E232: Wealthfront's robo-advisor IPO sprint: $88B AUM, $194M profits; OpenAI's instant checkout: Etsy surge 16%, taps 700M users; OpenAI H1 2025: $4.3B sales vs $2.5B burn, breakeven by 2026?; Cerebras' $1.1B pre-IPO: $8.1B val, Q2 rev 11x YoY; Black Fore

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon has closed six pre-IPo stock funds last week. We raised$23 million across 40 wealth management firms,$57 million raised in AG Dillon pre-IPO stock funds year-to-date 2025,$142 million in total assets under management since our inception three years ago. A special thank you to all of our wealth management firm partners. As a reminder, AG Dillon has two pre-IPO stock fund offerings each year, closing in March and September. Remember, there are six individual pre-IPO stock funds available for purchase in each offering. Use these single pre-IPO stock funds to build bespoke pre-IPO stock portfolios.

0:43You select the pre-IPO stock company exposures and weight allocations to each pre-IPO stock to express your unique investment thesis. Available for purchase at Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and directly at AG Dillon Funds. $2 ,500 minimum investment. Financial advisors only. Email Aaron.Dillon at agdillon.com to learn more. Again, it's A-A-R-O-N dot D-I-L-L-O-N at A-G-D-I-L-L-O-N dot com. All right. Now the pre-IPO stock update for October 3, 2025. Wealthfront, the automated investment platform founded in 2008 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, has officially filed a U.S. IPO on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol WLTH, marking a significant step after a confidential submission in June of 2025 and joining the burgeoning wave of fintech firms going public this year, including competitors like Chime and Klarna.

1:39The filing comes nearly three years after a proposed$1.4 billion all-cash acquisition by UBS collapsed in 2022 due to surging interest rates that pressured valuations across the sector. As of July 31, 2025, Wealthfront reported managing$88.2 billion in assets under management across 1.3 million customer accounts, reflecting robust growth in its robo-advisory services that automate portfolio construction, tax -loss harvesting, and direct indexing. For its fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, the company generated$309 million in revenue while achieving$194 million in net income, underscoring its path to profitability.

2:20That's a lot of profitability. With a lean team of just 359 employees, Wealthfront's IPO prospects are bolstered by its focus on high net worth individuals and features like automated bond ladders and cryptocurrency exposure, positioning it to capitalize on the$100 trillion global wealth management market projected to grow at 7 % annually through 2030. OpenAI has launched Instant Checkout, a groundbreaking e-commerce integration that allows US users of ChatGPT spanning free, plus and pro tiers to purchase single items directly over 1 million Etsy sellers with plans to expand to Spotify merchants such as Skim, Glossier, Spanx and Viore in the coming months.

3:02powered by an open-sourced agentic commerce protocol co-developed with Stripe, which already handles ChatGPT subscriptions. The feature streamlines transactions without OpenAI managing payments, fulfillment, or product recommendations, while merchants incur a modest undisclosed fee per sale and retain full control over customer relationships. The announcement propelled Etsy's stock price up 16 % and Shopify's up more than 6 % in single trading sessions, highlighting investor enthusiasm for AI-driven shopping. Tapping into ChatGPT's massive 700 million weekly active users as of August 2025, instant checkout represents a pivotal revenue diversification strategy for OpenAI, which has historically relied on API access and enterprise licensing for the bulk of its income.

3:51OpenAI disclosed its first half 2025 financials, revealing$4.3 billion in sales, juxtaposed against a$2.5 billion cash burn, a disparity driven by aggressive capital expenditures on AI infrastructure, including data centers and GPU procurements essential for model training and deployment. This burn rate equivalent to$1.25 billion per quarter underscores the capital intensive nature of frontier AI development, where OpenAI competes fiercely with rivals like Anthropic, XAI, and Google DeepMind for talent and compute resources. Despite the losses, the$4.3 billion revenue figure, more than doubled the$1.6 billion for the first half of 2024, signals accelerating adoption fueled by ChatGPT's evolution into a productivity staple with, again, that 700 million weekly active users and enterprise deals like the$300 billion Oracle Cloud PAC starting in 2027.

4:48Analysts project OpenAI could achieve break-even by late 2026 if utilization rates climb above 80%, but ongoing investments in model iterations, such as the forthcoming ChatGPT5, may prolong that path to profitability. OpenAI is a$535 billion secondary market valuation is up 7 % versus its August 2025 round, as secondary market trading reflects optimism about its$12 billion annualized run rate and potential for$100 billion in retained earnings through restructured Microsoft revenue shares by decades in. Cerebra Systems, the AI semiconductor company, has secured$1.1 billion in a pre-IPO funding round that values the company at$8.1 billion, more than doubling its$4 billion valuation from 2021, led by investors including Altimer Capital, Fidelity, Tiger Global, and Benchmark.

