Tech Giants, AI, and Big Money: Earnings, Funding, and Policy Shifts | July 24, 2025

0:13Welcome everyone to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasritcha. It is Thursday, July 24th, and earnings season is well underway, folks. We have got some big numbers coming from Google, Tesla, and the ServiceNow results from last night. We've also got some great guests coming on the show. The CEO of Vanta is coming on to talk about their new funding round. We've also got the CEO of LTK coming on to talk social commerce. And then, before we go, we've got a big scoop about OpenAI's new funding round for you, And we're going to get the latest from Washington, D.C., from our D.C. correspondent, who's going to tell us about the White House AI action plan.

0:52Before we get to the earnings, I want to share with you a big project that we just published here at The Information. Our generative AI takeover list is now live. It's the second time we've published a list like this. It basically shows more than 50 startups that our reporters have identified as prime acquisition targets. We know AI M &A is all the rave these days. A couple names on that list, u.com, Tika AI, Together AI. This is all from analysis and reporting that our newsroom has done, so be sure to check that out. Okay, let's go on to earnings. Last night, we had Google, Tesla, and Service now reporting.

1:29And to simplify things, I'm going to give you one number that you need to take away from each of those prints. For Google, the number that you need to know is$85 billion. That is how much the company estimated it will spend on capital expenditures this year. Most important thing here is that it is$10 billion more than what the company said earlier this year it was going to spend. That budget, of course, is what Google is going to put towards data centers and other AI and cloud infrastructure. And the good news is that both search revenue and cloud revenue growth accelerated in the quarter. And so Google is firing on all cylinders.

2:09Tesla, on the other hand, is a bit of a different story. The number you need to know is negative 12%. Tesla's revenue in Q2 was 12 % smaller than the same quarter last year. I mean, look, we all knew this was coming. The company is selling less cars. It has lowered its prices. Elon Musk seems to be making light with the situation. At least he was last night on the call. He's frankly more interested in robo-taxis right now. but I'm going to link our briefing newsletter in the show notes where you can get all of the details on that. And last but not least, we had ServiceNow reporting last night.

2:44The most important number there was$125 million. That is how much the company raised its sales forecast for the year. And the most important thing about this, I mean, is the fact that if ServiceNow is raising their sales forecast, it's one of the first enterprise software companies to report earnings publicly. And it kind of suggests that businesses are spending on software despite the macroeconomic uncertainty. And that is something that I am looking forward to getting into with our next guest as well. Okay. Speaking of our first guest, Banta is one of the fastest growing names in the business of compliance.

3:19The company raised$150 million this week at a valuation north of$4 billion. The company counts Cursor, Duolingo, Ramp, and Atlassian among its customers. And I want to bring on CEO Christina Cachapo to take us inside her playbook for the company. Christina, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Doing well. Thanks so much for having me. So look, I mean, Vanta, some people might have heard of the name, some people may not have. The product is a little bit in the weeds. So what is it that you sell? Let's start there. Yeah. So we, well, we sell a trust management platform, but that's a little jargony.

3:55So what we do is we help companies build out or improve their security programs internally and then get credit for that with their customers through compliance audits, security questionnaires, trust centers. And so it's really about turning security into a business driver so more security happens in internet companies. Got it. So it's a combination of security and compliance software. Yep. You know, there's a number floating out there around your top line,$220 million in annual recurring revenue. You know, I'm comparing that to the number that you put out about 18 months ago,$100 million in ARR.

4:37I mean, this is staggering growth. Where is all this growth coming from? So, you know, it's from our customers, kind of obviously. I think what we see, Captain Obvious here, but seriously, what we see is that two things. One, there's more and more startups and companies being created, right? And so we've just seen the pace of startup creation, you know, continue over the last six or eight years. Like whatever the COVID boom was, we're higher than it. There's that piece. And then we see the bar for trustworthiness and software is also just ratcheting up. And so Cursor is a great example. They came to Banta when they were very small, even, you know, not just 50 people small, but like five people small.

