Moonshot Plans IPO in Six Months After China AI Breakthrough

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1:36Or watch us live on YouTube. Lots of IPOs. That's certainly been the score for much of 2026. And we said the big investment banks reported earnings last week, and they were touting how much the deals they're getting done and how good their pipeline looks. And we've got more still coming here. That's keeping our next guest very busy. Belly Lipschultz, senior equities reporter for Bloomberg News. Moonshot AI. Oh, boy, I'm afraid to ask, what is this thing and when is it coming? You haven't heard of Moonshot AI? No, I have not. You are not? what really really oh my gosh i mean they moved markets on friday they're the reason that friday i was on that beach oh you look like you got some sun okay moonshot moonshot runs uh the kimmy model kimmy k3 was the latest kind of model kimmy k3 is a ai do i have to put that on my phone next to claude and they're a chinese company and they're open source so i think i know your answer there uh but so this is a company that really burst onto the scene while you were on a beach enjoying the nice weather that really kind of caught, took the world by storm, I guess you could say.

2:40And very quickly, Bloomberg is reporting they are now eyeing a Hong Kong IPO in the next six months. So that would be a quick turnaround. Companies, according to our reporting, working to close a funding round at$30 billion valuation. So relatively small potatoes compared to the anthropics and open AIs of the world. But it is pretty interesting just given how quickly the company, again, became for some a household name overnight, similar to that deep seek moment we had a few years back. Yeah. And trying to capitalize on that excitement. It's a Beijing based startup. It's held talks with China International Capital Corp and Goldman Sachs about working on an offering.

3:18The one part of the deals market that's been kind of sluggish is exits from private equity and exiting their investments and listing them on the public markets jersey mikes is kind of uh in defiance of that if uh it actually does go through with an ipo yeah and we've seen actually blackstone try to live up to their promises from jonathan gray that this was going to be the year of an ipo of the ipo they did take out uh blackstone digital which is kind of an ai data center roll-up firm and they also took out liftoff which is in the the app space but jersey mikes more of a household name i think you've been to one of those yes okay so you know, Jersey Mike's, uh, the company and their backers, including Blackstone looking to sell up to$1.1 billion in this IPO would value the company at about$8 billion.

4:05So that is kind of a big valuation relative to most kind of growing casual, uh, chains, if you will. The big pitch, at least when I talk to investors, is they look at the success from Kava. They look at Jersey Mike's Jersey Mike's Blackstone asset, but they brought in the leadership team from Wingstop. So you have seasoned vets running the show. You have Blackstone, which is going to make a decent amount of money on this IPO. And then you also have the international pitch they partnered with the Jersey Mike's founder to help lead an expansion in the UK. So fast growing, pretty darn good franchise model here in the US, international ambitions and private equity sponsor is what kind of BlackRock own this for about a cup of coffee.

4:43Let's be honest. When did they bought this just a few years ago? Blackstone closed the deal in January of last year. So in terms of the turn, one and a half years is fast. Awesome for them. I mean, and their IRR, I'll go do the math on the train ride home. But I'm going to guess our IRR is monstrous. Yeah, it's a big return. And it's a big, again, a quick return in a time when people, to Scarlett's point, private equity hasn't been super active in getting these exits. The interesting thing is you step back when that deal was announced back in November of 2024. And consumer bankers were like, this is a company that could have gone public then.

5:16So then you bring in Blackstone. They do a little bit of private equity magic. But again, they bring in an experienced management team, get the operations where they want it in a quick turn, quick money. And at least when I talk to folks on the buy side, they like it. And that is super important when they go out to raise the next fund, which is when I was looking at private equity, maybe 20 years ago, I was told pretty easy to raise money. It's really easy to invest money. It's really hard to sell to get a good exit. And so the way you get raised money is to say, hey, I'm generating returns. I'm getting exits, It's successful exits.

5:52And they happen to be, I mean, Blackstone obviously is huge, but you're not overexposed to software, which is a good timing because you talk to some of the folks at the Toma Bravos of the world and it's like, okay, well, you're super bullish on software. This is the opposite time. Totally different narrative, right? Very quickly, Billy, is there anything new with Anthropic or OpenAI going public? This week, Anthropic is meeting with some of the largest long-only investors. We put that out at the end of last week. So that'll be the formal starting to my understanding of testing the waters meetings, talking about what the size could look like, what the company looks like.

6:25Again, a lot of these funds own it. So they're meeting with Dario and team that they know. But the big thing is this seems to be indicating that that September, October time frame is in play, whereas OpenAI, for all intents and purposes, is very much seen as a 2027 story. And are we expecting activity to, once every week gets back from vacation, September kick back in? Is that kind of the thing? Yeah, we get a little burst with Jersey Mike's. People expect Cumberland Farms. Cumberland Farms? Yeah, they file. I grew up with Cumberland Farms. Yeah, EG Group. Yeah, that'll be another big one. That's a competitor to Wawa, John.

