20VC: Meta's Muse Hits No. 1. ChatGPT Finally Has a Rival | Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm | Factory Triples Its Valuation to $5 Billion | Keith Rabois vs Airwallex: Who is Right? | Crusoe's $3.9 Billion Round. Is the Data Centre Trade Overheating?

Meta's Muse Tops App Store as First Real ChatGPT Rival

Funding and deals

• Anthropic. Delays its roughly $2tn IPO from October to November, which Rory O'Driscoll says gives a cleaner story after a strong second quarter.
• Factory. Enterprise coding agent provider that tripled its valuation to $5bn in a $200m round, which Jason Lemkin backs.
• Crusoe. Data center builder raising $3.9bn at a $30.9bn valuation, with about $140bn of contracted orders.
• Legora. Legal AI company that reached $200m in annual recurring revenue and plans its next round at an $11bn valuation.

News

• Meta's Muse becomes the first real ChatGPT rival. The free assistant with autonomous agents hit number one on the App Store, and Meta added about $100bn in market value in a week. Jason Lemkin calls it a Trojan horse against ChatGPT.
• OpenAI expected to burn $278bn by 2030. Jason Lemkin expects actual burn to run 30 to 50 percent above plan. Rory O'Driscoll notes Anthropic holds about $122bn of cash against roughly $700bn of capital spending, much of it on partners' balance sheets.
• Cheap Jev model becomes Vercel's fastest launch. Jason Lemkin says it is a classifier backed by an LLM at about a hundredth of Anthropic's price for narrow tasks. Rory O'Driscoll sees about 20 percent of the $100bn LLM spend moving to cheaper models.
• Amazon blocks AI shopping agents while Shopify partners. Rory O'Driscoll says Amazon's advertising business now outweighs its e-commerce profit, so agentic buying threatens it, but he expects a negotiated settlement.
• Seed rounds now start around $20m. Harry Stebbings says first raises are rarely under $20m, and Andreessen Horowitz launched a university with $40m for pre-inception investing. Rory O'Driscoll says buying at these prices lowers expected returns.
• Airwallex draws attacks over alleged Chinese ownership. Keith Rabois and Joe Lonsdale attacked the company on X. Harry Stebbings says claims that more than 20 percent of its cap table is Chinese are untrue.
• Nasdaq swings from AI capex fear to a record day. Rory O'Driscoll says the move took eight hours, and he warns that data center investments, levered at four or five to one, are exposed to any slowdown.
• AI agents may bypass OpenTable and Resy. Jason Lemkin says agents will route around systems of record such as OpenTable and Resy. Rory O'Driscoll agrees middlemen get squeezed but thinks the effect will be marginal.