5:20Because it was a product-led growth motion, but as they were growing and expanding into larger companies, the larger companies would say, hey, we really want our engineers to use Cursor. But giving, you know, this five-person company access to our code base is really scary. What assurance cursor can you provide us so you have reasonable security practices? So they turned to Vanta, started to build out their security program. I went through a SOC 2 audit, had that report. They also have a trust center. But again, it's like five-person cursor needed that. Even cursor with its incredible product market fit and virality to sell to larger companies.

5:57You know, I talked about ServiceNow earnings at the top of the show. So I did a story on ServiceNow and I got to know the ITSM space pretty well. And it's not the most exciting space as far as software goes. I mean, the only thing, I mean this with respect, but the only thing less interesting ITSM might be compliance. And so, I mean, like as you thought about your vision for the Vanta brand when you were starting the company, I mean, what was the vision for the company? Yeah. Okay. Okay, so it was compliance is this like misunderstood space where if you say it to an engineer, you run screaming from the room.

6:35I literally did that when I ripped the drop lock, right? Like no one is like, you know, jumps out of bed or very few people, I should say, jump out of bed to go work on compliance, right? But I do actually think compliance is quite misunderstood because done well, it opens up new markets. It's a huge growth driver. Again, the first SOC 2 report for a startup will like let them talk to enterprise customers. The first ISO 2701 audit will open up Europe. HIPAA and HITRUST open up healthcare. And so the first, these are really business unlocks and market unlocks. And with that comes a ton of growth.

7:09And when you think about compliance that way, I think it's actually quite misunderstood. Right. So, I mean, unlocking new markets. I mean, but help me understand the brand. I mean, you guys just hired a new chief marketing officer from Brex. I mean, what is your vision for the brand? Yeah. So we are. OK, so we do make software. We also make a billboard on one on one that's been up for a couple of years. People know it's compliance that doesn't stock too much. Right. And I do think that slogan is us and the brand at our best. And so the way we think about it is we take ourselves seriously. We take our customers seriously.

7:43We're doing serious work. We take our customers seriously. We're doing serious work. We don't take ourselves too seriously. And so the, you know, pithy brand attribute is with the wink. But I think Vanta is at its best when, again, we're kind of winking at our customers and that compliance that doesn't suck too much is a good representation of that, I think. What brands do you look up to? Different ones. I mean, I think all the classic ones, you know, like everyone loves Nike. And I think the Just Do It is actually so powerful. And one of the things I really like about that is they don't say, you know, high performance athletics is easy.

8:18uh these high performance athletics it's really hard but you do it and you'll be glad at the other side so i really like that um i think uh ramp does a tremendous job of like having a high level message and pulling it through all of their material we can all kind of like say the ramp value statement because they just repeat it at every level all of the time and so like that consistency is really impressive um uh oh and then uh i love loved and loved but i loved the glossier brand when it came out uh you know kind of more like millennial female coated but uh i just thought like they nailed they nailed their moment how did they nail it i think they when they came out in whatever it was 2015 2016 or so like they understood their customer, which was kind of like a millennial female, and like spoke to them in a language and like a text language and a visual language that just felt like a friend.

9:18Hmm. You guys raised$150 million about a year ago. And now you've raised, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it was, you know, 13 months. You know, I'm wondering how the fundraising environment has changed in the past year from your perspective. oh um or was it the same but could have been the same so this round came together or we didn't even in some ways plan to raise we didn't have a deck it was like conversations with their existing investors who got excited we got a conversation about numbers uh we went to wellington who we've known for a long time but it was not an investor and they ended up leading and so in that sense easier but i think what it actually was was we just had, we'd gone out a year ago, we had our projections, we had our numbers, we hit them, even exceeded them.

10:11And so it was just this kind of year and also kind of multi-year, like history of execution. And so that made it easy, if that makes sense. You know, I mean, just going back to the growth of the company, like I said, you know, $220 million in ARR right now,$100 million about 18 months ago, you talked about it being, more customers and more customers spending more with you. As it relates to product lines, I mean, what is the product line that you are investing most in right now? Yeah. So one, I don't know, theory I have, I don't think it's that controversial, but is like all the companies that are long-term and sustaining have multiple products.

