20VC

Harry Stebbings × Fred Turner

Curative turned a failed lab-license wind-down into roughly $5 billion of COVID-testing revenue, scaling from 7 to 7,000 employees in nine months through an orthogonal supply chain built for 10x capacity.Its structurally loss-making troughs contrast with Claude agents cutting credentialing to 20 cents and Gwen contracts to $70, making administrative automation an earnings lever incumbents may struggle to copy.

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 × 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 × Alan Chang

Fuse Energy has grown revenue 10x annually—from £2M to £20M and over 200 this year—while raising 70 at a 5 billion valuation.Chang credits speed, quality-engineering hiring, and parallel bets—not capital—while diversified products offset Revolut’s near-zero interchange revenue during COVID lockdowns.The next test is roughly 5x growth, with hiring speed the stated constraint and UK planning barriers, grid bottlenecks, and renewable intermittency worth monitoring.

Harry Stebbings × Raaz Herberg

The panel frames 2026 as a potential IPO supercycle, with SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks potentially representing $1.4T of market capitalization and roughly $700B returned to venture, though timing remains exposed to market conditions.AI-app valuations such as Harvey at $8B depend on sustained growth and market dominance while deep-reasoning advances could obsolete today’s products, and Airwallex’s $8B price highlights both Asia-discount opportunity and China data-risk scrutiny.

Alex Bouaziz × Harry Stebbings

Deel is raising over $300 million at a valuation above $17 billion despite three profitable years, with September’s first $100 million revenue month and 60% of revenue from cross-sell and expansion supporting a broader acquisition offensive.Its advantage is owning payroll rails, workflows and proprietary data while integrating acquisitions in parallel, but brand expansion, Rippling litigation, sustained 15%-17% EBITDA and four or five clean quarters will shape the path toward a possible IPO.

Harry Stebbings × Vlad Tenev

Robinhood’s $35B-to-$85B re-rating reflects a strategy finally gaining credibility, with active-trader focus and near-100% engineering AI adoption reshaping its operating model.Tenev’s expansion thesis is tokenization without issuer opt-in, solving retail access’s adverse-selection problem as 200+ EU stock tokens move toward 24/7 trading, self-custody, and DeFi, with US regulation unresolved.

Harry Stebbings × Max Levchin

Max Levchin argues hiring can screen out C and D performers but cannot reliably distinguish A from B talent until people join, making integrity, incentives, and protection against insecure managers more consequential than letter grades.Affirm’s postmortem system turns failures into institutional knowledge through segregated evidence, named authors, and senior review, while its reported 35% growth, 45-day-to-four-year terms, and emphasis on durable infrastructure remain more important than an unsupported AI narrative.