Crypto’s Hottest Startup, Upgrade CEO on Future IPO, Questions Ahead of Nvidia GTC | Oct 20, 2025

0:13Welcome everyone to the information's TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, October 20th. Hope you had a great weekend. We have got a great show planned for you today. First up, we go inside Hyperliquid, the exchange in the spotlight after crypto's recent sell-off. We'll also preview NVIDIA's GTC conference in Washington, D.C. with analyst Patrick Moorhead, and we're going to talk about which company is closest on NVIDIA's tail. We've then got fintech company Upgrade coming on the show to talk about their big funding ground and about the company's plans to go public. And finally, tech is transforming the healthcare industry, and we're going to talk to a CEO who is looking to bridge the gap between the traditional healthcare category and new consumer gadgets altogether.

0:56It is going to be a busy show, and so let's get right on into our first guest. Earlier this month, crypto markets plunged after President Trump threatened more tariffs on China imports, but behind the scenes, the crash has brought a little-known exchange called Hyperliquid into focus. The company handles more than$13 billion in trades a day with around 11 employees. I want to bring on our crypto reporter, Yueqi Yang, to tell us more about the exchange and about a story she wrote today. Yueqi, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Hey, Akash. So tell us about Hyperliquid, what this new company is, and also why we should be paying attention to it right now.

1:37Great. So Hyperliquid is this a two-year-old exchange that's created by a small team of about 11 people, largely based in Singapore. And it's not widely known outside of the crypto world, but within the crypto community, it is quickly becoming the most favorite trading venue for traders who want to use leverage and who want to stay anonymous. And I think the role of Hyperliquid and their impact on the market was really illustrated during the last Friday's crypto market crash when more than$10 billion worth of trade were liquidated on the hyperliquid platform. And that's really the first time that drew people's attention to hyperliquid from investors outside of the crypto market, where they're starting to realize that this is a platform that has outside impact and that could potentially present systematic risk.

2:37Why have traders been flocking to Hyperliquid specifically? What is it about their platform that's different? The exchange was really born out of a response to FTX collapse. So its founder, Jeff Yen, talked about his vision of building a decentralized exchange, which means that the exchange will not hold custody of customers' funds and customers themselves will be able to retain control of their assets. And that's a big draw. But then more importantly, because it's a decentralized exchange, it doesn't need to perform KYC, know your customer check for their users. And that's a hugely popular draw for people who trade in crypto who largely want to stay anonymous.

3:24And the other reason is that it provides leverage. And the most popular product on Hyperliquid is what's called Perpetual Futures. These are the crypto derivatives that people were all excited about during the last crypto boom. Yes. Yes. And it's something that allows traders to either make a lot of money very quickly or potentially get wiped out. Now, so, I mean, I am just kind of curious about, I mean, high leverage, you know, anonymity. It all sounds great for traders. It also sounds like a bit of a risk and something that some of these newer crypto regulations, for example, have tried to sort of guardrail against.

4:06I mean, it seems a little bit risky that this platform has taken off in the way it has, right? Yes. Yeah. And it's important to note that Hyperliquid does not accept U.S. users. And that's largely because of the regulatory environment in the U.S. but there are people who are able to try to get around that by using vpn right right and what about the the founder of the company tell us about him so jeff yen is a fascinating character i talked to quite a few people who know him and they all say that he's someone who's deeply technical who's extremely ambitious and who really is an independent thinker and his career path was that he He grew up in Silicon Valley.

4:53He went to Harvard to study math and computer science. And after graduating from Harvard, he went to a well-known high-frequency trading firm called Hudson River Trading. And I think the first break from this conventional past was when he decided to leave Hudson River Trading within less than a year, and he wanted to do something on his own. So he tried to start a prediction market, which didn't really take off. And then he went on to do crypto market making as a one person trading shop. And that became hugely successful. He was able to hire extremely talented people later on to join him. And that includes some of the famous AI talent that we later saw.

5:40And then eventually that led him down to the path of creating Hyperliquid, which is an exchange. And he hasn't really raised much venture funding for this initiative at all, right? Yes. So he refused to take VC money and he mostly bootstrapped the platform by using his own wealth, but also through a very successful token airdrop event, which is essentially to give away tokens for free to early users. And it's a mechanism to incentivize people to join the platform and trade more. Hmm. So, Yuiqi, I just want to take a little bit of a step back here and looking at sort of what Hyperliquid tells us about the state of crypto broadly, because on one hand, in the U.S., you have these regulations being passed.

