South Korean authorities have imposed a record-breaking fine of $624 billion won (over $400 million) on retail giant Coupang after a data breach last year compromised the personal data of more than 34 million customers.

Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission issued the maximum penalty on Thursday following discovery of the breach in December 2025. The retail giant, which is headquartered in the U.S. but popular in South Korea and likened to the “Amazon of Asia,” had said the months-long data breach allowed a former employee to obtain names, email and shipping addresses, phone numbers, and order histories of about two-thirds of South Korea’s population.

Coupang told BBC News that it plans to challenge the regulator’s decision. The fine represents a rare case of a financial penalty issued against a U.S.-based firm. Korean lawmakers have accused some of their American counterparts of imposing political pressure after reports that U.S. representatives were linking the data breach with U.S.-South Korean bilateral ties in response to the case against Coupang’s executives.

U.S. companies rarely face financial sanctions or criminal prosecution for data breaches as a result of lacking laws and enforcement powers.

TL;DR

Salesforce’s stake in Anthropic is now worth approximately $5 billion after investing since early 2023, representing roughly two-thirds of its entire strategic portfolio. The return comes as Anthropic files confidentially for an IPO at a $965 billion valuation.

Salesforce has a stake in Anthropic worth approximately $5 billion after investing repeatedly in the Claude developer since early 2023, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The software company first participated in Anthropic’s fundraising with roughly $50 million and has continued investing in every subsequent round. With Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing also landing on Monday, Salesforce is positioned to realise one of the largest venture-style returns in enterprise software history.

The scale of the return becomes clearer in portfolio context. Salesforce’s total strategic investments across hundreds of companies were valued at $7.8 billion at the end of April, according to SEC filings. That figure predates Anthropic’s latest $65 billion funding round, which valued the company at $965 billion and more than doubled its previous valuation. After the revaluation, the Anthropic stake alone represents roughly two-thirds of Salesforce’s entire strategic investment portfolio.

The early bet

Salesforce Ventures acknowledged in a February blog post that the initial investment was not a consensus trade. “In 2023, betting on a research-heavy startup at a meaningful valuation was not obvious, given there was no market precedent of AI research turning into commercial success,” the firm wrote. Anthropic’s models now power AI features across Salesforce’s product suite, including Slack, and CEO Marc Benioff has said Salesforce will spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026.

The investment structure gives Salesforce a double exposure. It is both an investor capturing Anthropic’s valuation gains and a customer embedding Anthropic’s models into its own products, including the Agentforce AI agent platform that reached $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue last quarter. As enterprise AI spending shifts toward agentic platforms, Salesforce benefits regardless of whether its own AI products or Anthropic’s underlying models capture more of the value.

Not the only windfall

Salesforce is not the only company reaping outsized returns from early Anthropic bets. Zoom invested approximately $51 million in Anthropic’s Series C in May 2023 through its Zoom Ventures arm. That stake is now worth approximately $1.3 billion, a roughly 25x return in three years. Accel, which invested in Anthropic’s Series G, has seen its stake more than quadruple in months as the company’s valuation surged past OpenAI’s.

The returns reflect a dynamic that has become defining in the current AI cycle: a small number of model providers, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI, are capturing an extraordinary share of both venture capital and unrealised gains. For Salesforce, the $5 billion Anthropic stake has appreciated more than the combined market capitalisation gains of many of its software acquisitions.

The risks ahead

The $5 billion valuation is on paper until Anthropic’s IPO provides a public market price. Anthropic’s ongoing legal dispute with the Pentagon, which designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to grant the military unrestricted model access, represents a material overhang. Anthropic has said the designation could jeopardise billions in revenue.

For Salesforce specifically, the concentration of its strategic portfolio in a single company creates exposure that investors will scrutinise. If Anthropic’s IPO prices below the $965 billion private valuation, or if the stock declines post-listing, the mark-to-market impact on Salesforce’s balance sheet would be significant. Salesforce itself announced the acquisition of Contentful on the same day, continuing a heavy spending pace that has kept its own stock under pressure for months.

But the strategic logic of the original bet has been validated. Salesforce invested in Anthropic before the market had consensus that AI research labs could become commercial businesses. Three years later, Anthropic is filing for a public listing at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, and the $50 million that started the relationship has grown roughly 100-fold.

Mach Industries, the three-year-old defense tech startup run by 22-year-old founder and CEO Ethan Thornton, has raised a $300 million Series C at a $1.8 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday.

The raise nearly quadruples the valuation of the company in a year. In June 2025, Mach raised $100 million at a $470 million valuation. Other investors include Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

The round was led by deep tech fund Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, known for fintech and lately in hot deals everywhere — from AI coding startups like Cognition to neoclouds like Crusoe.

Since building autonomous weapons is a capital-intensive industry, Thornton began actively fundraising a couple of months ago, he told TechCrunch, and quickly discovered that the round would be popular with investors.

“We went out to raise 200 [million dollars] and we were extremely oversubscribed at 200 and happy with the price, so we decided to push up to 300. We’re still oversubscribed at the 300 mark,” Thornton said of the fundraising efforts.

Founded in 2023, Mach and its growth have been a wild ride for Thornton, who famously dropped out of MIT at 19 to start the company. VC enthusiasm is high for a few reasons. Other than AI, defense tech is a hot area for investment right now as newfangled autonomous weapons and drone defense systems prove themselves in battle in Ukraine.

Mach has also become prolific in its short time. The Huntington Beach, California-based company now has five autonomous vehicles in development: Viper, a jet-powered vertical takeoff vehicle; Glide, a high-altitude glider capable of launching weapons; Stratos, an airborne surveillance platform; Dart, a low-cost counter-drone interceptor; and Pike, intended for launching long-range munitions. Production is expected to begin next year on at least three of these systems, the company says.

Plus, just this week, it won a Department of Defense contract to create a new, sixth vehicle that the startup has never discussed publicly, Thornton tells TechCrunch. The contract is from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to develop the Navy’s new “runway-independent strike aircraft,” as the startup describes it.

This will be for a very large aircraft, Thornton says, that could have applications in the commercial industry, too.

It has also grown from about a dozen employees in its first year to about 350 employees today, has a 115,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huntington Beach, and design and production facilities in a number of other locations.

“So by the end of this year, in 2026, we will have brought on four new production facilities,” Thornton said.

But another reason VCs wrote big checks is that last month, Mach orchestrated an industry coup (excuse the pun) when it acquired solid rocket motor (SRM) startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal, as TechCrunch previously reported. It beat out upward of eight other potential buyers, the startup said.

There’s an acute shortage of SRMs as drones create unprecedented demand in a market controlled by two of the major prime defense contractors, Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman. The lead times for purchasing can stretch years.

With this buy, Mach controls its own destiny for rocket motors and also launched a new commercial business, Mach Energetics, to sell the engines. While Thornton declined to share revenue, he said the current mix is 50/50 between selling to the government and selling to other companies.

Thornton remembers a moment last year when all the fast growth of the company really hit him. Two years ago, the all-hands meetings were held in the conference room with “like 12 people,” he said. “At our two-year party we had like 200 plus chairs and it was standing-room only.”

Still, he said, he’s most proud of the speed of product development. That is, after all, the entire reason for his company and for the defense tech industry. The idea with these startups, backed by tech VCs, is to bring faster, more affordable products to the military and related commercial uses, as opposed to the expensive, bespoke offerings that legacy prime defense contractors offer.

“Traditionally, it’s four years to build a jet engine. That’s about the fastest you can find in this space. And we went from no team to building a team to a jet engine firing in about eight months,” Thornton said.