6:54So, I mean, you're a Cumberland Farms person, you're a Wawa person. I don't know how you go there. No, Cumberland Farms is, no, I'm not going to characterize you as getting in trouble. I've never been there. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. Over$100 trillion estimated to be transferred to generations in the next 25 years. It's both a risk and opportunity because we see that only about 18, 19 percent of high net worth investors plan on sticking with their advisor post-transfer. This has to be a tough statistic for some to hear. People who work so hard trying to grow their net assets, they want to protect that life work and they want to make sure that it is able to transfer in a seamless way.

7:40Support for the show comes from Public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the risk. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined.

8:18An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by public investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks.

8:58You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube. We heard another company, you know, IPO, DeepSeek.

9:40Talk to us about DeepSeek because that rocked the AI world, I don't know, a year ago because they came out with a pretty good AI product at a much lower cost. Talk to us about DeepSeek. Yes. So in January of 2025, DeepSeek came out to the Chinese-owned, Chinese-based AI chatbot and basically ramped up on downloads about 170 million downloads in 2025 alone is as you mentioned significantly cheaper for many of the uh tasks that people ask it to do so one study i read that for a basic intelligent task it would cost two cents versus 275 okay for some of the other models so just to put that into perspective but what has happened since then um is that downloads have subsequently declined.

10:26This year and year to date, it's only been downloaded 34 million times and only 2 million times within the U.S. So there could be a number of reasons for that. One might be the fear of security. The servers are based in China, so there might be questions about national security and the security of the information if people use it. So that's one of the options, as well as other products such as ChatGPT and Claude ramping up their features and functionality. So it seems like on these AI tools here, whether it's a Claude or a Gemini, they iterate so often, right? Yes, yes. And they make material jumps in quality and capabilities.

11:09How do you guys track that? How do you guys track, like, who are the big ones, who are the good ones? How do you guys do that? So based on our data, we have a proprietary first-party panel. So we keep track of every time an app is downloaded, every time someone opens an app, how long they spend on the app, the number of sessions. Similarly, we also have website data where we also track when they go on these sites, as well as we started keeping track of the percentage of ads that are seen by chat GPT users. So we also have advertising data. So we have a wide breadth of different data sets that we look at and combine to figure out what we think is happening in the space.

11:46And so we don't keep as much to figure out if, you know, version one is better than version three. It's just more about are they getting more engagement? Are they getting more users? And what's driving those changes? I think most tech companies, in my experience, they have this fear in the back of their minds that a couple of kids in some garage in Palo Alto are a day away from putting me out of business, coming up with something better mousetrap. I know we feel that way here at Bloomberg, and that's kind of what drives you forward to continue to innovate. In this space, it really seems like it because it feels like we're on the wild west of this.

12:23We don't know where this technology is coming from. At least I don't. It's coming from everywhere. Yes. And it's going at such a rapid pace. As an IPO investor, I'd be like, you want me to invest, put all my eggs in your basket, knowing that tomorrow there could be some kid who comes out of somewhere in the middle of the world. That's kind of how it is out there, it seems like. It is, but there are definitely leaders in the space. So when you look at total active users globally, ChatGPT is over 55%. Gemini is also, I would say, 45 % to 50%, very high. The other players, while they are growing, are significantly smaller.

12:57And the way, you know, Gemini has a lot of advantages. It's in your Android operating system. They can connect to Gemini without going to the app. So it's probably even understated versus the active users that we show. So ChatGPT is sort of the first mover advantage, first app to reach a billion MAUs in the shortest amount of time. ChatGPT sort of become the Google word, right? And so when you think about B2C customers, I think a lot of people first start out using ChatGPT. And for an average user, they probably don't see much difference between any of them. Whereas Claude has rapidly grown and it seems to be more focused on enterprise.

13:3370 % of their users' time spent is on the web, right? Right. So maybe you get a split versus B2B and B2C. But while the other players are growing, they are very small. And isn't the cost of it, if I want to enterprise and have Claude used by my employees, I got to pay for that, right? Yes. You get tokens. So when you ask a task or when you have a task, it requires some sort of payment in the token. And then also in the back end of this is a lot of energy to do these calculations. So it's an expensive endeavor. And that is the benefit that DeepSeek has is that it is much cheaper. And there are U.S.

14:10companies testing it, again, because of national security and whatnot. I mean, you're allowed to use it here, but we'll see how well it's adopted in certain Western countries. So just in terms of the timing of potential IPOs, I guess Anthropic is the first one we think we might see. They have mentioned it. Anthropic owns Claude OpenAI for ChatGPT. And now DeepSeek said maybe early 2027. I think a lot of that depends on how the market goes, how we see SpaceX perform, just given its exposure to AI and Grok. So, yeah, I think that will be market dependent. But I think they certainly would all like to.

14:49Yeah, absolutely. I'm looking at space exploration. SpaceX kind of a quasi AI play, to say the least. That's certainly what they pitched. Yeah. I don't know. When public at 135 bucks went over 200, we're now back down. We're 123, so we're below the IPO price and below the first print at 150. So we'll see how that plays out. See you, Michelle, Vice President. Thank you. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge.

