Figma IPO, Earnings & OpenAI's GPT-5 Breakthrough | July 28, 2025

0:13Welcome everyone to the Informations TITV. My name is Akash Pastrucha. It is Monday, July 28, and we have got a busy, busy week ahead with earnings and IPOs. We're going to talk about it all. Today on the show, we are sitting down with our very own Corey Weinberg to talk about which venture capital firms stand to be the biggest winners in the big Figma stock market debut that is just days away. We're also going to talk about earnings with our co-executive editor, Martin Pierce. We've got four of the Magnificent Seven reporting. We're going to go to him to talk about what he's watching for. And finally, we're going to close out the show by bringing on Stephanie Palazzolo to get a bit of a pulse check on OpenAI.

0:55There is always a lot going on with them as usual. I want to start with two big headlines that are in the news right now. Samsung will make Tesla's AI6 chip in Texas. That was a deal that Elon Musk himself confirmed on Sunday. The most interesting part about this is that Samsung currently makes Tesla's AI4 chip. The AI5 chip is being made by TSMC, but this next chip is coming right back to Samsung. So that is a big win for that company. And the second headline is that Anthropic is in talks with investors about a funding round that could value the company at$150 billion. That is according to the Financial Times.

1:33The company raised money in March at a$61.5 billion valuation. So this would be a big step up for Anthropic. And one of the big parts of this story here is the gross margins that Anthropic has been able to hit. That is some reporting that we did and published earlier this month. I will link that story in the show notes, but it will be very fascinating to see how that fundraise turns out. Okay, let's talk about Figma. One of my favorite traditions here at The Information is that every time a big Silicon Valley tech startup goes public, We publish these really great analytical stories that highlight who the biggest winners are for these IPOs.

2:11And today, I want to bring on our Deputy Bureau Chief of Finance, Corey Weinberg, who published that exact story today for Figma, the company that is expected to go public later this week. Corey, it is always a pleasure to have you on here. And I got to say, I really enjoyed this story. I'm excited to talk about it with you. Thank you, Akash. Great to be here. So, look, let's just go through it. Who are the big winners? Who are standing to be the big winners in the Figma IPO? So it's your marquee venture capital firms this time around. The three big headline names in this are Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Kleiner Perkins.

2:51Three fairly familiar names to information readers and folks in Silicon Valley. And this was the reason why I was interested in doing this exercise for this Figma IPO, is we have not seen an IPO since the IPO boom of 2021, where so many venture capital firms are standing in so large of profits from an IPO. In the past couple of years, when you've had a hot startup go public, an Instacart, a Reddit, a Service Titan, companies like that, you haven't had VC firms with nearly the same amount of gains as you'll see from Figma. Well, I mean, let's go through some of the numbers. We have a great chart, actually, that sort of shows that the history of the company's funding.

3:37I mean, you talked about Index, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins. Talk to me about some of the numbers that you found in terms of how much these firms actually stand to gain. So all will gain at least a billion four in profit. So each of those three, their stakes at IPO are worth between 1.5 and 1.8 billion. And they all invested 100 million dollars or less. So that's pretty easy math. That's not that complicated. They all stand to gain, you know, sort of in that 1.5 billion dollar arena. And those are the vast majority of the profits that you're going to see for this IPO. In that chart, you see after that Series B round, after that Kleiner Perkins round, it was a pretty big step up in price.

4:22That was around that Series C that Sequoia did, and then Andreessen did the D. Sequoia will stand to profit close to a billion. They're not hurting. I'm not crying for Sequoia Capital, nor Andreessen Horowitz. But this is definitely a case where you see just the benefit of being early. And then the other thing that, you know, sort of what got these three VC firms their big reward, they invested before Figma really had either any revenue or much revenue at all. Index and Greylock invested in Figma before the company had any revenue. Those two firms were connected to CEO and co-founder Dylan Field through some of his early career endeavors as a teenager even.

5:06And then Kleiner Perkins invested when Figma only had three or four months of revenue. So it was a pretty big sort of leap of faith that they took. And that's why they can claim a billion five in profit. So one of the things that I noticed from that chart from your reporting is that at every stage, a different venture capital firm seems to have led the next round. And I wondered, I mean, how common is that? What did you make of that from looking at Figma's history? It's more unusual compared to these days. I mean, look, we are going back in time a little bit here. You know, this was largely a fundraising period between 2024 and 2019, roughly, where they raised a lot of their capital.

5:48And yeah, it was a different time. A lot of times firms did venture capital firms did not like double down on rounds in the same way that you see these days. I think we've written about this trend a lot. Right now, we see a ton of VC firms kind of doubling down on their winners, so to speak. That didn't happen this time around. And I think it was, you know, sort of possible for, you know, Greylock led the A. They potentially could have led the B. You know, Sequoia could have led the D. You know, like that could have certainly happened. So it is a bit unusual. That's a good thing to kind of call out there, especially compared to now.

