20VC: Cognition vs Factory: Vinod Khosla Creates a Storm | OpenAI Nears $70B Run Rate: Anthropic Under Threat | ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B & Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B

OpenAI Seeks $30 Billion at $1.4 Trillion Valuation

Funding and deals

• OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker nears a $70bn run rate and seeks $30bn at a $1.4tn valuation, with its IPO reportedly waiting until 2027.
• ElevenLabs. The voice AI company doubled its valuation to $22bn. Jason Lemkin says a friends and family round is hoped to close at $50bn.
• Listen Labs. Salesforce is buying the AI market research startup for $2bn. Sequoia, which led the A, gets about $850m back on $96m invested.
• Aura. Pulled its IPO despite 74 percent growth on $1.2bn of revenue. Harry Stebbings says the board should have taken the bid at $13 a share.

Guest interviews

• Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB. He says OpenAI's billion weekly ChatGPT users are a strong distribution channel, but developers show little loyalty and the enterprise business is where the moat sits. He argues a US open model near frontier quality could be three to four times more cost effective for enterprises. He adds that joining a direct competitor does long-term reputational damage, and he has never seen a CRO make that jump.

News

• Khosla's tweet escalates Factory and Cognition feud. Cognition hired CRO Chris Deignan, a former Factory board observer, and Vinod Khosla, who led Factory's Series C, then called Factory a struggling second tier rival. Rory O'Driscoll calls the tweet a mistake.
• Anthropic out-earned OpenAI in Q2, hosts say. Rory O'Driscoll cites Q2 GAAP revenue of $11bn for Anthropic against $6.8bn for OpenAI, with Anthropic growing about 10x. He calls Anthropic's Q3 number key ahead of its expected mid-November IPO.
• Reflection's launch revives US open-weight hopes. Rory O'Driscoll sees a US open-weight model near frontier quality as strategically attractive. Jason Lemkin predicts US models could reach half of open-source token flow within twelve months, though he distrusts published evals.
• Vercel hits $600m ARR as agents drive sales. Agents now make up 50 percent of Vercel's new business, up from 3 percent at the start of the year. Jason Lemkin says the company is growing 170 percent.
• Two ex-Groq engineers sue over NVIDIA deal. The Delaware suit targets NVIDIA's $17bn license and hire deal, which they say left common shareholders with less. Jason Lemkin argues such deals will die on double taxation and legal risk.
• OpenAI's Dots launch gets a mixed reception. Harry Stebbings calls the launch very unimpressive, while Jason Lemkin defends it as a persistent coding agent and wants thirty days to see what developers build.