10:52And it's really hard to go multi-product. And so you should do it early. It's always hard. It's harder over time. So do it as early as possible. So we've tried to do that. So we talk about core product line is automated compliance and GRC, governance risk and compliance. It's what most of our customers use this for today and know us, so there's a ton of investment going in there. Then we have started additional product lines around security questionnaires and trust centers that are attached to probably north of 50 % of our customers, maybe north of that. We have a new product around vendor risk management, which helps larger enterprises think about the software they're bringing into their company, procuring.

11:32And that we're very excited about as well. Just acquired a company last week to make that product line even better. Right. And I was going to go to acquisitions. I mean, you acquired a company. You've said specifically that you would like to make more acquisitions with the money. What exactly are you looking to buy? Yeah, really strong tech and technical teams that are building in adjacent areas to Vanta. The only sign is like there's, you know, 2020, 2021 was sort of the years of Vanta knockoffs. There's lots of those still, but even acquiring that is tough because we have the tech, right? And so you're just kind of throwing that away.

12:05You get a talented team of people who know the space, but it's harder to make the numbers work in those. So taking last week's acquisition as an example, it was a team out of Israel that was building outside in risk scoring. So like from the outside of a company, what is the risk posture or what do you think about that? We brought that in because we have a lot of inside-out data. And so when you couple those two together, you get a much more compelling product offering. So I think last week's acquisition is like a really good example of what we aspire to do more of in the future. Right. I mean, I just want to double-click on that.

12:37I mean, you talked about the different product areas you guys are building. I mean, which product area do you really think it will make sense probably to lead to? The all-of-them answer? Say it again? No. No, no, because you mentioned all these different products. Which one in your mind are you like, we're going to have to buy? I mean, building here is just like we can't get there fast enough. Oh, nothing that we have today I feel that way about. Okay, so you're committing to building. Yeah, for the stuff we have today. Yeah, totally. Great. Last question for you. I just want to understand a little bit your view on sort of enterprise software spending in the current macroeconomic climate.

13:16We're going to have a lot of software companies report. We've had a couple of them report already. How has, you know, what are you hearing from customers in terms of how they're thinking about their budgets and enterprise software spending broadly in this climate? Yeah, we've actually seen and seen and heard it anecdotally increase quite a bit. I think there was a bit of a, you know, lull in 22-ish. And then the AI boom has sparked a lot of that up. And I think it's with the premise of kind of efficiency savings, cost savings. Oh, if you have this AI support tool, you will at least at the very least stop hiring on support agents.

13:55I don't know if we've really seen as much of that happen in practice yet. But that narrative is still driving a lot of software purchases today. So you're not seeing people pulling back because of the macroeconomic right now? We are not. I think there also might be a little bit of, you know, we thought the tariffs would be bad. They don't seem actually that bad. We thought, you know, the news of the week would be bad. It hasn't actually shown up, right? The volatility in the media is not matching the volatility in the markets yet. Are you guys looking to go public anytime soon? You know, companies that are like long-term and enduring tend to go public.

14:34So, you know, think about it that way, but like no plans right now. 26? 27? No plans. All right. Well, thank you so much, Christina, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. That is Christina, the CEO of Vanta. Our next guest has spent the past few years capitalizing on the dramatic shift in e-commerce as social media has played a much bigger role in influencing what people buy. Amber Vensbox is the president and co-founder of LTK, which is a website that you may have been redirected to through Instagram if you've clicked to see an influencer's recommendations. The company was last valued at$2 billion.

15:10and I want to bring on Amber to talk about how AI could be the next big shift for e-commerce. Amber, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Akash. Congratulations. So, look, you built a really interesting company. Help me understand how LTK makes money. Let's just start there. Yeah, I'm going to walk you through the three sides of the business. We are a three-sided marketplace. Really, LTK is the global platform for creator commerce. And we're unique because creators don't just post here. They're building lasting businesses here. So with their LTK profiles, they can retain, nurture, and also grow direct relationships with their audiences.