15:25On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English, like if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less.

16:06That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., Member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts, or spending time on month-end close, it's time to get Brex AF, a gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. Get the news you need in just 15 minutes. Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter.

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17:24We're at the stage of this AI story in the marketplace where the market is definitely trying to find winners and losers. And one of the areas that the market is concerned about is software, certain areas of software, particularly software as a service. And that includes the next company here. The company is called Klaviyo. and the symbol is KVYO. The stock is down about 45 % year-to-date. It's a customer relationship management company using technology there. Think something akin to salesforce.com. We want to get the latest on how AI is impacting this company, this part of the software space, and we're pleased to welcome Serby Gupta, Chief Technology Officer, and the company's name is KVYO.

18:07Again, KVYO is the ticker. Serby, thanks so much for joining us here. Talk to us about kind of what you guys do at Klaviyo and how you're integrating AI into your business. Yeah, thanks for having me. So Klaviyo is an autonomous B2C CRM. And we bring marketing, customer service, analytics, AI all under one umbrella. And it's all powered by our data. And we are building products and features to help our marketers be the best they can be. And we actually just launched Composer and Customer Agent to help with this. Okay, so let's bring it down to how a consumer might interact, interface with your technology, with your products.

18:51Your B2C platform, which means business to consumer, so the consumer does have some exposure. How might Paul, when he is buying something online, experience your work? So we have 200 ,000 customers. And let's say there's Glossier, Away, Mattel, Tory Burch. If you, as a customer, go and interact with any of these brands, you can get a very personalized experience. And the way you do this is because these brands work with Klaviyo, and we help with powering each of these relationships. Is AI a friend or an enemy to you and your company and your software? Oh, we're all into AI. There's a lot that we're using AI for, even if we just take our Composer product.

19:43It's your marketer's right hand. The goal is to help you be as effective as you can. You have all these ideas of things that you want to build and experiences that you want to create. And we want to make that much easier for you. And AI is at the forefront of helping make this a reality. So talk a little bit about consumer behavior and how that enables the use, the application of a lot of the AI tools that you are developing. So one thing that's really exciting about this wave is that AI is not only helping with what we build, but also how we build it. So when we think of what we build, we're able to build out these experiences much faster, right?

20:33And we're able to get out more ideas in the hands of our customers. And I look at the entire build process as significantly changing. We see the velocity going up a lot. We see that our engineers are able to ship these features much faster. Now, you might say that, hey, software engineering, writing code has become so much easier. But there's so many other parts of the software development lifecycle that we see that the bottlenecks move to. And we're working through all of those. And AI is helping us with massive velocity increases. Are your customers, are they saying, hey, we need more AI capabilities in our marketing promotion campaigns?

21:18Are they pulling that from you or are you more pushing that to them? Our customers are driven by growing their business. They want to help grow their brands. They want to help reach their customers much better. And that's what we are focused on. And when we create these products, when we show them demos of the features that we've built, they want those features. So the end goal for us is not that, hey, we're going to use AI in this way and convince you why it's important. We are going to build the best products that we can. And we believe that AI and these models have really unlocked the ability to create a whole new set of features that we can put in their hands.

22:00And that's what we've seen with Composer. We've put this in front of our customers. They've been using this to create their campaigns and flows. And when it works, it's magic. and we've taken away so much work from them and they can do the work that they're best at, which is coming up with really good ideas. And we can help make that a reality. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions, buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge.

22:36On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less.

23:17That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds.

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24:39Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube. We talk a lot about this younger generation of consumers, Gen Z, and how their spending is very different than, say, Gen X or Boomers. They like to spend on experiences. I mean, they do buy some hardcore products. They're rediscovering things like landlines and Polaroid cameras. What does it look like when it comes to beauty products? What does it look like when it comes to that part of the consumer market? Let's bring in Lindsay Dutch.

25:17She is our BI Senior Industry Analyst covering this sector, and she joins us now. And Lindsay, you and your team put together some research on what Gen Z likes, what they don't like. What did you find? Yeah. Hi, Scarlett. Thanks for having me. We ran our semi-annual beauty survey, and we just got the results back. And in general, when you look at the market, it's a$120 billion market in the U.S. Demand is relatively soft for beauty. kind of weakened a little bit over the past six to 12 months. It's sitting near lows, two-year lows based on our series of surveys. But one thing that stood out was Gen Z.

25:57Gen Z tends to have more intensive beauty routines. A lot more of them use a lot of product compared to average on our survey. And there are demand signals that I look at, which is, you know, would you cut back on other things before beauty? You know, how important is continuing your beauty routine? Are you trying new products? When I look at those types of indicators, Gen Z not only shows steady demand, but it actually seems to be improving, which is a pretty big contrast to what we're seeing in the broader market. So Gen Z, I mean, they're very, very comfortable with buying pretty much anything and everything online.