5:40The capital infusion aims to ramp up U.S.-based manufacturing capacity, addressing the global chip shortage exasperated by AI demand that saw data center power consumption, excuse me, surge 20 % year over year in 2024. In Q2 2024 alone, Cerebus reported 70 million in revenue. That's an 11-fold increase from its 6 million in the prior year period given deployments of its CS3 systems in hyperscale environments for faster inference and training downloads. The company has already expanded production 8x over the past 18 months and plans to further 4x boost within the next six to eight months, positioning it to capture a slice of the$200 billion AI semiconductor market forecast to grow 35 % CAGR through 2030.

6:28With total funding now exceeding$1.5 billion since its 2016 inception, Cerebra's pre-IPO momentum highlights investor bets on diversified AI hardware ecosystems. Black Forest Labs, the German AI startup behind the cutting edge Flux One image generation model that has garnered acclaim for surpassing mid-journey and stable diffusion in the photorealism and prompt adherence is an advanced talks for 200 to 300 million dollar funding round at a$4 billion valuation, quadrupling its previous$1 billion mark from an earlier undisclosed raise. Strategic partnerships, including collaborations with Meta on Lama, model integrations and Mistral AI have accelerated Black Forest growth, with Flux One downloads exceeding five million in the first month post-launch in August 2025.

7:16The startup's focus on open weight models has attracted over 100 enterprise clients in advertising and e-commerce, where AI-generated visuals reduced production costs by up to 70 % compared to traditional photography. As part of the round, Black Forest plans to hire 50 additional engineers to enhance multilingual capabilities and video generation features, tapping into Europe's burgeoning sovereign AI ecosystem backed by 10 billion euro in EU funding. At a projected$4 billion valuation, the deal would cement Black Forest's status as a leader in the$50 billion generative AI media market, with analysts eyeing potential acquisition interests from big tech firms seeking to bolster creative tools.

7:58Rebellions, the South Korean AI chip startup founded in 2020 by former Samsung executives, has closed a$250 million Series C funding round at a$1.4 billion post-money valuation with semiconductor giant Arm Holdings. It's joining as a strategic investor to co-develop advanced GPUs optimized for edge AI workloads in autonomous vehicles and smart cities. This infusion brings Rebellion's total funding to over$500 million, enabling expansion of its Rebel accelerator chip lineup, which claims 2x the efficiency of NVIDIA's A100 in inference tasks while consuming 40 % less power. It's very important. The company's revenue has tripled year over year to$120 million in 2025, driven by partnerships with Hyundai for automotive applications and SK Phoenix for memory integration amid South Korea's$20 billion national AI initiative.

8:54arms involvement provides access to a vast IP portfolio, accelerating Rebellion's roadmap to tape out a three nanometer chip by mid-2016, or excuse me, mid-2026, positioning it against U.S. and Chinese rivals in the$100 billion edge computing segment. With Asia-Pacific AI hardware spend projected to hit$150 billion by 2028, Rebellion's valuation reflects investor confidence in its potential to capture 5 % to 10 % market share through localized supply chains resilient geopolitical tensions. The Trump administration has finalized a framework for TikTok U.S.'s operations divesture from Chinese parent ByteDance under the 2024 Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, requiring a majority American ownership by investors, including Oracle, while allowing ByteDance to retain approximately 50 percent or more of U.S.

9:49profits through a revenue based licensing fee for its core algorithm and an equity linked profit sharing mechanism. This structure, which includes multiple deadline extensions since January 2025, values the standalone U.S. entity at around$14 billion. That's far below the prior$40 billion estimates, despite 170 million monthly active users generating over$10 billion in annual revenue, equating to a mere 1.4x price-to-sales multiple compared to Meta's 10x and Alphabet's 8x. Naturally, the 50 % revenue share must be depressing the valuation here. Oracle, alongside Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, is negotiating 45 % stake plus board seats in the restructured app, with deal requiring Beijing's approval within 120 days to avert a national wide ban.

10:40Experts decry the terms as daylight robbery, arguing undervaluation overlooks TikTok's 1.5 billion global downloads and e-commerce potential via TikTok Shop, which processed$20 billion in U.S. sales in 2024. The arrangement not only mitigates national security concerns over data flows, but also sets a new precedent for hybrid foreign tech models. Meta Platforms has acquired Rivos, a stealthy AI chip startup developing custom GPUs for data center acceleration and an undisclosed all cash deal that bolsters Meta's in-house semiconductor ambitions amid annual external GPU spending, exceeding$10 billion, primarily with NVIDIA.