6:28You have a lot of people saying, hey, crypto is coming into or becoming more overlapping with the traditional financial sector, and you're seeing more of these traditional financial firms buy into it. And on the other hand, you have these firms that aren't operating in the U.S. It's a little bit of the flavor of the Wild West, I think, that we're used to. What does this tell you about the current state of crypto more broadly, that Hyperliquid is so in focus right now? So people that I talk to are generally optimistic about the regulatory future of Hyperliquid, given the current crypto-friendly environment under Donald Trump.

7:07And Hyperliquid did show some interest in weighing in on crypto rulemaking in the U.S. They submitted a comment letter to the CFTC earlier this year to advocate for the role of decentralized exchanges such as Hyperliquid. The company itself hasn't said whether they will want to enter the U.S. market one day, but from regulatory and legal experts who I talk to, there will be a pathway for them to do so if they desire so. and they can either try to acquire a licensed entity or try to start and apply for a license from scratch by themselves. And I think the broader takeaway is the expectation is that activities that are happening on Hyperliquid will likely become legal in the U.S.

7:56under the current administration just because how the CFTC and also the SEC are pushing for more innovative products in crypto. And that's a good sign for a hyperliquist regulatory future. Great. Yueqi, well, thank you for coming on. That is Yueqi Yang, our crypto reporter here at The Information. Okay. It is a busy time for the chip sector, not just because of the flurry of deals all these companies are signing with cloud providers and with OpenAI, but also because many of these companies are hosting conferences right now. It's a good time to step back and look at some of the broader trends that are shaping the sector and its biggest businesses.

8:37And so I want to bring on Patrick Moorhead, founder, CEO, and chief analyst at Moor Insights and Strategies. Patrick, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. This is a first-time guest. I think I need to say that, so I appreciate that. Well, I know. You've done over a thousand broadcast appearances, is that right? Yes. I have a lot of experience, let's say. I also have my own podcast as well. well. Great. Well, and we didn't even get to your weekend at F1. It looked like you had a big weekend. Oh, it was fantastic. And if you look at the sponsors, I mean, the technology sponsors are pretty much the lead sponsors.

9:19I mean, thanks to IBM for being out there, but Atlassian, Dell, AWS, a lot of different chip companies. Heck, I ran into Perplexity CEO and founder as well, who sponsors the top of Lewis Hamilton's helmet. Really? We're talking like the part up here. Exactly. And when you get the camera on the back of the driver, sure enough, you can see the - There's a perplexity right there. Perplexity logo. So yeah, it was great running into Arvind in the pad club. Well, there's no question. It's the tech companies that have the money right now. And so it's great to see where they're putting that to work. I want to talk about NVIDIA.

10:05NVIDIA has its GTC conference coming up next week, and you're putting on a bit of a pregame show, which I'm excited to watch. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the questions facing NVIDIA as it goes into this conference. What are the things that you are hoping that they address? And what are the things that you think investors are going to be watching for at that event? Yeah, so NVIDIA always will make some major announcements at these shows. And I think we, first of all, we're going to see some victory laps on what NVIDIA has done, I think specifically for the country, right? We're sitting here in Washington, D.C., and there's a reason that the conference is there.

10:45So I think it's going to talk about how it has pushed major technologies forward, whether it's life sciences, creating new new drugs and all the different breakthroughs that we've seen in high performance computing. We'll probably get some more details on Vera Rubin and its architecture, and that's the slated for 2026. We could even see some more details on 2027. NVIDIA talked about a system called Kyber. Kyber is what? Kyber is the 2027 rack scale architecture. Okay. Yeah, and then I think we're going to see a lot about manufacturing and robotics. Over the last year, NVIDIA has talked a lot more about how it's enabling what they call physical AI, which is shorthand for robots, manufacturing, even in-home elder care.