15:49And they're driving daily high-intent shopping behavior. So for them, this is owned distribution. This is not algorithmic reach. Then we move to the brands. So for brands, LTK is a full funnel performance channel, and it really scales globally. We have creators in over 100 countries. countries. And being on the LTK platform as a creator means that we're turning those creators into a retailer's tech-enabled power partner. These are not social-only built on platforms that have perverse incentives in the way that they're engineered. This is purpose-built to drive outcomes. So behind the scenes, we're providing the infrastructure, the attribution, insights, payments that last year drove over$5 billion in retail sales.

16:31So quick summary, three-sided marketplace mission to make creators as economically successful as possible over a decade building this the data attribution payments um ltk is really the rails that the creator economy runs on right so you've got you've got the creators you've got the brands um and then you've got the the audience um you know in in terms of the business model the way you make money i mean the way i understand correct me if i'm wrong i mean ltk takes transaction fees on customers that buy through the platform that are redirected to the platform and then are redirected to the site.

17:05And then you've also got this other line of business now, which is working directly with brands. Help me understand sort of that side of the business. Yeah. Well, and some adjustments actually to your assumption on the transaction revenue. So actually, the vast majority of purchases happen on the LTK platform. So you had mentioned kind of a redirect through or traffic from outside. Today, the bulk of LTK traffic is actually direct traffic. Oh, a trend not just for a trader. So this year we're closing in on$6 billion with the goods sold. The vast majority of that is happening on platform direct load.

17:41The second side of the business is collaboration revenue that you referenced. So this is platform fees for LTK on campaigns that are running through the platform. A campaign is a flat fee paid to a creator for a certain activity on a certain platform at a certain time. And today our creators, they earn roughly half and half. So half of their revenue is coming from flat fees. Half of it's coming from transaction revenue. We're aligned to that business model. We earn when they earn. And so our books look the same. And so these are brands coming to you to LTK saying, hey, you know, I've got$10 ,000 to spend on some kind of a campaign.

18:19Help me find the right creators and help me sort of manage this campaign. Is that how it works? Really, it's a creator management platform on the brand side. So it's everything from kind of sourcing, discovery, management, gifting codes, commissioning, doing flat rate paid collaborations, running, you know, commercials on television, licensing images for your website. So there's a lot of things that we have been able to put in the platform that creators are now able to sell today. Over the last couple of years, we've actually been able to grow the revenue that our creators are earning by several billion dollars.

18:54by really driving efficiencies across the entire marketing team. So now it's not just the marketing teams here today. It's social, it's in-store, it's content, it's catalog, it's really all groups. And the CMO overlooking that and they're able to overlay all this information and then make more efficient decisions. I truly believe what Goldman has actually put out as well, which is that creators will actually be the powering force behind the entire digital economy. And we're making that a reality through the LTK platform. I want to talk a little bit about your perspective on AI. But, you know, again, just I'm fascinated by the current state of the business.

19:31You know, you've got the transaction fees. You've got this business working with brands. What's the breakdown in revenue right now between those businesses? Yeah, it's about half and half. So slightly more on the flat fee business today. We did start in the transaction fee business. What was it? What was it a year ago? You know, it has been, you know, it's all the last couple of years. It's been about half and half. I would say that we are finding more ways for brands to spend efficiently. So it has grown more on the on the flat fee side. But we've also grown from the pie has just gotten a lot bigger.

20:06We're talking about going from a billion dollars invested a couple of years ago to now over three billion dollars invested. We're talking about going from, you know, just a couple million, I mean, a couple billion in retail sales to now closing on six billion in retail sales. So it stays pretty close to half and half, kind of teeters both ways. But like I said, the pie is getting much bigger. And it's really a reflection of a significant shift that both we are benefiting from and driving because consumers are now they're making purchases based on trust. And you're seeing huge shifts in where trust comes from in the market today.

