be the backer: Onecom serves more than 65,000 small and midsize businesses, which is a ready sales channel for a product aimed at exactly that buyer.
OPay had real numbers and still didn’t trade
OPay, founded in Nigeria in 2018 by Yahui Zhou, offers payments, transfers, savings and loans in Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia. Its prospectus showed first-half 2026 revenue of $467.1 million, up 136.5 percent, and net profit of $90.9 million, with 50.1 million monthly active users in July. Nigeria brought in 89.5 percent of that revenue. SoftBank entities held 6.6 percent before the offering.
It sold 16 million American depositary shares at $19, the bottom of its $19 to $21 range, for a valuation of about $4 billion. On Friday the NYSE showed a halt with news pending, and indicated opening prices sat below the IPO price. Later that day OPay said it wouldn’t proceed for now, citing a regulatory inquiry in a foreign jurisdiction it didn’t name and called immaterial to its core business.
So the company with profits got priced at the low end and stalled, and the one with no disclosed users got $1.25 billion. Watch whether OPay names the regulator and comes back, and whether Wabi shows a user number before it raises again.