E229: Groq's $750M funding, $6.9B valuation; Figure's $1B+ robotics raise, $39B valuation; Workday's $1.1B Sana acquisition for AI agents; Irregular's $80M AI security boost; xAI's 64M user milestone; OpenAI's new ChatGPT usage report; OpenAI to cut Micro

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon is closing six pre-IPo stock funds this Friday, September 26, 2025. five, just five business days from now. Andrel, XAI, Grok, 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 stock company exposures and the weight allocations to each pre-IPO stock to express your unique investment thesis. Available per purchase at Charles Schwab and Fidelity or directly at AG Dillon Funds. $2 ,500 minimum investment, financial advisors only. Email aaron.dillon at agdillon.com to invest.

0:42Again, 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. All right, now the pre-IPO stock update for September 19, 2025. Grok, the AI inference chimp challenger to NVIDIA, announced$750 million in its latest funding round that closed this week. The$750 million surpassed the initial rumors of a$500 million raise and achieved a post-money valuation of$6.9 billion. That's more than double its$2.8 billion valuation from August 2024 when it raised$640 million. The price per share for the round has remained the same throughout the entire capital raising effort, led by Disruptive with participation from BlackRock, Neuberger, Berman, Deutsche Telekom, Capital Partners, and existing backers like Samsung, Cisco, D1, Altimer.

1:34The round brings Grok's total funding to over$3 billion. The company's language processing units, or LPUs, now power AI applications for more than 2 million developers. That's a 461 % increase from$356 ,000 a year ago, while supporting models, open models, from Meta, DeepSeek, Quinn, Mistral, Google, and OpenAI at lower cost without sacrificing performance. Founder Jonathan Ross is the ex-Google TPU developer, that's Google's AI chip, emphasized Grok's focus on efficient inference engines for cloud and on-premises use. Grok has a$8.1 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 16.9 % versus this July 2025 round.

2:23figure the humanoid robotics company founded in 2022 closed a series c funding round exceeding a billion dollars at a whopping 39 billion dollar valuation led by parkway venture capital with investments from brookfield asset management nvidia and intel capital pushing its total funding to nearly 2 billion in just three years the capital will fuel scaling of its robo robot fleet, excuse me, infrastructure for accelerated training and advanced data collection initiatives to enhance AI-driven humanoid capabilities for real-world development. While specific performance metrics like unit deployments or revenue were not disclosed, the round underscores investor confidence in figures potential to disrupt labor markets through versatile general purpose robots.

3:10Figure AI has a$36.4 billion secondary market valuation. That's down 6.7%. versus this current round, so trading a little bit of discount. Workday is acquiring AI agent startup Sana for$1.1 billion, marking a strategic push into the AI-driven workflow automation for enterprise HR and finance. Though details on Sana's prior funding history, exact valuation trajectory, or growth metrics like user adoption rates remain under wraps amid the deal's announcements, the acquisition highlights the surging demand for AI agents that streamline knowledge work, with SANA positioned as a key enabler for Workday's platform to handle complex, multi-staff tasks autonomously.

3:55No specific statistics on SANA's revenue, customer base, or ROI impacts were available, but the$1.1 billion price tag reflects a premium on its tech stack amid broader M &A trends and AI productivity tools. AI security startup Irregular, formerly Pattern Labs, raised$80 million at a funding round, valuing it at a$450 million valuation. Led by Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures with backing from Wiz CEO Asif Rapoport, Irregular bolsters defenses against emergent risk in frontier AI models through simulated testing environments. The funds will expand in the company's SOLVE framework. Now an industry standard for scoring model vulnerabilities, which has evaluated high profile systems like Anthropics, Claude 3.7, Sonnet and OpenAI's 03 and 04 Mini, revealing gaps in attacker defender simulations across complex networks.

4:56Co-founder Dan Levav noted, our view is that soon a lot of economic activity is going to come through human on AI interaction and AI on AI interaction. And that's going to break the security stack along multiple points while emphasizing the moving target of securing ever more capable LLMs. Co-founder Omer Nevo added that their AI versus AI simulations pinpoint where defenses fail with plans for intensified pre-release risk detection. Total funding to date was not specified. XAI Grok AI large language model chatbot has achieved a remarkable milestone with 64 million monthly users, highlighting explosive growth in the competitive AI landscape just months after its launch.

