E224: ByteDance buyback at $330B, more revenue vs Meta; Klarna IPO back on; Framer $2B valuation Series D; Rain raises $58M for stablecoin payments platform; Commonwealth $863M for fusion prototype; SpaceX 10th Starship test a huge win; Anthropic launches

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon is closing six pre-IPo stock funds in September of 2025. andrel xai brock lambda labs together ai and a space economy company use these single stock funds to build bespoke pre-ipo stock portfolios you select the pre-ipo stunt company exposures and weights allocations to each pre-ipo stock to express your unique investment thesis available for purchase at charles schwab fidelity and directly at ag dylan funds 2 500 minimum investment Financial advisors only. Email Aaron.Dillon at agdillon.com to invest. Again, that's A-A-R-O-N dot D-I-L-L-O-N at A-G-D-I-L-L-O-N dot com to invest.

0:46All right. Now the pre-IPO stock market update for August 29, 2025. Five. By dance, the parent company of tick tock is launching a new employee share buyback program, buying the firm at over three hundred and thirty billion up from approximately three hundred and fifteen billion six months ago. Shares will be offered at a two two hundred dollars and forty one cents per share. That's up five point five percent from the previous one hundred eighty nine dollars and ninety cents per share price. The company's second quarter 2025 revenue reached about forty eight billion. That's marking a 25 % year-over-year growth, primarily driven from its Chinese market customers, while first quarter revenue exceeded$43 billion, surpassing Meta's$42.3 billion in the same period.

1:33So this company is bigger than Meta. Both ByteDance and Meta maintained over 20 % sales growth in Q2, driven strongly by advertising growth. um byte dance is now the world's largest social media company by revenue though its valuation remains less than a fifth of meta's 1.9 trillion market cap due to u.s regulatory risks you uh tiktok's u.s operations with 170 million users are loss making and byte dance faces a debister deadline extended to september 17 2025 potentially leading to a joint venture where byte dance holds a minority stake alongside investors like Tesquahanna International Group, General Atlantic, KKR, and Andreessen Horowitz.

2:17Klarna, the consumer credit and online payments company, is targeting a U.S. IPO next month at a valuation of$13 billion to$14 billion, aiming to raise around$1 billion with shares priced between$34 and$36 per share, following a pause in April 2025 to the U.S. tariffs. This is down from a near$50 billion valuation target in 2021 and over$15 billion earlier this year in 2025. In Q2 2025, revenue grew 20 % year on year to$823 million with adjusted operating profit at$29 million. That's up from$1 million in the prior year. Active customers surged 31 % to$111 million. Recent U.S. IPOs like Figment Circle saw share prices rise 333 % and 864 % above IPO prices, while the top 20 U.S.

3:10IPOs in 2025 averaged a 36 % first-day gain. Klarna has a$12.1 billion secondary market valuation. A$14 billion IPO is up 15.7 % versus the current secondary market valuation. Framer, an AI-powered NoCo website builder, raised$100 million in a 2025 Series D round led by Meritech and Atomico, achieving a$2 billion valuation. The company has 500 ,000 monthly active users. It previously raised$27 million in its 2023 Series C at an undisclosed valuation. The company was breakeven in 2024. It's hit 50 million in ARR in 2025 and is aiming for another 100 million in ARR in 2026. So it's going to be a 100 % increase year over year.

4:05Enterprise business now constitutes a majority of the new customers since introducing business plans late last year. Notable clients include Miro, Perplexity, Scale AI, and 40 % of Y Combinator's latest batch. rain a startup providing enterprise grade infrastructure for stablecoin powered payments which include visa debit and credit cards wallets and cross-border rails raised 58 million in a series b funding round led by sapphire ventures with participation from samsung next dragonfly galaxy ventures endeavor catalyst light speed and norwest the round brings total funding to 88.5 million after a 24.5 million Series A in March of 2025.

4:50The company, as a Visa principal member, joined Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot in May of 2025. It fully tokenized its credit cards, receivables, and transitioned all transactions to USDC for 24-7, 365 operations while expanding the support to Solana, Tron, and Stellar blockchains to enable customers like fintechs, neobanks and marketplaces to launch stablecoin programs for consumer spending, B2B disbursements and payouts. RAIN reported a 10x increase in transaction volume since January 2025, attributing growth to regulatory clarity from the U.S. Genius Act and Europe's MECA framework. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a fusion-focused nuclear power generation company, raised$863 million in a Series B2 round, bringing total funding to nearly$3 billion.

5:47It's representing one-third of all fusion industry funding to date and included investors like NVIDIA's InVentures, Google Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is Bill Gates, Coastal Ventures, and a consortium of 12 Japanese companies led by Mitsui & Co. and Mitsubishi. This follows a$1.8 billion raise in 2021. The funds will complete the Spark prototype reactor expected online next year and achieving scientific break even by 2027 and develop the Arc commercial plant in Virginia, which construction is starting in 2027 or 2028, costing several billion dollars with a 200 megawatt deal to Google. Both reactors use the tokamak designs with superconducting magnets.

6:38SpaceX, the space payload delivery and satellite internet company, completed its 10th Starship test flight on August 26th from South Texas. The company successfully deployed eight dummy Starlink satellites via a Pez-style payload door, relit a Raptor engine in space. It's the second time they've done that. And tested heat shield resilience by removing tiles and trialing new metallic and actively cooled tiles during re-entry. Both the rocket and the super heavy booster demonstrated propulsion redundancy by switching to backup engines for splashdown. The upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean after maintaining communication, advancing towards NASA's$4 billion Artemis contract for mid-2027 lunar landings.

7:26Future upgrades include higher thrust Raptor engines and improved flaps. Elon Musk envisions over 24 launches in 24 hours. SpaceX has a$420 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 5.2 % versus its July 2025 tender. Anthropic, the AI large language model company, launched a research preview of Cloud for Chrome. It's a browser-based AI agent integrated via extensions. Cloud for Chrome is initially available to 1 ,000 max planned subscribers. Those are folks who pay$100 to$200 a month with a wait list for others. The new product maintains browser context, performs tasks with user permission, and includes safety features like blocking financial and adult sites.

8:08It reduces user prompt interjection success from 23.6 % to 11.2%, so it's more efficient. Anthropics competitors have launched or are about to launch similar solutions. Perplexity has got Comet. OpenAI has got an upcoming browser and Google Gemini's integration with Chrome. Industry-wide browser-based AI agents excel at simple tasks but struggle with complex ones. So it will be interesting to see how Anthropik's solution performs here. Anthropik is currently in the market raising$10 billion at a$170 billion valuation. XAI, an AI large language model company, released the Grok Code Fast 1 model.

8:53The new model is a speedy, economical, agentic coding AI for autonomous coding tasks available for free for a limited time. Users can access Grok Code Fast 1 via GitHub Pilot and Windsurf. The emphasis is compact performance for common coding. Competitors include Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which launched in May of 2025, and it's writing about 20 % to 30 % of Microsoft's codes per their CEO, and OpenAI's Codex, which has been available in ChatGPT Plus since June of 2025. XAI has a$128 billion secondary market valuation. It's up 13.9 % versus its March 2025 merger with X. Okay, that's it for me this week.

9:37Thanks, and see you guys next week.