E237: Tether $20b buyback!; Ripple $500m raise at $40b valuation; Crusoe tender at $13b valuation; Anthropic forecasting $70b in annual revenue; SpaceX Starlink at 8m customers; AI legal Harvey raises at $8b val | AG Dillon & Co Pre-IPO Stock Research – N

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPO stock update for November 7, 2025. Tether reported net profits above$10 billion for the first nine months of 2025, making it one of the most profitable private financial companies globally. Its flagship USDT stablecoin now has a$174.4 billion market cap after adding$17 billion in circulating supply in Q3 alone. The company holds$181 billion in reserves with$6.8 billion in excess capital, including$135 billion in U.S. treasuries, which makes Tether roughly the 17th largest holder of U.S. debt, plus$12.9 billion in gold and$9.9 billion in Bitcoin.

0:46Sether has launched a share buyback program and is reportedly seeking up to$20 billion from institutional investors such as ARK Invest and SoftBank to support the transaction, signaling an equity-friendly capital return strategy rather than a near -term IPO push. ripple raised 500 million in fresh capital at a 40 billion dollar valuation up from roughly 15 billion in 2022 so investors are underwriting a 2.7x step up in about three years despite the regulatory overhang around xrp the round extends ripple's war chest from for cross-border payments the rl usd stable coin and mna the company has already been adding cash to acquire custody and infrastructure assets to expand outside the U.S.

1:35Ripple's on-chain and payments throughput now run into the tens of billions of dollars processed annually, so investors are effectively paying low single-digit times forward payment volume in line with premium fintech comps rather than pure-play crypto tokens. Customer support AI startup Decagon is in talks to raise a new round at a$4 to$5 billion valuation more than 2 to 3x, the$1.5 billion valuation is secured in only a few months ago in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company has disclosed significantly more than$30 million, that's a quote, in ARR, implying at least 100x plus current year ARR multiples in the high end of the proposed valuation range.

2:20Decagon has raised more than$230 million across four rounds since 2023, with most recent$200 million check arriving earlier this year. So investors are underwriting extremely rapid revenue growth and very high retention to enterprise customer experience budgets. Crusoe, OpenAI's energy efficient data center partner, is running an employee-led secondary sale of about$120 million of stock, reportedly at a 30 % premium to a primary funding round that completed only weeks earlier. That primary round raised around$1.38 billion and valued Crusoe at roughly$10 billion. So this tender implies a$13 billion mark and a quick 30 % uplift for employees.

3:04Crusoe's pitch combines flared gas capture and renewables with dense GPU data centers serving open AI and other AI workloads. Investors are effectively valuing it like an integrated infrastructure plus energy transition play rather than a traditional hosting business. The U.S. Department of Justice has cleared Google's$32 billion acquisition of Wiz. WIZ is moving one of the largest cybersecurity deals ever a step closer to closing. Google first approached WIZ in 2024 with a$23 billion offer that the company rejected and revived the deal at$32 billion announced in March 2025. So that represents a 39 % bump to that earlier bid and validates WIZ's very rapid ARR growth.

3:48The transaction is still pending, final conditions, and is expected to close in early 2026. But U.S. antitrust clearance removes the biggest regulatory overhang and sends up Google Cloud to own one of the fastest growing cloud native security platforms at late stage SaaS like multiples.

4:08Cybersecurity company Armus raised a$435 million pre-IPO round led by Goldman Sachs alternatives with participation from Capital G and Evolution Equity Partners at a$6.1 billion valuation. That mark is up from$4.5 billion tender valuation in August, a 36 % step up in three months, and follows seven M &A offers, including a potential$5 billion bid from Toma Bravo that Armist declined. The company reports$300 million in ARR and plans to reach$500 million while turning cash flow positive before a targeted IPO in 2026-27. This implies roughly a 12 to 20x forward ARR for critical infrastructure security closure.

4:52Legal AI startup Harvey raised$150 million in new funding led by Andreessen Horowitz at an$8 billion valuation, its third major round in 2025, including earlier checks such as a$50 million investment from EQT Growth plus capital from Sequoia, Co2 and Open AI startup fund GV, Elit Gill and Planet Perkins. Harvey has pulled in roughly$750 million of funding this year alone. The round summons Harvey as one of the highest-valued vertical LLM plays, with investors effectively paying multi-decade high legal tech multiples for a platform that aims to automate contract review, drafting, and research across global law firms and in-house teams.

5:34Sam Altman says OpenAI's annual revenue is well more than widely reported$13 billion, and external reporting now pegs the company on track to exceed a$20 billion revenue run rate this year. Management has floated scenarios where revenue could reach$100 billion by 2027. The longer-term commentary suggests ambitions for hundreds of billions in revenue by 2030, driven by enterprise APIs, AI cloud agents and devices. OpenAI expects to post heavy infrastructure-driven cash burn with cumulative cash flow outflows that could total greater than $100 billion by the end of the decade. OpenAI is a$574.9 billion secondary market valuation.

6:14That's up 15 % from its August 2025 round, which was priced at the company at$500 billion. That was a tender round. That implies investors are already underwriting a 5 to 6x revenue multiple on near-term$100 billion top-line revenue, that would be forward revenue, and treating OpenAI as a potential multi-trillion dollar AI infrastructure and services platform. OpenAI disclosed that more More than 1 million businesses now use its products, including 92 % of the Fortune 500, and that chat GPT has reached 800 million weekly active users. The developer ecosystem includes over 100 million developers and more than 2 million custom GPTs built on the platform, with enterprise usage up roughly 4x since January.