11:53I want to talk to you a little bit about NVIDIA's structure of its business. The chips are expensive. There's no two ways about it. And that has boded really well for them as a leader in this market. It has also made it very difficult for other companies at AI to make any money at all because of the fact that it all relies on those GPUs. I wonder if you see at all their advantage in terms of pricing power, the idea that they can keep increasing the price as their models get better and better. Do they have less flexibility in terms of pricing now compared to two, three years ago? Do you see that power, I guess, dwindling at all?

12:32Well, first off, these chips do cost an enormous amount of money. And the company went from a three-year cadence to a two-year cadence to a one-year cadence. And that added a tremendous amount of R &D. And the other thing is these chips are what are called a reticle limit, meaning these are the largest chips that a company like TSMC can manufacture. and then you add on that this expensive memory that goes on it that's called HBM, it costs a lot. And if something costs a lot, NVIDIA has to charge for it. And right now, NVIDIA has a lot of pricing power. In fact, NVIDIA can sell everything that they can make, likely through the end of 2026.

13:20So they absolutely have pricing power. I guess my question is, though, as it remains hard for other companies downstream to make money in AI because the chips are so expensive, do you see their pricing power? Are they going to be a little nicer? Will they have to be nicer at all? Well, let me put it like this. Nobody is comfortable having a sole source for anything. And that's not just true for technology. It's true for every industry out there. And typically, the healthiest markets have three strong competitors. Some argue all you need is two. so this is where you see companies like AMD come to the table the hyperscalers are creating their own homegrown accelerators spread being Google TPU and after that what AWS is doing right do you see the chip startups I'm talking about Grok, Samba Nova how much competition do they post to this market?

14:27Yeah, so let me answer the question this way. There's nobody who feels comfortable with a single source in tech, that's true, but any other industry. Healthy markets typically have three strong competitors driving innovation, lowering price, and some argue too. So what that does is it's providing opportunities for companies like AMD that have a GPU architecture, Intel that has also announced their GPU in 2026. And also, I would say one of the biggest competitors just based on market share today is on hyperscaler custom chips from Google and Amazon. Right. Now, we've been watching these chip startups here at The Information, companies like Grok and Salmanova.

15:23And one of the aspects that I've been interested in is the fact that a lot of these companies, they just all rely on TSMC to make the chips. And I wonder if you've done any research or any analysis on to what extent TSMC is the bottleneck here, because it feels like any company that wants to compete with NVIDIA, I mean, they have to produce their chips with the same player right now. TSMC is kind of the head haunter there. Yeah, TSMC is what we would call the long pole in the tent. To their defense, it does take two to four years to stand up a new foundry, and you're pouring billions of CapEx in before you're going to see a penny of revenue coming out.

16:09And also, if you had told me the amount of CapEx we were going to spend this year five years ago, I would have said, you're completely crazy. I guess that may have been a hundred billion, but now it's 300 billion. And that's hard to react to very quickly. And it also provides opportunities for Intel and their foundry business, as well as Samsung and their foundry business. Right, right. Well, look, I'm excited to see what comes of GTC next week. And I'm also excited to watch that pregame show that you have. So Patrick, thank you for joining us. That is Patrick Moorhead, the CEO, the chief analyst, and the founder of Moorhead Insights and Strategy here on TITV.

16:50Okay. Fintech company Upgrade raised$165 million last week at a valuation of$7.3 billion. The company has been around since 2016 and has built a big business in the online lending market. Now, the company is looking ahead to a possible IPO in the coming 18 months. Joining me now is Rénaud Laplanche, the CEO of the company. Rénaud, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Good morning. Thank you for having me. So you recently said that this funding round would be your last funding round privately before you IPO. Talk to me about what your timeline is for going public. Yeah, I mean, as you know, it will depend on a lot of factors that are not entirely in our control, including the markets, the economy.

17:38But I think as far as our own readiness and process, we think we're about 12 to 18 months away from being ready. Right. And I am kind of curious about the desire and the goal to go public, because on one hand, it's a fundraising event. On the other hand, I totally understand that you have investors that would like to see a return on their investment. But if you look at some of the other fintech companies that have gone public, like Klarna and like Chime, the public markets have not been so kind to them after their debuts. And so I wonder, you know, how do you grapple with that? I mean, what is your plan to succeed in that environment where new fintech IPOs aren't being treated that well?

