Leaked Anthropic draft S-1 reportedly shows about $4.6bn of 2025 revenue, an $8bn operating loss and $518bn of compute commitments.
Instinct closed a $1bn Series C at a $10bn valuation, and Jack Altman says Benchmark sees consumer agents as a major new paradigm where many players can win.
AMD's $8.2bn purchase of World Labs, led by Fei-Fei Li, signals that big foundation labs will chase robotics and world model companies, according to Rory O'Driscoll.
Benchmark Leads $1 Billion Round Valuing Instinct at $10 Billion
Funding and deals
Instinct. AI agent company founded by 23 year old Noah Shin closed a $1bn Series C at a $10bn valuation, led by Benchmark.
World Labs. AMD is buying Fei-Fei Li's world model startup for $8.2bn in stock, the first big neolab exit, about two and a half years in.
Anthropic. The AI lab's leaked draft S-1 shows about $4.6bn of 2025 revenue and an $8bn operating loss against $518bn of compute commitments.
Oura. Pulled its IPO, planned at about $16bn, just before pricing, and Forerunner had planned to sell its entire position.
Modal. The inference company's round triples its valuation to $15bn, while rival Base 10 is reportedly in talks at $26bn.
Nubank. Reported to be eyeing a takeover of UK bank Monzo at an estimated $8bn to $12bn.
Guest interviews
Jack Altman, partner at Benchmark. Jack says consumer agents are a big new paradigm in which many players will win, and he predicts agent usage will grow about 100 times. He is long inference, arguing open source share could fall 50% while total consumption rises 10 times. He expects quite a few AI native companies to list in 2027 and says only about 10 companies can afford $10bn acquisitions.
News
MongoDB's CEO quits for Meta, shares drop 20%. The CEO left less than nine months into the job to run Meta's enterprise division, and the former CEO stepped back in. Jason Lemkin says Mark Zuckerberg offered a $500m package.
Bessemer raises $5.75bn across its funds. The total includes a $1.75bn seed fund. Jason Lemkin says a seed round is about $30m today, and Harry Stebbings says his team cannot find one under $100m.
OpenAI reopens $200 plan after compute shortage. The plan had been paused after OpenAI ran out of compute for its latest Azure model, and it now buys half as much as before.
Sonnet 5.5 uses more tokens but costs less. Jason Lemkin's test found input tokens up 42% and output tokens up 44%, with cost down about 10%. He says Anthropic could cut prices 30% or 40%.
Anthropic founders lock up 50.1% of voting control. Rory O'Driscoll says he changed his mind on founder control, citing activist pressure in public markets, and calls trusting the founders with the votes reasonable.
Tap a name to go there · tap a line to see why they are linked