GenAI Daily - February 5, 2026: Waymo's $16B Funding, Ai2's SERA Open Source Breakthrough, Meta Superintelligence Lab Progress

Top Story

Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle company, has raised $16 billion as it plans to grow its fleet of driverless taxicabs this year to more than a dozen new cities internationally, including London and Tokyo. Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital led the funding round, which now values Waymo at $126 billion. Waymo said the funds will be used to fuel its growth, which has accelerated over the past year and doesn't appear to be slowing.

The massive funding round represents the largest investment ever in an autonomous vehicle company and comes as in 2025 alone, Waymo more than tripled its annual volume to 15 million rides, surpassing 20 million lifetime rides to date. Today, with more than 400,000 rides provided every week across six major U.S. metropolitan areas, Waymo has demonstrated that its technology is not just the most advanced manifestation of AI in the physical world, but a vital service that people have come to rely on in their daily lives.

Why it matters: Waymo's record-breaking funding validates that autonomous vehicle technology is moving from experimental to commercially viable, setting the stage for global expansion of robotaxi services and potentially disrupting traditional transportation models.

Key Developments

Ai2 Releases SERA-14B - UPDATE

The Allen Institute for AI has expanded its Open Coding Agents initiative with the release of SERA-14B, a new 14-billion-parameter model designed for more efficient deployment and easier customization. The team is also shipping a substantial refresh of its open SERA training datasets. The data is now in a general, model-agnostic format with verification thresholds for each sample and additional metadata to make filtering, analysis, and downstream training easier.

The SERA family (Soft-verified Efficient Repository Agents) can solve more than 55% of SWE-Bench Verified problems, a benchmark surpassing prior open-source models of comparable sizes, and costs just $500 to run, meaning any lab with a few GPUs can now do coding agent research. (Source)

Impact: Democratizes coding agent development by making enterprise-grade AI programming assistants accessible to small teams and independent developers at a fraction of traditional costs.

OpenAI IPO Plans Face Growing Skepticism - UPDATE

OpenAI is reportedly racing toward a fourth-quarter IPO that would test investor faith in the giant startup—and in the AI boom itself. The AI lab has begun informal talks with Wall Street banks in an effort to beat rival AI startup Anthropic to market. While OpenAI boasts a $500 billion valuation, it doesn't expect to turn a profit until 2030.

However, NYU professor Scott Galloway predicted that OpenAI could withdraw its IPO plans entirely, assigning a "nonzero probability" to the company pulling its public listing. His skepticism stands in sharp contrast to reports that OpenAI is seeking additional funding at valuations as high as $830 billion. (Source)

Impact: Growing skepticism about AI valuations and cash burn rates could signal a broader market correction for unprofitable AI companies seeking public listings.

Meta Superintelligence Lab Delivers First Internal Models

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth announced at Davos that the company's new AI lab delivered its first big internal AI models this month. Meta Superintelligence Labs—launched only last year—already shows strong promise. The team's just six months in, but their early results look surprisingly solid.

Meta's AI team is building two key models: Mango (an advanced model focused on images and videos) and Avocado (a text-based model aimed at becoming better at coding and reasoning). These models are expected to launch in the first half of 2026. (Source)

Impact: Meta's internal model delivery marks a significant step in its effort to catch up with OpenAI and Google in the AI race, potentially reshaping competition in multimodal AI and coding assistance.

Funding & Deals

• Waabi - $750M Series C: Toronto-based Physical AI startup developing autonomous trucks and robotaxis with unified AI platform - Led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, includes strategic partnership with Uber for 25,000+ robotaxis (Source)

• Aerofugia - $136M Series C: Chengdu-based eVTOL aircraft startup developing AE200 series for urban air mobility, largest funding in China's low-altitude transport sector in 2026 - Led by CSCI (Source)

• Biorce - $52M Series B: Machine learning platform for drug development optimization, focusing on clinical trial automation and pharmaceutical R&D efficiency (Source)

• Rain - $250M Series C: Crypto-payments startup at $1.95B valuation, develops blockchain infrastructure for digital payments and cross-border transactions - Led by Iconiq Capital (Source)

Related reading: Check out this week's Deep Insights analysis for strategic context on these developments.