5:46This user surge coincides with Elon Musk's new focus on XAI following his departure from Washington, where in a company-wide meeting, he unveiled ambitions to develop the maximally truth-seeking AI systems, signaling aggressive expansion into compute resources and talent acquisition to challenge incumbents like OpenAI. The 64 million figure positions Grok as a fast-rising contender, potentially accelerating XAI's path towards broader adoption. XAI's$132.7 billion implied valuation in the secondary market. That's up 17.5 % versus its March 2025 merger with X or Twitter at$113 billion.

6:29OpenAI's pioneering study, co-authored with Harvard economist David Deming and analyzing 1.5 million consumer conversations, unveils ChatGPT's transformation into a daily task tool with non-work usage climbing to 73 % of messages in June 2025, up from 53 % a year earlier, now engaging about 10 % of the global adopt population, 700 million people. The data shows three quarters of interactions focused on practical guidance, that's tutoring and ideation and information seeking and writing, Specific to writing, 56 % of the queries involved doing tasks like editing or translating existing text rather than creating it from scratch, boosting productivity and knowledge jobs without displacing roles.

7:22Adoption trends highlight narrowed gaps. Female users with identifiable names rose from 37 % in January 2024 to match male demographics by mid-2025, while low-income countries saw 4x faster growth. than high-income ones through May of 2025. Chief Economist Aaron Chaturij noted on LinkedIn that this wild usage trend offers insight into AI's value. OpenAI is a$524.9 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 5 % versus its August 2025 tender round. OpenAI is set to slash its revenue share with Microsoft and partners to 8 % by the end of the decade from current 20%, a move projected to unlock over$50 billion in retained earnings, according to a memo from board chair Brett Taylor.

8:15The nonprofit arm currently claims$100 billion or 20 % of the revenues under existing terms, but a fresh non-binding pack aims to restructure OpenEyes' for-profit entity while negotiating server rental costs, reflecting tensions over the current 50-50 split with Microsoft on API and ChatGPT revenues. The shift follows OpenAI's strategy to reduce dependency on its founder and partner, potentially reshaping its financial and operational autonomy amid a competitive AI landscape. SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink's satellite internet product, plans to kick off testing for its Starlink Direct2Cell, or DTC, service using its$17 billion Ecostar acquired spectrum, which includes the AWS4 and H-Block licenses by late 2026, so just around the corner, shifting from carrier-dependent rollouts to first party global 5G connectivity that eradicates dead zones via orbiting satellites.

9:11President Gwen Shotwell, speaking at the World Space Business Week, called it the start of a huge amount of work involving chipmaker collaborations for smartphone integrations and operator deals for capacity wholesaling. Building on 2024's first DTC satellites and summer of 2025's full first-gen constellation deployment, which now supports messaging and data for apps like Google Maps, X, and WhatsApp. Next-gen satellites promise 100x capacity via custom silicon and phased array antennas with US T-Mobile's T-Satellite and Canada's Rogers tests already live. Shotwell added, we're working with chip manufacturers to get the proper chips in phones.

9:57SpaceX has a$413.7 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 3.4 % versus July 2025 tender round. All right, so this last one's not a pre-IPO stock story, but it's relevant as perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, are all considering or have launched web browsers with AI agents integrated. So Google rolled out the Gemini integration in Chrome to all US Mac and Windows users, desktop users with English settings accessible via a top right icon. The Gemini search AI mode search in the address bar launches later this month in the US before global expansion. I think that's going to be a huge deal on the kind of 12 blue links revenue model for them.

10:42New agentic browsing features debuting in coming months and power Gemini for autonomous multitask, multitask, like booking haircuts, ordering groceries with user finalized checkout or retrieving past site visits. i.e. where did I see that walnut desk last week? Alongside deeper ties to calendar for scheduling, YouTube for video navigation, and maps for location details. Additional safeguard includes Gemini Nano's detection of AI-generated scams like fake alerts, plus one-click password resets for breaches on sites like Coursera, Spotify, Duolingo, and H &M. Capabilities emphasize a productivity boost through context-aware suggestions.

11:27and cross-site summarizations for trip planning and or product research. So just to be clear, context aware is another way of saying your own personal data. So basically, Google is going to track and store everything that you do on the Chrome web browser if they're not already doing that today. Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks, and see you guys next week.