6:24And I mean, you know, you talked about sort of what these VC firms stand to gain and what their stakes would be valued at. I mean, you know, walk us through a little bit, you know, what happens when the company actually goes public. I mean, do these firms sell right away? Do they have to wait? I mean, you know, how long do they have to wait before they can actually start selling? That's a really good call out because it is really important to note that when we're talking about these profits and these gains, for the most part, these are still somewhat theoretical. You know, what happens in an IPO and what will happen in the Figma IPO is most of the shares for existing shareholders, including the VC firms, as well as employees, will be locked up for six months.

7:07They won't be able to sell. There's some different, you know, some IPOs have early lockups or what have you. In this case, some of the firms, and this is listed in Figma's updated IPO filing, all of the major shareholders, the VC firms, are taking some money off the table in the IPO. They are selling a portion of their stake. Not a huge amount, but for instance, I believe Index, which has that$1.8 billion stake, they're selling about$90 million in the IPO. That'll be straight cash. um and so uh you know that is um a nice win for them but it is as you said important to note that you know we got to see where this thing trades man like like i think it'll probably trade well that's the consensus right um but we've seen plenty of times where these like gains that we're writing about some of them get evaporated this is a bit of a hot streak for index 100 i feel like it's a bit of we it's a bit of an underplayed story i'm sure they'll get the word out about it to some degree.

8:08You know, that's why they have, you know, I'm sure they have great PR professionals. But it's good for us to note, too. Index is on a huge hot streak. They've had, you know, three. This will be the third pretty monumental exit this year. The others being Wiz, the cybersecurity startup that sold to Google for 32 billion. And then the partial sale for meta for meta to buying scale AI, which liquidated a lot of those investors. Both of those exits are in the, you know, area between, I think, one to two billion for index. Right. Well, look, I mean, like you said, it'll be interesting to see where the company trades, but it was a really great analysis and report that you put together.

8:52Before we let you go, I do want to cover a story that you, a scoop that you published late last week about BRAC. My apology about RAMP. You can see the Freudian slip there. Ramp is the competitor of Brex. The story was about Ramp. And the story was about a new funding round that the company is looking to raise at a$21 billion valuation. Corey, I mean, Ramp just raised money at a$16 billion valuation. This literally just happened. I mean, they're raising money again? I know. I was surprised. I think Natasha, I wrote the story with, got the tip on this scoop. I was like, didn't they just raise? This happens a lot with AI rounds as a reporter in a hot fundraising environment.

9:39You hear a rumor of a company raising more money at a higher valuation. And you're like, wait, didn't I just write the story? Wait, I did. We just wrote the story like a month ago at a$16 billion valuation. Now they're raising at 21. And yeah, it's not an AI company. It's a it's a corporate card fintech. So it you know, when I when I called a source about this, I was like, what's the deal? Like, why are they raising so quickly? You know, essentially, the source was just like, look, when they announced this previous round at a 16 billion dollar valuation in June from Founders Fund, Ramp got a lot of inbound from from more investors who want to put money in.

10:18And I feel like you have these two trends happening. One, investors, VC firms, growth stage firms that have a ton of capital to deploy. We've seen this for the last couple of years. They're deploying it into firms that they think are a safe pair of hands, that they think are going to be winners, that they see as ramp as a decent bet to reach$100 billion valuation. situation, or at least like, you know, they'll be able to, you know, it won't be a failure, so to speak. And you see companies, on the other hand, that have business momentum, getting really good at timing the market and clean FOMO and, you know, capturing that momentum and getting really good prices for it.

11:04So I think those two things are happening. And then I think something I'm watching is I do wonder if these consecutive fundraisers and this momentum and this amount of cash that they'll now have, if it's going to lead to some more M &A for Ramp. There's nothing, I'm not basing that on any reporting, but I just wonder if they're going to keep trying to capture the moment and go shopping. And just before I let you go, I saw I saw the story about Ramp, and I immediately thought about your reporting on Brax, which is another company you've reported on. And they've actually, you know, they've sort of, they made some changes at the company.

11:46They've started, you know, growing again very healthy. Just tell us a little bit about that story before we let you go, because I think it's interesting how there's kind of a fintech resurgence happening. There is. Brax is doing well. I mean, I wrote the story earlier this year. The growth has kind of come back. It expects to be profitable by year end. It's kind of taken a bit of different direction than Ramp. It's going harder after larger enterprise customers for their corporate card. Ramp is a little bit more S &P, focusing a little bit more on software for like accounts payable and bill pay and stuff like that.

