20VC

Harry Stebbings × Rory

SpaceX’s all-stock Cursor takeover, completed within a week and carrying a breakup fee, highlights AI M&A’s currency and clearance advantages while testing premium pricing against forward revenue.Stripe’s OpenRouter bet monetizes routing complexity but faces model drift, while Workday’s take-private underscores system-of-record durability without guaranteed upsell; AI-budget ceilings and agentic roadmaps remain key risks.

Harry Stebbings × Paul Erlanger

FOMO raised a $75M Series B at a $550M post-money valuation from Index and USV, with founders anchoring the price before receiving a term sheet.Its 17-person, AI-enabled organization has no meetings, 1:1s, or hierarchy, while founder-grade equity aligns a small group for a decade-long build.Pre-IPO perps and thesis-driven trading could define its global wedge, but SpaceX’s retail performance and prediction-market regulation remain key tests.

Harry Stebbings

Anthropic’s filing alongside a $65B raise and Cursor’s potential $60B exit reset startup scale and public-market timing.Token budgets are the battleground: Uber capped spend at $1,500/month, agent-attached software rose, and classic per-seat SaaS weakened.Watch whether tokens reach 33% of engineering compensation, or whether capex intensity and PE software returns constrain the upside.

Harry Stebbings × Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Siemiatkowski argues that near-zero software creation costs and one-click data migration could push threatened SaaS revenue multiples from 5–10x toward utility-like 1–2x, while enterprises reorganize around secure Lego-like components and agents.Klarna’s workforce fell from more than 7,000 to fewer than 3,000, with fewer than 2,000 possible by 2030, but whether AI-driven information compression reduces compute demand or consumer generation overwhelms those savings remains unresolved.

Harry Stebbings

Brex’s $5.15B sale to Capital One resets the comparison for Ramp’s roughly $32B mark: a real-money acquisition applied about seven times revenue to Brex’s roughly $700M, while Discover’s closed network gives Capital One a structural interchange advantage.Anthropic’s inference costs ran 23% above expectations even as gross margin improved to roughly 40%, leaving mid-tier SaaS economics and AI-capex sustainability unresolved.

Harry Stebbings

SpaceX combines exceptional rocket and Starlink businesses with roughly $15 billion of revenue growing about 30%, yet its $800 billion mark exceeds 40x run-rate revenue.The valuation embeds an Elon premium and leaves downside if growth decelerates, while 2026 IPOs from SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks could unlock liquidity without fixing private-market overpricing.

Harry Stebbings

OpenAI’s restructuring removes its corporate obstacle to raising another $100–200 billion and moves a potential IPO one enormous step closer, while Microsoft retains IP rights, revenue share, and prospective Azure business. a16z’s $10 billion scale supports optioning and follow-ons, but Mercor’s $350 million round at a $10 billion valuation depends on three to five more years of AI CapEx hypergrowth despite pass-through margins and two customers reportedly exceeding 50% of revenue.

Harry Stebbings × Hemant Taneja

General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja is concentrating venture around few companies while adding a few hundred million to Anthropic at $60B and again at $180B, a 5x oversubscribed round.He cites roughly 20x ARR versus peers at 50-100x, while model durability remains highly unclear; GC caps venture funds to deliver four to 5x and routes scale into creation and customer-value vehicles.

Harry Stebbings

Databricks at $100 billion looks relatively inexpensive beside Snowflake because both have roughly a $4 billion run rate, but Databricks grows 50% versus Snowflake’s 26%.The valuation works only if growth persists for several years, while a coming IPO wave could release venture returns without preserving today’s scarcity premiums.Nubank’s $2.5 billion net income and 123 million customers show the upside of replacing the incumbent bank, whereas CoreWeave’s $11.2 billion debt remains dependent on matched customer commitments and AI demand.

Harry Stebbings × Martin Mignot

Index's $11.5B invested and close to $30B returned show decade-scale concentration: most value sits in eight or nine companies, reinforcing its focus on entering category leaders early and building double-digit exit ownership.Martin Mignot says early gross margin and price should not block exceptional deals, but overcapitalization before product-market fit remains dangerous; mechanical post-IPO selling and Cohere/Mistral exposure frame trade-offs between outcome size, dilution and liquidity.