20VC x SaaStr: OpenAI Cuts to $1.25 Trillion, Anthropic’s Growth Goes From 12x to 2x, and Why Agents Are an Existential Risk to DoorDash - www.saastr.com
By Google News AI ·
by Jason Lemkin | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts
Alphabet loses about $500B in market cap, DoorDash buys Instacart for $17B, Kalshi hits $40B a day after criminal charges, and we each had to pick one deal to take to IC: Cognition, Baseten or Serval.
This was one of the busiest weeks we’ve had on the pod. The AI trade wobbled hard. OpenAI took a lower price to fill its round, Alphabet had its worst day in about a decade, and Anthropic’s latest S-1 amendment showed quarter-over-quarter growth cut roughly in half. At the same time, money kept pouring into whatever is working: Kalshi, Cohere, Baseten, Cognition, Serval and Physical Intelligence all raised or are raising at numbers that would have sounded crazy a year ago. Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll and I went through all of it. Below are the top takeaways, followed by the best lines from each of us.
What happened: OpenAI has secured about $11 billion of the $30 billion it sought and now aims for up to $20 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, per the WSJ, FT and CNBC. The FT says OpenAI pitched $1.4 trillion and cut it to $1.25 trillion a week before the deadline, as tech stocks were falling after the results from Google, Amazon and Intel.
Rory’s read: Drop the “AI wave is cracking” story. Rory thinks people are projecting their own biases onto what is really a simple pricing question. Two securities are about to be sold over the next couple of months. One belongs to a bigger, faster-growing, profitable company that’s about to list, and you’ll be able to buy it liquid at $1.5 to $2 trillion. The other belongs to a smaller company that’s growing more slowly, still losing money and illiquid. Of course the second one prices below $1.5 trillion. The only open question is how far below.
Jason’s read: I…
Originally published by Google News AI