12:24So they are diverging a little bit. I think I would expect to see Brex raise, you know, fairly in fairly short order, you would have to think. But, you know, it's clear that that from a valuation standpoint, ramp is certainly leaps and bounds ahead. Great. Well, thank you so much, Corey, for for coming on the show. Again, Corey has written a number of these IPO winner stories. He's written them not just for Figma, but also for Instacart and a number of the other companies that have recently gone public. We will link all of them in the show notes. And I want to go to our second guest. It is a big earnings week with four of the magnificent seven companies reporting this week.

13:04We've got Meta and Microsoft on Wednesday. We've got Apple and Amazon on Thursday. All these companies are drastically different, and yet there are often common threads you can tie between all these businesses. And no one is better at doing that than our co-executive editor, Martin Peers, who also authors our nightly newsletter, The Briefing. I want to bring on Martin to break it all down for us. Martin, happy Monday. Hey, Akash. How are you? I'm doing great. So, look, earnings week, we all know in the newsroom, it's one of your favorite weeks. You must have jumped out of bed. Real excited. And Emma, this is a misnomer.

13:40It's not one of my favorite weeks. It's an awful week because, you know, you have big earnings, Microsoft and Meta happening at the same time. It's awful. Amazon and Apple happening at the same time. It's just very difficult. So this is your plea to spread them apart, you're saying? I really wish the companies of yes would report on different days. Monday, there is no earnings today. Why not one company report today on a Monday? Well, because we have to get you on the show to tell everybody about what they can expect. We need a day to do that. That's probably why. Okay, we're going to go through them one by one.

14:18But we should be clear, earnings are an information-free event. The companies don't usually give us any information at all. They have these earnings calls, and they really refrain from actually saying anything at all. That's just to be clear. But they give us numbers. They give us a few numbers. But the Apple people, for instance, will say, iPhone, it's great. The iPhone's great. They'll say that about five times. So just set the scene. This is a marketing event for the company. Understood. Understood. Understood. Okay. Well, be that as it may, we have the results coming out this week. I didn't want anyone to sort of, you know, over-expect stuff.

15:04Let's talk about them, Martin. Let's talk about what we can expect. Okay. We're going to go one by one, but very quickly, high level. I mean, what high level themes are you looking for this week as you're listening to these calls? Well, I think AI, as has been the case, will be the dominant theme, I think, with Amazon. And Microsoft will be looking to hear how much AI has affected their business. Have they managed to sell more AI-powered products on their cloud, for instance? Apple will, I mean, I think this is not a big quarter for Apple. It's the end of the year for them in the sense that the iPhone comes out in the, well, I guess it comes out in September.

15:55So we're kind of expecting the iPhone revenue to be sort of winding down. We will be looking from both Apple and Amazon what the impact of tariffs have been. And there was Apple already told us that tariffs would really hurt their earnings this quarter that they're about to report. So I think AI, to a certain extent, and then tariffs, those are the two big themes. Sorry, as well as advertising as well. And speaking of advertising, tell us what you're sort of watching for with Meta. Meta is expected to report a stronger quarter. There's been some analyst reports out saying that in the second quarter, which this is for them, advertising was actually pretty strong.

16:46So, you know, we can expect that they will do well. They have to do well because they're spending a fortune on AI and they have to sort of have some way to pay for it. So, yes, that's the meta. Talk a little bit about, you know, as it relates to CapEx. You know, we saw Google report last week. They are upping their capital expenditures. Everybody's upping them. Everyone's upping it. So, I mean, across the board this week, that's largely what we can expect, I imagine? Yeah. I mean, in most of the companies, they've already told us that. Meta has already said that they have raised their capex from what they had projected at the start of the year.

17:29Alphabet has done that as well. Microsoft, I'm not sure they might. They're more careful about it, actually. And Amazon, that's the one that we will be watching for. Are they also going to increase their CapEx spending? And then the other big issue is, are any of these companies going to talk about jobs? Microsoft has just laid off, I think, 9 ,000 people, and they've had to explain that they're doing that because the cost of AI development is so intense that they have to cut costs throughout the rest of their operations. They're also spending a fortune on these AI people, so they have to trim elsewhere.

18:22Right, right. Well, look, I know that it's an exhausting week for you, but thank you for coming on the show and telling us about what to expect. We wish you all the best with your Wednesday and Thursday. And for more on Martin Pierce takes on the earnings, be sure to tune in to his nightly newsletter, The Briefing. It comes out at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific every weeknight. That is Martin Pierce, our co-executive editor. Now, before we close out the show, I want to go to our AI reporter, Stephanie Palazzo. Let me just set the scene for you a little bit. One of the big tech companies that does not report earnings at all is OpenAI.

