E244: Brex acquired by Capital One; ClickHouse raise at $15B; Nvidia invests in Baseten; New OpenAI revenue streams

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. Here is the pre-IPo stock update for January 23, 2026. clickhouse is an open source commoner database built for real-time analytics and high concurrency query workloads sold primarily through its managed service clickhouse cloud the company said it closed a 400 million dollar series d led by dragon ear investment group with participation from bessemer ventures gic index ventures coleslaw ventures light speed t-roll price and wcm investment management. Clickhouse said it serves more than 3 ,000 customers on Clickhouse Cloud and that ARR is up more than 250 % year over year.

0:43It cited recent customer adoption or expansion over the last three months from Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, Polymarket, and Airwallex, alongside an installed base that includes Meta, Sony, and Tesla. The$400 million round valued ClickHouse at$15 billion. It's about 2.5x increase from a$6.35 billion valuation last May. The company competes with Snowflake and Databricks and spun out of Yanex, which is a Russian company, in 2021. ClickHouse also announced it acquired LangFuse. It's an open source LLM observability platform used to trace, evaluate, and monitor LLM applications and agents. LangFuse said it is used by 19 of the Fortune 50 and 63 of the Fortune 500.

1:29RunPod is a developer-focused AI app hosting platform that provides GPU infrastructure, including serverless options and developer tooling, such as APIs and command line interfaces. Founders Zhen Liu and Pardeep Singh said the company has reached$120 million annual run rate revenue and previously bootstrapped to more than$24 million in revenue. The founders said that they spent about$50 ,000 repurposing GPU crypto mining rigs into AI servers and launched the platform publicly in early 2022 after initially recruiting beta testers through Reddit offers of free access in exchange for feedback. They said they reached a million dollars in revenue within nine months and quit their jobs, then expanded capacity via revenue sharing partnerships with data centers rather than debt.

2:15RunPod said it raised a$20 million seed round in May of 2024, co-led by venture arms of Dell and Intel, with participation from Nat Freeman and Hugging Face co-founder Julian Chumon. And it has not raised an additional capital since that round. RunPod said it has grown from 100 ,000 developers in May of 2024 to$500 ,000 developers today, including Fortune 500 teams with multimillion-dollar annual spend. The company said it operates across 31 regions globally and cited customers, including Repli, Cursor, OpenAI, Perplexity, Wix, and Zillow. And the founders framed the market as competitive versus hyperscalers and sector specialists, naming AWS, Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave, and CoreScientific.

2:59Humans and, ampersand symbol, is a three-month-old startup positioning AI as software that helps people collaborate rather than replace them. Described as an AI version of an instant messaging app, Humans and raised$400 million in seed funding and at a$4.48 billion valuation with investors including NVIDIA, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Emerson Collective. The founders included Andy Pang, described as a former anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training of Cloud 3.5 through 4.5, plus George Harik as Google's seventh employee and former XAI researchers Eric Zeckelman and Yuchen He, who developed GROC alongside Stanford professor Noah Goodman.

3:46The company said it has about 20 employees and cited backgrounds, including OpenAI, Meta Inflection, AI2, and MIT. The company referenced technical focus areas, including long horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding. Base 10 Labs, an AI inference-focused company, helps companies deploy and run large language AI models, excuse me, large AI models. The company raised$300 million at a$5 billion valuation, more than doubling from a September round of$150 million at a$2.15 billion valuation. The round was co-led by IVP and G, capital G, that's Google's group, Alphabet's, that's Alphabet's investing arm.

4:27With Novidia investing$150 million as part of the deal. Base 10 was founded in 2019, counts customers, including Cursor and Notion, and has raised$558 million to date, including the new capital. The company's goal is to be the AWS for inference. Again, inference is running AI models, servers that run AI models. novion magnetics is a rare earthmatic maker magnet maker excuse me uh seeking to supply u.s industries that rely on magnets using systems such as missile defense submarines data centers jet fighters drones and electric vehicles the company raised 215 million with 200 million from one investment management and 15 million from existing investors according to ceo scott dunn who declined to disclose the valuation.

5:15Novion was founded in 2014, began delivering magnets in the past two years, and has said it's on track to produce more than 2 ,000 tons of magnets per year for about 5 % of U.S. demand. China supplies 92 % of the world's rare earth magnets and can produce about 400 ,000 tons per year, described as at least 40 % more than total global demand. And Novion has recently received almost$40 million in federal grants and sources Rare Earths from Australia, partners with a refiner in Europe and performs sinistering, molding and finishing domestically here in the United States. $630 million was invested in U.S.

