A fresh all-secondary investment of $153 million has raised the valuation of Indian nutrition startup HealthKart to almost $500 million, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Private equity companies ChrysCapital and Motilal Oswal co-led the investment, which was one of the biggest for an Indian consumer business this year. Avendus Capital provided financial advice. The round also included participation from asset manager Neo Group and A91 Partners. At one point, the startup was worth $350 million.

According to the sources, some of the original investors in the firm sold their shares to the new backers. Peak XV, formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, has sold the shares it purchased for around $15 million for nearly $120 million, effectively exiting the firm. Temasek, Sofina, and financial management IIFL are also supporters of HealthKart.

HealthKart, a company based in Gurugram, announced $118.5 million in revenue for the fiscal year that concluded in March 2024, solidifying its standing as the biggest consumer nutrition platform in India. The firm offers health accessories and protein supplements for sale.

The 13-year-old company, which split off from online drugstore startup 1MG, announced on Thursday that it is repurchasing $6.5 million worth of employee shares. In the fiscal year that concluded in March, the startup was EBITDA profitable.

“The Indian sports nutrition market, currently underpenetrated, is expected to expand due to a rise in fitness awareness and the increasing importance of nutrition and protein,” said Arpit Vinayak, VP at ChrysCapital, in a statement.

Recent court documents reveal that OpenAI had contemplated purchasing Cerebras, an AI chip manufacturer preparing to go public.

According to new evidence in Elon Musk’s continuing case against OpenAI, OpenAI was considering acquiring Cerebras in or around 2017—a year after Cerebras was founded and only a few years after OpenAI started operations.

Ilya Sutskever, a former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, proposed purchasing Cerebras through Musk’s electric vehicle business, Tesla, in an email sent to Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Musk had some control over OpenAI’s course at the time and was financially invested in the company.

In September 2017, Sutskever wrote, “In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that it’ll be done through Tesla,” “But why do it this way if we could also do it from within OpenAI? Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI’s mission. So the overall result may not end up being optimal for OpenAI.”

Sutskever lists a number of Cerebras-related agenda items in a previous email sent in July 2017 to Musk and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who is currently the company’s president: “Negotiate merger terms with Cerebras” and “More due diligence with Cerebras.”

Although it’s unclear from the exhibits why, the merger deal would eventually fail. Additionally, OpenAI would put its chip goals on hold for years.

Based in Sunnyvale, California, Cerebras creates specialized hardware for AI model execution and training. The company asserts that its chips are quicker and more effective for AI workloads than Nvidia’s flagship products.

Cerebras has received $715 million in venture funding and is apparently looking to use the IPO to almost treble its $4 billion valuation. But it has a lot of obstacles to overcome. Eighty-seven percent of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024 came from a single Abu Dhabi company, G42, whose longstanding ties to China have alarmed U.S. politicians. Having pled guilty to evading financial controls while serving as a vice president at the publicly traded business Riverstone Networks, Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebras, likewise had a troubled past.

The transaction might have been advantageous to both businesses if it had taken place. OpenAI may have had an important advantage in its competition to develop in-house chips, while Cerebras would have avoided the road to a challenging IPO.

Since Nvidia holds a significant portion of the market for processors with AI optimization, OpenAI has long aimed to lessen its need on the company. OpenAI is under pressure to lower the cost of training, fine-tuning, and operating models, even though it is late to the in-house chip game—Google and Amazon Web Services, among others, have long provided chips made for AI workloads. It could be able to achieve the necessary savings by having its own chips.

At one point, OpenAI was thinking about being an acquisition target and intended to build a network of chip manufacturing factories. However, IBM has apparently shelved such plans in favor of rapidly expanding a team of engineers and chip designers and collaborating with semiconductor companies TSMC and Broadcom to develop an AI processor for running models. It might show up as early as 2026.

Starfish Space, a business providing satellite services, revealed on November 13 that it has raised $29 million in a fresh round of funding headed by Shield Capital. Munich Re Ventures, Toyota Ventures, NFX, and Industrious Ventures are among the other investors in the round, along with newcomers Point72 Ventures, Booz Allen Ventures, Aero X Ventures, Trousdale Ventures, and TRAC VC.

Established by former engineers from Blue Origin and NASA, Starfish Space creates self-sufficient satellite maintenance vehicles to prolong the lifespan of satellites and eliminate space junk. Recent successes for the company include agreements with NASA and commercial satellite operator Intelsat, as well as a $37.5 million contract with the U.S. Space Force.

With the closing of the latest round, Starfish has raised more than $50 million in total fundraising to date.

Otter is an in-space maintenance vehicle created by Tukwila, Washington-based Starfish. Starfish will be able to finish developing the first three Otter vehicles with the new money, which will be used for missions for NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and Intelsat. In 2026, Intelsat and the U.S. Space Force are expected to launch their Otter missions into geostationary orbit.

The investment in Starfish is the third space-focused investment made by Booz Allen Ventures, the startup capital division of consulting behemoth Booz Allen Hamilton. According to Chris Bogdan, executive vice president of Booz Allen and head of the company’s space division, “This investment aims to strengthen the resilience and sustainability of space infrastructure through innovative offerings for both government and commercial mission sets,”

Prior space investments made by the corporation include Quindar, which automates satellite fleet management operations, and Albedo, which creates low-flying satellites for high-resolution Earth observation.Starfish Space, a business providing satellite services, raises $29 million.