18:59They are, of course, a private tech company. But Stephanie Palazzolo, she has a particular knack of finding out what's going on inside the AI giant. And so I want to bring her on for a bit of a pulse check on what's going on in the land of Sam Altman. Stephanie joins us from here in New York, just outside. She is with us here in the newsroom. Stephanie, thank you so much for being here. Of course. Happy to be here. So, look, OpenAI has a ton of product developments going on. I mean, they're working on feels like everything under the sun. You know, they've got a team going at it. GPT-5 is their latest model that you wrote about last week.

19:37Tell us a little bit about, you know, what you're hearing about when we can expect GPT-5 and what we can expect from it. Yeah, definitely. So GPT-5 is the next model that, you know, OpenAI is working on. And we reported last week that it's likely to kind of come out in the next couple weeks. There's been a lot of pressure building, and I think there is very high expectations for this model because it's been so long since, you know, OpenAI released sort of the last iteration of this model, GPT-4-0. So in terms of what to expect, this is going to be the first time that OpenAI has combined its kind of traditional LLMs with the O reasoning model.

20:18So that means that it'll both be able to, you know, quickly spit out answers like you're used to on ChatGBT, but it also can take extra time to think about more difficult questions the way it would with O1, O3, and the other reasoning models. So that's kind of what to expect. And this combination of traditional GBT LLMs and the O reasoning models is something that Sam Ullman has been wanting to do for quite a while. And tell us about the significance of that. I mean, why has he been wanting to do this? Yeah, so he has kind of talked about how this would greatly simplify kind of the user experience.

20:55So, you know, today, if you want to use Chat2BT, there's so many models to choose from. There's, you know, agents, deep research, all these different products that let you kind of control how much you want the model to think about hard problems. And so if you're able to combine all of that into a single model that can decide on its own when it'll need to think extra hard on tough problems and when it can give you an answer very quickly, that would just kind of make the experience a lot simpler for the user, whether it's a consumer using the chat to BT chatbot or like a developer using the API.

21:28What about on the coding front? How does GPT-5 perform there? Yeah. So, you know, the sources that we talked to for this piece told us that GBT-5 is a step up on a lot of different domains, whether that's, you know, the hard sciences, creative writing, general knowledge. But yeah, one area that really stood out to them was with coding, which has been kind of the most promising and money making application of generative AI so far. So specifically, we were told that, you know, not only is GPT-5 better on more academic or competitive programming tasks, but it's also better on the more, you know, practical programming tasks that a developer might want to do in everyday life.

22:12So working with, you know, very large and complex code bases that have lots of old legacy code in them, for instance. And that has been something that, you know, OpenAI, I don't want to say has struggled with in the past, but, you know, an area of improvement for them. And one reason why Anthropic has been able to release models that are so much more popular with software developers and these coding assistant startups like Cursor and Windsurf. And so this is really interesting because if GPT-5 is going to be significantly better at these more practical everyday programming tasks, that could prove to be bad news for Anthropic.

22:51We might see, you know, startups like Cursor, for instance, move over to OpenAI models. And today they're spending, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars every year on these coding assistants. So that's a very large chunk of revenue that could easily switch from Anthropic to OpenAI and would be a very significant loss for Anthropic and a big gain for OpenAI. One of the things that really stands out to me about all these models that are coming out is we at The Information, as you've done, we report about this latest and greatest model that is coming out and how it poses a threat to another company and their latest model.

23:26But the fact of the matter is then that company then comes out with their own model. And it's kind of like the story changes every two months. I mean, and I guess this is just this is the latest one we have. I mean, it's who knows what Anthropik comes out with, you know, four months from now. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's been the very complicated thing about this market is that it seems like every couple months one company comes out with a model that leapfrogs the other. And so I think that's been one reason why people have very strong opinions on whether investing in this space is a good idea or not.

23:58Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of questions around what the actual moat is. If, you know, in two months, the other big model developer will release a model that's better than yours. So lots of questions about whether, you know, it makes sense as a business to just keep on making models and be in this like constant rat race with the other model developers. or if you should like what OpenAI is doing, move more to applications like chatbots, agents, those sorts of things. Before we let you go, I mean, do we have any sense of the timeline on when GPT-5 will finally become available? Yeah, that's a big, big question.

24:33It seems like so far things are a little in flux, so I don't want to put an exact date on it, but I think it's fair to say that it should be coming out in the next couple of weeks or so. So hopefully by the end of the summer. Great. Well, thank you so much, Stephanie, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. That is Stephanie Palazzolo, who authors our AI Agenda newsletter. That does it for today's show. A reminder that we are live on this stream Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. I want to thank Amazon Web Services, who was our presenting sponsor for this production.

25:04And I want to thank you for tuning in. We really do appreciate your viewership. I am already excited to see you tomorrow on our next show. Thank you so much for joining us and bye-bye for now. Thank you.