18:19Yeah, so if you look at the broader range of public fintech companies, you see companies like SoFi or Nubank, Affirm to some extent, that have a business model that's closer to ours and have been performing well in the public market. So we will try to emulate their success. And I'm curious about what you think this next wave of fintech looks like, because we had the Zerp era of fintech, And then we had the sort of the reckoning. I am curious to see where the sector goes from here. Where do you see these online lending products, buy now, pay later, and some of these newer agentic AI or agentic commerce, I guess, categories?

19:01Where do you see all this going? Yeah, I think the most successful fintech companies of this new generation, new crop of fintech, really manages to deliver more of a full banking and credit solution to consumers. Most consumers don't want to have eight different financial apps and have to juggle between them and have their data disseminated into a lot of these different apps and companies. Companies like Upgrade, I think have understood this and really are trying to deliver a full suite of banking and credit services and really become this primary relationship with sort of financial partners that knows you and can be there when you need it and really be on your side.

19:56But, you know, you say full suite of banking products, and it's something that we've heard from all the other fintech companies out there. Like you said, it's a crowded market. There's eight other apps that people can go to. How do you actually differentiate yourself with companies that literally seem to have that same mission, full suite of banking and credit card products? Yeah, I mean, it might be a mission in terms of execution. I think Upgrade is far very long. So we have six different major products including auto loans, personal loans, BNPL. I mean, just these three, there's no other fintech company that delivers on these three different dimensions.

20:38And then there's a lot of product innovation. I mean, to your point, Agentic finance is coming fast. And I think Upgrade is at the forefront of that innovation. Great. Well, Renaud, thank you so much for coming on the show. That is Renaud Leponge, the co-founder and CEO of Upgrade here on TITV. Okay. We have talked a little bit on this show about how healthcare is turning into a tale of two cities as tech gets more advanced. The first is the traditional healthcare system covered by insurance. And the second is the tech-enabled private healthcare category with new therapies and consumer gadgets that are everywhere nowadays.

21:15I want to bring on a founder who is trying to build a bridge between these two camps. Sunita Mohanty is the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant. Sunita, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks so much. It's wonderful to be here. I appreciate you having me on. So I want to talk about your company. We're going to get there in a second. But you were at this conference last week, the Doc Conference, and we had the co-founders of the conference, John and Jordan. on the show prior to the conference having started. And they told us all about the debate that was going to kick off the festivities, whether or not AI was going to replace doctors, what that would even look like.

21:48The conference, of course, was multiple days long. Tell us about what your takeaways were from that event, what you learned, and then we'll talk about your business specifically. Great. Doc was a tremendous gathering of thought leaders from all these different intersections. It was a mix of leaders in research, really pushing the field forward on cutting edge diagnostics and an understanding of personalized medicine. It was leaders in technology, you know, some of the top funders. And when you bring these people together and you're talking about, you know, really what the frontiers of space are, it was a truly amazing conversation.

22:24I think, you know, some of the themes that came up were obviously what Jordan and John mentioned about, will AI replace doctors? What is the role of AI and what is the role of doctors as AI starts? What was the answer? I mean, what was the, who won the debate, I guess? Well, you know, it was a great debate because not only did you have humans, you had Reid Hoffman and Neil Parikh on one side. And then you had Anita Kahnan and Mike Krieger of Anthropic and Instagram on the other side. And then along with the humans, you also had two AIs that were trained on the transcripts and coming up with their own perspective.

23:03And ultimately, AI kind of won. AI won? Okay. But, well, AI both won the debate, but also it's really about timescales. I think it's not a question of, you know, like if it will happen. There is superintelligence coming that will take some time to get here. But it might be decades, right? So a lot of the conversation was around, it's not just, it's not about AI or humans. It's not AI or doctors. It's actually about how these things come together. What does it look like in the interim? Obviously, in places where there are no doctors, AI trumps it. You have access for people, millions, billions of people who otherwise may not have access to great care.

23:44And that's an amazing breakthrough for humanity. And then you also have the ability for AI to supercharge and really help doctors become better professionals. And there's a lot of research that was discussed about how recently there were studies around doctors comparing AI, AI plus doctors and doctors. And in many cases, AI, a standalone, actually won. But when you break into the nuance of what's actually happening in some of this research is that these doctors don't yet know how to use AI and that there is a middle ground of training people really well, of understanding how to prompt, of understanding how to get things out of AI.