11:23Founded in 2021 by ex-Apple and Qualcomm engineers, Rivos has raised$250 million in venture funding at a$1.5 billion valuation, focusing on coherent memory architectures that reduce latency by 30 % and large language model training compared to off-the-shelf solutions. The acquisition aligns with Meta's$600 billion commitment to US AI infrastructure through 2028, including its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, MTAIA is the acronym there, chips already deployed across 100 ,000 plus servers for Lama model fine-tuning. By absorbing Rivo's 50-person team and IP, Meta aims to cut reliance on third-party suppliers by 20 % to 30 % over five years, enhancing cost efficiencies as AI CapEx balloons to$50 billion annually.

12:13This move follows similar plays by hyperscalers like Google and Amazon, signaling a mature ecosystem where custom silicon could capture 25 % of the$400 billion AI hardware market by 2030. Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.5, an advanced mid-sized AI model that outperforms its Opus 4.1 predecessor on benchmarks like SWE Bench Verified for coding accuracy and instruction following, while introducing a colleague-like autonomy capable of tackling intricate multi-hour tasks in domains such as cybersecurity simulations, financial modeling, and scientific research. The model sustains independent operation for up to 30 hours.

12:56That's more than quadruple the prior seven-hour limit without human intervention thanks to refined reinforcement learning that minimizes hallucinations by 25 % and bolsters safety protocols against deception or prompt injection attacks, Hitting a$5 billion annualized revenue runway in August of 2025, primarily from coding and enterprise tools integrated into Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic has appointed Raul Patil, formerly of Stripe and Oracle, as its new CTO to spearhead infrastructure optimizations amid compute constraints that cap Sonnet usage at 240 to 48 hours weekly for heavy users. This launch coincides with broader industry trends, including Meta's$600 billion AI infrastructure pledge through 2028 and OpenAI's matching Oracle and Stargate initiatives.

13:45As Anthropic Eye's sovereign AI deals in Europe valued at 5 billion euros, Anthropic has a$207 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 13 % versus its August 2025 round. perplexity has made its agentic comic browser excuse me comet browser available for free to users worldwide following a three-month exclusive for 200 dollars per month max subscribers that amassed millions on the waitlist featuring an ai-powered sidecar summaries intelligent tab grouping automated email composition and a multitasking background assistant for pro users such as$20 a month and max users. The free version includes specialized tools for discover spaces, shopping, travel, finance, sports, queries, plus a$5 per month Comet Plus add-on, unlocking premium content from outlets like CNN, Conde Nast, and the Washington Post, and the New Yorker, enabling seamless research without traditional search friction.

14:46This rollout directly challenges Google Chrome and emerging AI browsers from OpenAI and Anthropic with Comet's agentic capabilities handling autonomous actions like booking reservations or compiling reports across tabs. Perplexity's annual recurring revenue now approaches$200 million, up from$150 million last month, driven by 10 million monthly users who conduct more than 50 % queries via the browser and then the web alone. Perplexity AI is a$20 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 2 % since its September 2025 round. stripes bridge stablecoin subsidiary acquired for 1.1 billion in early 2024 has an unveiled open issuance and developer friendly platform for creating and managing custom stablecoins with minimal code charging 50 basis point fee while allowing issues to retain all generated interest from underlying blackrock and fidelity treasuries backed by lead bank uh excuse me backed by lead bank liquidity for seamless interoperability ahead of the genius acts stable coin regulations slated for july 2026 bridge is pursuing a federal national trust charter alongside a new york bit license to operate as a regulated issuer targeting the 300 billion dollar current market projected to swell to 2 trillion by 2028 through tokenized payments and DeFi integrations.

16:15Early adopters include wallets like Phantom and Metamask, plus native markets for cross-chain settlements with bridge eschewing its token issuance to prioritize enterprise-grade compliance and scalability. The initiative builds on Stripe's core payments volume, exceeding$1 trillion annually across 200 plus countries, where stable coins could slash cross-border fees by 80 % for its 3 million merchant clients. Stripe has a$118 million secondary market valuation. It's up 29 % since its February 2025 round. Thinking Machines Lab, the AI research firm co-founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Mirati, alongside veterans like John Shulman, has debuted its Tinker API.

17:03It's a platform for automated fine-tuning of open models such as Meta's Lama and Alibaba's Quinn, using supervised and reinforcement learning techniques to craft bespoke frontier AIs for enterprise and academic use. Currently in beta with select access for researchers, Tinker enables rapid customization, like embedding backdoor detection and code bases in hours rather than weeks, with future tiered pricing expected to start at$10 ,000 monthly for high volume users. emphasizing reproducibility, open collaboration through its Connectism research series. The lab contrasts sharply with industry shifts towards closed source models.

17:48Beta testers from Redwood Research and AnyScale have lauded Tinker's 95 % success rate in defeating LLM non-determinism from GPU orchestration variances, positioning it to democratize AI safety tools amid rising regulatory scrutiny. Thing and Machines is a$12 billion secondary market valuation from its primary round in July of 2025. Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks and see you guys next week.