20:40I want to ask you about AI and, you know, how people are finding their shopping recommendations now. You know, we've written a lot of the information about how it's only a matter of time before people likely start shopping through these chatbots more and more and, you know, get their recommendations that way. I mean, if I just think about myself, you know, where I might have found something through social media, for example, or through influencer, you know, maybe tomorrow I'm finding more things through these AI platforms. Do you think that this shift, you know, potentially away from finding things through influencers and maybe more using some of these AI tools, I mean, does that represent a threat to your business at all?

21:27You know, we are both leveraging those tools to drive efficiencies, personalization. But what I do think that AI is not going to be able to reproduce is the browse and discover. And so when you think about, like, why is it that you wanted to search for that hotel in San Miguel? or why is it that you wanted barrel leg jeans or why did you want hokas? It's probably because a creator told you about them and recommended them. So I find that it's much like going to the world superstore. When I go there, we all know what I'm talking about. I know that I'm searching for little girls' ballet flats. I know I'm searching for Epsom salt.

22:00I'm there. I'm highly intent driven and I can get an efficient outcome. But where AI falls short is on the browse and discover. And what we uniquely do is actually give you browse and discover in the highest trust environment, which is through human created content. So to be on LTK, a creator actually does have to go through the application process, be vetted, you know, KYC, the whole deal. And so for a consumer to come in, it's such a high trust environment, which is why we see two core things happening in the LTK consumer app today, which is a top rated app on the app store. So first, they're coming in for control of their feed.

22:33They've chosen who they want to follow. We're giving them that reverse chronological, no algorithms, video first feed of the people that they've chosen. And that's there and they have confidence in that, both for the creator and for the consumer. The second thing that they immediately go to is search. So we are also leaning into the utility element and layering in AI for personalization on that because they are also coming to us to see what people are saying about those HOKAs or San Miguel hotels. And so you'll see both happening in the LTK app. But I think what AI cannot replace is browse and discover.

23:05So do you guys allow any AI-generated content on your platform at all? So assisted. And actually, some of that, actually, we as a platform are helping them with. So last fall, we actually launched our LTK AI co-pilot, which does a number of things for our creators. They're loading in content. They're editing it, creating it, adding music. The next step, we take over. So we're going and saying, hey, we identified these products within this content. Are you right or wrong? That's automated through AI. They can approve, deny, edit. We move on. There's more through the funnel that's now being automated.

23:40On the end of this, so the automation through really their CRM is also LTK AI. So right message, right person, right time, whether that's a push notification, an in-app notification, an email to their customer based on the specific message that that customer would need, also all automated. And our promise to our customer is that you are getting a real human who's making real human recommendations. We do not allow AI bots on the platform. I mean, that's kind of interesting. You know, this idea that, you know, the trust that you talked about, I mean, it makes sense, you know, you have to be a person to create that content.

24:15And so, you know, I think based on some of the other conversations we've had, you know, it might be one of the few platforms that, you know, that people can turn to, to strictly get, you know, human generated content. And it sounds like you're leaning into that and you don't plan to go away from that. No, 100 percent. That's the promise. It aligns with our mission of making creators as economically successful as possible, not making LTK as economically successful as possible. But we believe those two things do align. But we're looking to empower humans. And so I think that's the first thing. Second of all, I hear a lot from our brands when they talk about brand trust or a trusted environment, a brand safe.

24:55what I see happening across what used to be social, what Mark came out in May and said, we are no longer social media. I think his words were, we are now, you know, browse, we're now not browse, we're broad discovery and entertainment were his words. They've fully stepped out of the lane of social and now into that. Last year, they promised recommended content would take over. It did. This year, they're promising AI content takes over. It has. When I opened the platforms, I have very low trust. I don't know about you. There's things I've seen this week that look really real, whether it's in politics, in weather, in local news, and in recommendations that look real, but I have a suspicion that they're fake.