5:56critical mineral startups last year. That's the highest on record. And the U.S. government actions include$670 million in loans and equity investment to Vulcan Elements,$80 million for re-element technologies, and the Pentagon taking a 15 % stake in MP Materials, which is building a magnate factory in Texas. ZipLine is a drone delivery and logistics company operating in seven countries with in origin delivering blood and medical supplies in Rwanda starting in 2016 and later expanding into food, retail, and consumer goods. The company raised more than$600 million in a new funding round and said that the round valued it at$7.6 billion, compared to the 2024 round at$5 billion.

6:39Investors included Valor Equity partners and participants such as Tiger Global, Fidelity, and Belly Gifford. Zipline said that it has completed more than 2 million commercial deliveries of 20 million different items covering 125 million miles, and it plans to use the capital for expansion in the U.S. and to new areas. ZipLine said its U.S. delivery has expanded at about 15 % a week over week over the last seven months. It cited U.S. partnerships, including Walmart and Chipotle, including limited drone delivery burritos, burrito delivery in Dallas in 2025. Get your burrito via drone. The company said it is expanding into metro markets in Houston and Phoenix.

7:20Zipline described operating two drone platforms, including a fixed-wing aircraft for long-range deliveries for drops from about 60 to 80 feet, and quieter platform for short-range home deliveries using a tether. Yelp, the recommendation app and online business directory, agreed to acquire AI agent startup Hatch for$300 million, described as about 12x Hatch's annual recurring revenue. Hatch sells subscription AI agents that respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, including conversational agents across SMS, email, and phone. Yelp said it will operate Hatch as a standalone business and also offer Hatch to service professionals on Yelp, such as plumbers and contractors.

8:04Yelp said Hatch employs about 150 people and was founded in 2018 in New York and raised about$14 million from investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Y Combinator. Yelp said Hatch generates$25 million in ARR, up 70 % year over year. Yelp will pay$270 million in cash and allocate$30 million for employees retention paid over two to three years. Capital One agreed to acquire FinTech Brex for$5.15 billion. The deal will be 50 % cash and 50 % stock. Brex provides technology used to administer corporate credit cards, expenses and rewards, and it oversees nearly$13 billion in deposits held by partner banks and money market funds.

8:45Capital One said it expects to close the deal in the second quarter. Brex was founded in 2017 by Brazilian entrepreneurs Pedro Francesi and Henrik Dubras, excuse me, Dubugras, who served as co-CEOs in 2024 with Dubugras, moved off the executive team to become board chairman, and Francesi remains CEO and plans to continue post-close. Brex was valued at more than$12 billion in 2022 and$12.3 billion in a 2022 Series D2 round, making the$5.15 billion price less than half of that level. Early Brex investors include Rivet Capital, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, and individuals including Peter Thiel and Max Lepchin.

9:30Day One is a Singapore-based data center operator that runs facilities in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Finland. It is previously known as GDS International or GDSI. Day One is targeting a valuation as high as$20 billion and a potential 2026 U.S. IPO and is considering a dual listing in the U.S. and Singapore. Day One closed a more than$2 billion Series C earlier this month, led by KOTU Management and expected to push valuation about$10 billion. The company also raised$1.9 billion in two funding rounds in 2024, with backing include Boyu Capital, Hill House Investment, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin.

10:14World Labs is a startup founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, focused on tools for navigating and making decisions in the three-dimensional world described as large world models. World Labs has talked with investors about raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of about$5 billion. The round could add about$500 million to the balance sheet, while noting that the deal is not finalized and terms could change. World Labs emerged from stealth in 2024 with$230 million in financing and a$1 billion valuation. The company launched a product called Marble late last year and described, it's described as a model that can recreate 3D worlds from image and text prompts.

10:54It listed other backers, excuse me, elicit backers, including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, Sandoval Investments, and Temasek, and individual investors Jeff Dean, Ashton Kusher, and Jeffrey Hinton. TikTok and ByteDance establish a new U.S. entity to transfer parts of U.S. operations to American investors. Described as avoiding a nationwide ban in securing the app's future in the U.S., the entity has three managing investors, Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. and TikTok CEO Xiao Chu will have a board seat while continuing to run Bright Dance globally. Adam Presser, formerly TikTok's head of operations, will become head of U.S.

11:37operations, will become CEO of the American Venture. The report said that the venture will be governed by a seven-member majority American board and will be responsible for content moderation and protecting U.S. user data, with Oracle serving as a security guard role to ensure compliance. Under the new ownership structure shown, new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX, will own 50 % of the new entity. Existing ByteDance investors will control 30.1 % and ByteDance will hold 19.9%. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance cited a price tag of about$14 billion, while estimates of TikTok's American business have ranged from$35 billion to$50 billion.