6:56This combination of mass market reach and deep enterprise penetration gives OpenAI one of the largest top-of-funnel distributions in software history. If the company can move even 5 % to 10 % of active users into paid plans, that supports management's ambitions of$100 billion plus in revenue by 2027. The scale of the installed base also strengthens OpenAI's bargaining leverage with cloud and chip partners that helps justify its high secondary valuation. openai signed a seven-year 38 billion dollar cloud computing agreement with amazon web services to secure capacity for training and serving models like chat chapt and sora marking its first major move away from the exclusive reliance on microsoft sure under the deal openai will gain access to hundreds of thousands of nvidia gpus hosted by aws data centers with full capacity expected online at late 2026.

7:50The AWS deal lifted Amazon stock by roughly 5 % to record highs. NVIDIA-backed Lambda Labs deepened its partnership with Microsoft through a multi-billion dollar AI infrastructure deal that will deploy tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs on Azure, including cutting-edge GB300 NVIDIA systems. And the exact contract size is undisclosed, but sits on the same news cycle is Microsoft's$9.7 billion iron capacity deal and OpenAI's$38 billion AWS deal. So investors are reading all three of these together as a sign of accelerating AI infrastructure capex. Lambda, founded in 2012, has raised roughly$1.7 billion in venture funding and now looks more like a vertically integrated AI cloud provider than a traditional GPU reseller, capturing value from scarce NVIDIA supply, managed clusters, and high-level services.

8:46Lambda has a$11.8 billion secondary market valuation. It's up 90.1 % versus the September 2025 round. Gemini, the Winkervoss-backed crypto company, is preparing to launch federally regulated prediction market contracts, moving the exchange into a nascent asset class where financial firms are starting to treat event contracts as new derivative variables. The product will allow users to bet on outcomes such as sports, elections, and macro events similar to CalShift's CFTC-regulated contracts. It could diversify Gemini away from its core spot crypto business that has been highly cyclical. Gemini's push into prediction markets comes as the firm rebuilds after the 2022-2023 crypto downturn and the fallout from its EARN program.

9:39The new line aims to tap a multi-billion dollar TAM, that's target adjustable market, at the intersection of trading, sports betting, and retail speculation with fee take rates often in the single digit percent range on notional value. Amazon sent perplexity a scathing seats and desist letter demanding a startup stop using its common shopping agent to make purchases on Amazon without clearly identifying itself as a bot. Amazon argues that third-party agents must disclose their status pointing to food delivery, travel booking, and other intermediaries as precedent. While Perplexity claims its agents should inherit the same permissions as end users, the episode follows earlier Cloudflare research accusing Perplexity of scraping sites that explicitly opted out of AI crawlers and now represents Amazon's first direct legal action against an AI agent company.

10:37The dispute effectively turns Perplexity's shopping bot into a test case for how large platforms will govern agentic commerce and could shape whether bots play platform trolls, respect robots.txt style controls before you get blocked altogether. Anthropics signed Cognizant as a large enterprise customer with plans to roll out the Claude Assistant across hundreds of thousands of Cognizant employees and jointly serve Fortune 500 scale clients in BFSI, healthcare, and other verticals. Reporting says that this makes Cognizant one of Anthropics' three largest customers. and Parallel Anthropics' internal forecasts project up to$70 billion in revenue and$17 billion in cash flow in 2028, with gross margins climbing from negative 94 % last year to 50 % in 2025 and 77 % in 2028.

11:31The company expects revenue of about$3.8 billion this year from API access and targets$9 billion in AR by the end of 2025 and$20 to$26 billion in 2026. has reportedly already reached$1 billion in annualized revenue from this code product alone. Anthropic last year raised$13 billion in September at$170 billion, excuse me, last raised$13 billion in September, this past September, 2025, at$170 billion valuation and may seek a$300 to$400 billion valuation in its next round. That's the rumor. Anthropic has raised$221.2 billion secondary market valuation. That's where it's at today. That's up 20.8 % versus August 2025 around.

12:19Epic Games and Google reached a settlement that ends a five-year legal battle over Google Play's App Store rules and fees. While full financial terms remain under wraps, Google will roll out a new all-apps program that caps effective fees for some developers between 9 % and 20%, significantly below the legacy 30 % list rate, especially when alternative building or third-party stores are used. Epic CEO framed the settlement as a win for Android's openness, since Epic will be able to keep distributing Fortnite and its own store on Android under more favorable economics, although Google avoids the precedent of a court-imposed structural remedy.

13:02The compromise may set a reference point for future App Store negotiations, especially as regulators in the U.S. and EU keep pushing mobile platforms towards lower and more transparent fee structures. SpaceX's Starlink passed 8 million customers globally and continues to add airline partners as it secures additional spectrum for in-flight connectivity and future directed device services. The service's scale and spectrum footprint now makes Starlink one of the most important non-terrestrial broadband networks with a growing share of revenue coming from mobility and enterprise rather than pure consumer-fixed wireless.

13:41SpaceX has$446.3 billion secondary market valuation. That's up$11.6 billion versus July 2025 tender round, which valued the company at$400 billion. Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks, and see you all next week. Thank you.