E236: Mercor $350M Series C quintuples valuation to $10B amid AI data pivot; OpenAI restructuring to PBC unlocks $40B fundraising at $500B valuation; SoftBank greenlights $22.5B final tranche to OpenAI contingent on PBC shift; OpenAI advances generative m

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for October 31st, 2025. Mercor has secured a$350 million in Series C funding led by Felicius Ventures with Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Newcomer Robinhood Ventures. Also participating, boosting its valuation to$10 billion and contemplating from the$2 billion post-money mark from its$100 million Series B in February of 2025. The 2023-founded startup led by Thiel Fellows CEO Brendan Fudi and CTO Ardash HireMath initially launched as an AI-driven hiring platform evaluating candidates through transcripts, resumes, and portfolios.

0:48It pivoted sharply after Meta's$14.3 billion June 2025 investment secured a 49 % stake in rival scale AI, prompting OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and Meta to abandon scale over neutrality issues. Mercore rapidly built a network of over 30 ,000 domain experts, including former Goldman Sachs bankers, consultants, and lawyers who contributed specialized workflow knowledge at rates of up to$200 per hour, enabling daily payouts exceeding 1.5 million. The company now runs at a$500 million annualized recurring revenue pace, while maintaining profitability through premium finder's fees and enforcement learning systems.

1:29Fresh capital will expand the expert pool, refine matching algorithms, and automate workflows. Positioning Mercore is a gig economy powerhouse akin to Uber for elite AI training data against scale AI and surge AI, both valued north of$20 billion. OpenAI completed a transformative restructuring, converting its capped profit subsidiary into a for-profit public benefit corporation dubbed the OpenAI Group, while the nonprofit are rebranded as the OpenAI Foundation with full board appointment rights and enhanced governance powers. The foundation receives an initial 26 % equity stake valued at$130 billion based on the early October$500 billion company valuation, addressing investor needs from a$40 billion fundraising round that allocates 27 % to Microsoft via$13.75 billion invested through 2032 for IP rights and 15 % to SoftBank and partners and 26 % to employees.

2:30The nonprofit can scale its ownership further in 2040 if the group reaches $5 trillion, 10 times current levels, despite criticism that profits now overshadow charitable goals. Regulators in California and Delaware approved the plan. OpenAI committed$1.4 trillion to infrastructure like data centers and chips, with foundation pledging$25 billion initially towards an AI safety and health initiatives. CEO Sam Altman emphasized that the for-profit structure attracts vast resources for ambitious research and product scaling. OpenAI has a$750.9 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 14.2 % from its August 2025 round.

3:14OpenAI SoftBank, excuse me, SoftBank Group approved the remaining$22.5 billion installment into OpenAI, fulfilling a$40 billion total commitment from an April$41 billion financing package that included$10 billion in paid mid-April and$30 billion agreed in December. The final tranche required OpenAI to transition to a for-profit PBC by the end of the year, or it drops to$20 billion. The funding supports OpenAI's$1.4 trillion infrastructure expansion amid explosive growth to 800 million weekly active users and a$12 billion annualized revenue run rate. excuse me, SoftBank's aggressive move reinforces its AI leadership strategy and paves the way for potential IPOs under the continued nonprofit oversight.

4:05OpenAI is advancing a sophisticated generative music platform involving from 2020's Jukebox, which produced songs with rudimentary vocals, and 2019's MuseNet, capable of four-minute multi-instrument composition. The team collaborates with Juilliard school students to annotate musical scores for training data and is hiring voice AI experts at salaries of$500 ,000 plus equity. The tool will generate full music tracks, sound effects, and ambient audio from text or audio prompts supporting applications like video soundtrack creation or real-time accompaniment for vocalists. Planned integrations with ChatGPT and Sora 2 targets the$200 billion annual creative media market.

4:54Competitors include Suno, currently negotiating over$100 million in a valuation exceeding$2 billion, and Udeo. OpenAI has tested ChatGPT's Spotify connectivity and continues infringement litigation. Job posting highlights priorities in conversational fluency and accessibility. Poolside is in the process of raising$2 billion at a$12 billion valuation with NVIDIA pledging at least$500 million and potentially up to a billion upon round completion, quadrupling its prior mark after NVIDIA led a$500 million Series B in October of 2024. The startup focuses on large language models tailored for software development and code generation, offering real-time suggestions within integrated development environments for Fortune 500.

5:42clients. The AI coding sector is valued at$50 billion and expanding at a 45 % CAGR. Bending Spoons raised$270 million in primary equity alongside a$440 million secondary share sale to investors, including T. Rowe Price, Valley Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, and Fidelity, achieving a pre-money valuation of$11 billion. That's up from$2.8 billion in 2024. The company also arranged for$2.8 billion in debt financing to acquire AOL for$1.4 billion from Apollo-owned Yahoo, its 50th-plus transaction following purchases of Vimeo, Evernote, Meetup, Hopin, and WeTransfer. Projected 2025 revenue reached$1.2 billion, bolstered by AOL's 30 million monthly active email users and 8 million daily actives.

6:33Co-founders Luca Ferrari, which has a$1.4 billion stake, and Matteo Danielli, Luca Puella and Francesco Patinello, each with$1.3 billion of equity, entered the billionaire's rank. Funds will drive long-term AOL development in a$100 billion digital media landscape. Whatnot completed a$225 million series F round co-led by DST Global and Capital G, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Alkian Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Graycroft, Avra, and Bond, including a$126 million tender offer, lifting its valuation to$11.5 billion from$5 billion post-January Series E. Total funding now surpasses$968 million.