24:25Was there any conversation? I'm curious. You mentioned how to train doctors on it. Was there any conversation about how medical education needs to change or how it's changing already to teach them how to use these tools? You know, there was a little bit of that that came up. Obviously, a lot of doctors and clinicians were in attendance. And I think there's just a wide ranging feeling that there has to be a shift in education. There has to be a shift in competency development around how to use AI. I don't know that there was a clear answer of how that's happening yet. But, you know, it's obvious that doctors everywhere from, you know, people who are just entering the field to experienced doctors are currently using all sorts of AI, whether that's open evidence or chat GPT or very specific clinical examples.

25:09And so I think people are rapidly reskilling in the middle of this platform shift. Right. Tell us about the business that you're building at Vibrant. Of course. So Vibrant is an AI native operating system built for personalized medicine practices. Now, what does that mean? We have this intersection happening, as you mentioned, between the traditional medical system and then the new emerging kind of data-rich, more personalized shadow system that's happening, you know, with this explosion of consumer-based data, of diagnostics, of all of this stuff that's happening outside of the realm of billable care.

25:42And you have patients who are trying to kind of self-manage between the two, and now a rising group of clinicians who are trying to self-manage between the two. Really, we're starting with a mix of functional integrative longevity doctors. But, you know, we see these doctors as shaping the future of what modern medical practice will look like, especially in the primary care and primary care adjacent settings. So we've built an AI-native intelligence system that includes the EHR as the system of record, but also layers of intelligence on top of that. Imagine if you were to design one of these things in 2025, which is when we've gotten the benefit of building things.

26:20You would integrate the documentation flows that are AI-native, the clinical decision support that's AI-native. All of this into a smooth flow so that as a doctor, you really feel like technology is being wrapped around you rather than you trying to fight with it to get your job done. We had Christina Farr, who I know is a good friend of yours on the show last week, maybe two weeks ago. One of the things that she mentioned is this idea, a scenario really, where a patient comes to a doctor and they've got these gadgets they're using to help them guide their own treatments, their own, you know, therapies that they're taking.

26:57And then you also have all of these, you know, drugs that you can get over the counter. Now, sometimes, you know, not necessarily drugs, but I'm talking peptides and different types of concoctions and stuff like that. And the doctor doesn't actually know what the patient is taking anymore because the patient, you know, obviously they can do whatever they want. Is your startup helping to allow the doctor to take advantage of that data, the data that sometimes is on their finger now? Exactly. That's exactly it. So now what if you had this whole stream not only of wearables, but, you know, you have information coming from your phone and other so many other digital biomarkers that we're creating these days as patients.

27:36What if it was really easy to just connect all that into one place and have that system of record include this total perspective of who you are as a patient and have your doctor be able to see that? So, you know, that's really what we're building is this is a way to create a perfect context engine on a patient. And so the doctor can have that as a means to understand, you know, what's going on with this patient. And then I think the other piece that we're really unlocking is not just being tied to billable care, but also cash-based care, hybrid care in many senses, because so many of these interesting therapies, you know, a lot of this was talked about at Doc, but there's so much on the frontier that has so much promise and, you know, the evidence is building, but it's not quite there yet.

28:21But, you know, that should kind of be up to a patient in terms of how they think about their risk tolerance, of wanting to try these things, of wanting to be able to access some of what we know is likely to work but is still taking time. And then, you know, the real promise here is can we get better data faster? Instead of taking years to get to answers of what isn't working, if we have a better system that's connecting up all these data points and understanding what's working for whom, I think we can fast track that cycle of understanding, you know, which treatments are and aren't worth really pushing more broadly.

28:56Great. Well, Sunita, thank you so much for coming on the show. That is Sunita Mohandy, the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant here on TITV. Well, that does it for today's show. A reminder that we are on this stream Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. I want to thank Amazon Web Services, who is our presenting sponsor for this production. And I want to thank you for tuning in. We really do appreciate your viewership. I'm already excited for our next show tomorrow. Have a great rest of your Monday. Bye-bye for now.