12:19So this is a coup for these early investors getting in. It said that the platform is roughly 200 million U.S. users per month. The structure allows ByteDance to lease a copy of its content algorithm to the U.S. entity while retaining retraining on U.S. user data. And it said ByteDance is expected to maintain control over parts of the U.S. business, including advertising division and TikTok shop. infrac a newly formed vc-backed startup created by the team behind vllm an open source tool used to run ai models faster and more affordably in inference the company said it raised 150 million seed funding at an 800 million valuation co-led by indrescent horowitz and light speed venture partners vllm was incubated in 2023 at a uc berkeley lab led by databricks co-founder ayan Stoyska.

13:07And Interfact CEO Simon Moe said existing users of VLLM include Amazon's cloud service and shopping app. RadixArc is the commercial company behind SGLang, an open source tool designed to make AI models run faster and cheaper with a focus on inference optimization. RadixArc recently valued at about$400 million in a funding round led by Excel. The company was announced late August and previously raised angel capital, including Intel CEO Lu Lip Boutan. Yang Sheng, described as a key SG Lang contributor and former XI engineer, became co-founder and CEO of Radix Arc and previously worked at Databricks.

13:52Radix Arc continued to develop SG Lang as open source and is building a reinforcement learning framework called Miles. It also said that RedixArc is charging fees for hosting services while most tools remain free. Blue Origin announced TerraWave, a satellite communications network targeting symmetrical data speeds of up to six terabits globally for enterprise data and government contractors. The architecture includes 5 ,408 optically interconnected satellites across low-Earth orbit and medium-Earth orbit described as 5 ,280 LEO satellites and 128 MEO satellites in reports. Blue Origin said customers can access speeds up to 144 gigabits via Q and V-band links from the LEO constellation and up to 6 terabits via the optical links from the MEO satellites.

14:47The company said deployment will begin in Q4, 2027. SpaceX's Starlink has more than 9 million customers. Starlink plans to upgrade it, plans upgraded satellites targeting one gigabytes in the future. Blue Origin has said, excuse me, has had some recent operational milestones, including a first New Glenn launch in 2025, a booster landing on a second attempt and a first commercial payload for NASA. so. Shopify said it will begin making merchants products available for purchase via or through chatbot checkout features starting on January 26, including ChatGPT, Google's AI mode and Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

15:27Shopify said merchants will pay OpenAI a 4 % fee on sales made through ChatGPT's checkout on top of a typical Shopify fees, such as payments processing, while sales through Google and Microsoft chatbot checkouts will carry no additional fees for now. Shopify said merchants must opt in for channels that charge an additional fee such as ChatGPT and products will be available by default on channels that do not charge an additional fee. Merchants can toggle AI platforms on or off individually to choose the channels and products may still appear in AI responses with links to the merchant's own websites unless the merchants contact the AI companies or block indexing by web crawlers.

16:06The agentic storefronts put products directly into AI chat interfaces, routing orders into Shopify checkout. Shopify president Harley Ficklestein said AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores rose 7x since the prior January and orders attributed to AI research rose 11x. Sam Altman said OpenAI has added more than$1 billion of annual recurring revenue in December 2025 from its API business alone. That is about 5 % of OpenAI's total ARR, which topped$20 billion by the end of 2025, rising from$6 billion in 2024 and$2 billion in 2023. OpenAI API is used by businesses and developers to embed OpenAI AI large language models into their products.

16:51OpenAI said it will begin testing ads within ChatGPT in the coming weeks, the company said Plus Pro and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads and it will test ads with adult free users in the US. It also said the low cost Go offering is now available in the US and users on Go will begin to see ads. OpenAI said ads will appear at the bottom of answers and be clearly labeled. It said that the responses will not be influenced by ads. And it said that it will never sell users data to advertisers. OpenAI said that users under 18 will not see ads and ads will not appear near certain topics, including politics, health, and mental health.

17:31OpenAI and ServiceNow signed a three-year deal to integrate OpenAI's models into ServiceNow's business software with the arrangement depending on customers using OpenAI models within ServiceNow and including a revenue commitment from ServiceNow to OpenAI. Those specific terms were not disclosed. ServiceNow said it will develop AI voice agents for use cases such as customer service using OpenAI speech-focused models. ServiceNow also said it will embed OpenAI's computer use model to enable agents to perform IT tasks such as restarting a computer and to help access data in legacy systems like mainframes through workflow automation.

18:07Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks, and see you guys next week.