7:20The live stream shopping platform spans nine countries and targets Asia by the end of 2026, covering collectibles, fashion, electronics, and over 140 categories. Gross merchandise value doubled to$6 billion in 2025 on 8 % commission rates, though it remains unprofitable with average daily viewer engagement exceeding 80 minutes. Seattle headcount will triple to over 75 in product engineering and machine learning and trust and safety roles from a 900-employee base. Competitors include Amazon Live, TikTok Shop, and YouTube Shopping in a U.S. market hitting$49 billion this year and projected at$60.6 billion by 2028 per eMarketer.

8:08Figma acquired Tel Aviv-based AI media generation startup Weevy for more than$200 million, its largest acquisition at eight, integrating the 20-person team founded in 2024 by ex-Fiber executives, including CEO Lyre Albeck. Figma launched Figma Weave and established a new R &D center in Israel while keeping Weavey's standalone node-based workflow tool, which combines models like Sora, Veo, and Flux and Ideogram for prompt-driven image and video creation with layer editing, lighting, and color adjustments on infinite canvases. The product generated several million dollars in revenue within four months of launch.

8:49Backed by$4 million in seed funding, Entree Capital held a 20 % stake. The deal enhances Figma's AI capabilities following July 2025 IPO at$24 billion, which peaked at nearly$60 billion after a failed$22 billion Adobe takeover. Minimax unveiled into a$200 billion parameter open-sourced model employing mixture of experts architecture that activates only 10 billion parameters per inference for superior efficiency. It tops artificial analysis. Overall intelligence index is the leading open model and places in the global top five. Outperforming Google DeepMind's Gemini 2.5 Pro released in June of 2025.

9:38For comparison, DeepSeek V3.2 activates 37 billion parameters. And Moonshot's AI Kimi K2 uses 32 billion. Minimax advances China's sovereign AI agenda amid U.S. restrictions in a generative AI market exceeding$100 billion and growing at a 40 % CAGR. 1x Technologies began accepting pre-orders for its NIO household robot at$20 ,000 outright. It's a$200 deposit required or$499 monthly lease with a six-month minimum. U.S. deliveries are slated for 2026 with global expansion in 2027. The 5 '6 tall, 66-pound humanoid performs tasks like folding laundry, loading dishwashers, fetching items, watering plants via voice or app commands.

10:30It carries up to 55 pounds, lifts 150 pounds, runs for four hours on battery, and connects via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G. Complex operations require human VR supervision in expert mode with a data sharing waiver for AI improvements that sparks privacy concerns over camera access. CAO Bernd Bornich describes it as a social contract for advancement. Demonstrations show tasks completing in one to two minutes, though balance challenges remain. One X Technologies has a$10 billion valuation from its September 2025 primary round. SpaceX is on track to secure a$2 billion Pentagon contract for up to 600 air-moving target indicator satellites to detect missiles, aircraft under President Trump's Golden Dome initiative from a July tax and spending bill.

11:25The award strengthens its national security role after completing 120 Falcon 9 launches in 2025. Starlink is projected to post$11 billion in 2025 revenue. That's up 42.9 % year-over-year, serving more than 7 million users in 150 countries. It signed its inaugural UK telecom partnership with Virgin Media O2 for O2 Satellite, providing basic messaging in mobile dead zones through direct-to-phone satellite links. SpaceX also expressed acquisition interest in Globalstar to enhance spectrum holdings in a$200 billion satellite industry. SpaceX has a$446.3 billion secondary market valuation that's up 11.6 % from its July 2025 round.

12:15Canva introduced a proprietary foundational design model trained on editable layers and objects, creating prompt-based creation of social posts, presentation whiteboards, and websites with iterative refinement that surpasses diffusion and omni-model capabilities. Canva AI is now deeply integrated platform-wide, offering app mentions and comments, 3D object generation, art style replication, and spreadsheet to visualization widgets. Canva Grow delivers AI-powered marketing with asset creation, platform analytics, and direct meta ad publishing following the Magic Brief acquisition and the Infinity Suite acquired in 2024 for$380 million with 5 million prior downloads and 1.5 million added cents is now free forever, consolidating vector, pixel, and layout editing in a single GPU accelerated application featuring custom UI studios and on-device AI scaling.

13:13Canva challenges Adobe's$70 per month creative cloud for its 30 million users in a$100 billion design software market. Canva has a$43.6 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 3.8 % from its August 2025 round. Grammarly unified its brand under Superhuman, combining Grammarly writing tools, coded collaborative workspaces, and the acquired superhuman mail into a single AI native productivity ecosystem serving 40 million daily active users. The superhuman suite debuts with AI assistant superhuman Go, providing proactive recommendations across more than 100 applications, including Jira, Gmail, Google Workspace, and via connector agents that access CRM and meeting data for tasks like bug reporting or calendar coordination.

14:03dedicated writing agents foster inspiration and originality with integrations from partners such as fireflies and quizlet all features are free until february 2026 through chrome and edge extensions with mac and windows versions forthcoming strict privacy controls prohibit data monetization pro tier pricing is$12 per month businesses$33 per month annually and superhuman competes with notion and google workspace in a$50 billion product activity sector. An agent's STK is currently in closed beta. Okay. That's it for me this week. Thanks and see you all next week.