E248: OpenAI $280B in 2030 revenue! + “buys” OpenClaw; Grafana $9B valuation; World Labs $5B valuation; + more

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon is closing five pre-IPo stock funds on March 31st, 2026. Andruil, Together AI, Harvey, Glean, and OneX Technologies. Use these single stock funds to build bespoke pre-IPO stock portfolios. You select the pre-IPO stock company exposures and weight allocations to each pre-IPO stock to express your unique investment thesis. It's 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 invest. Again, 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.

0:46Here is the pre-IPO stock update for February 20, 2026. OpenAI now expects revenue to exceed $280 billion in 2030, driven by faster subscription growth across consumer and enterprise products and a new advertising effort that is being tested with certain users. CFO Sarah Fryer said annualized revenue topped$20 billion in 2025, up from roughly$6 billion in 2024, above a$10 billion target, alongside$8 billion of cash burn below the$9 billion target. Usage has scaled to 910 million weekly active ChatGPT users in February of 2026. That's below a prior$1 billion goal for the end of 2025. Management noted that the growth dipped in the second half of 2025 during a Rocky ChatGPT5 rollout before rebounding after GPT5.1 and GPT5.2 updates.

1:44OpenAI now projects 2.75 billion weekly active users by 2030. The company also disclosed Codex, which is their coding solution, has surpassed 1.5 million weekly active users as competition with Google and Anthropik intensifies. On expenses, OpenAI said inference or running AI models cost quadrupled in 2025, pushing adjusted gross margin down to 33 % from 40 % and below a 46 % internal target. And it lowered forward margin expectations to 52 % to 67 % over the next five years versus prior plans to reach 70 % by 2029. OpenAI ended 2025 with about$40 billion in cash and now expects burn to rise to$25 billion this year and$57 billion in 2027.

2:36And it warned it will burn more than twice as much cash through 2030 as previously forecast, as it expends$665 billion on running and training models, including inference costs rising to$14 billion in 2026 and$26 billion in 2027, and training costs rising to$32 billion in 2026 and$65 billion in 2027, totaling nearly$440 billion through 2030. OpenAI is targeting about$600 billion of total compute spend by 2030 versus prior messaging that pointed to more than$1.4 trillion in infrastructure spend. That's a 57 % reduction. In its segment outlook, OpenAI is grouping subscription and ads into consumer bucket and forecasting consumer sales doubling to$17 billion in 26 and$150 billion by 2030.

3:28Enterprise GPT revenue is projected to more than triple to$8 billion in 26, with API sales are expected to reach$5 billion in 26 and$10.5 billion in 27, before scaling to about$50 billion by 2030, or roughly 17 % of the total. OpenAI's pinning hardware lineup is forecasted at about$100 million in 2026 and$1.3 billion in 2027 and about 5 % of 2030 revenue. Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind the AI assistant OpenClaw, joined OpenAI after a month-long surge in attention that pushed the project into viral territory over the past few weeks. Steinberger said OpenClaw could have become a large company, but he is choosing distribution and access to frontier research instead.

4:18Describing OpenAI as the fastest path to bring consumer-grade agents to massive audience. He said that he spent last week in San Francisco meeting with major labs and getting exposure to unreleased research. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Steinberger will drive the next generation of personal agents, while OpenClaw will be moved into a foundation and remain open source with continued OpenAI support. OpenAI is finalizing initial commitments before a financing round that could raise more than$120 billion in an$850 billion post-money valuation. SoftBank is expected to anchor with$30 billion spread across three$10 billion installments over the year.

4:54Strategic checks under discussion include Amazon up to$50 billion, Nvidia up to$30 billion, Microsoft in the low billions, with negotiations fluid and totals not fully committed. OpenAI is also seeking additional financial investors and has been in discussions with existing backers, including Thrive Capital, Coastal Ventures, Founders Fund, and Sequoia. The round is the first since OpenAI restructured last fall into a corporation that can issue standard equity, and executives have discussed going public as soon as the fourth quarter. The company is calling the financing its Series C, and investors are receiving preferred shares with 1x liquidation preference and conversion into a Class A common stock at an exit.

5:36OpenAI has raised about$61 billion to date. Tata Group and OpenAI are partnering to deliver AI services and build infrastructure in India as New Delhi pushes to strengthen its position in the global AI race. Tata Consultancy Services said it will build industry-specific offerings, help businesses integrate open AI platforms globally, and develop AI infrastructure, starting with 100 megawatts of capacity, with an option to expand to one gigawatt. Tata Sun's chairman, N. Chhira Deshir Aran, I said that name improperly, called the partnership a milestone for India's ambition to become a global AI leader.

6:16The announcement follows Infosys' partnership with Anthropic earlier this week focused on regulated industries and also comes as Andani Group said it will invest$100 billion to build large-scale data centers by 2035. Grafana Labs, the observability software company, is finalizing a new round that would value the company at about$9 billion, up from a$6.6 billion valuation in 2024 round. The talks come as Grafana's annual recurring revenue reached$400 million in September, and as demand rises for observability software that tracks cloud usage, AI activity, and spending, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC is in talks to lead the round, while the amount being raised has not been disclosed.

6:58Grafana is positioned against Datadog, which has a$45 billion market cap and grew revenue of 28 % last year to$3.43 billion. The broader observability sector is seeing increased deal activity, including Palo Alto Network's$3.35 billion acquisition of Chronosphere, as enterprises respond to AI agents that increase the risk of outages and breaches. WorldLabs, that's the AI world model company, secured a$200 million investment from Autodesk as part of a broader$1 billion round backed by investors, including AMD, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, NVIDIA, and others. World Labs emerged from stealth in 2024 with$230 million raised at a$1 billion valuation.

7:44This new round is rumored to have a$5 billion post-money valuation. Autodesk and World Labs will collaborate at the research and model level on world models that generate and reason about immersive 3D environments, starting with media and entertainment. World Labs' first product, Marble, launched in November, allows users to create editable, downloadable 3D environments. Autodesk said data sharing is not part of the agreement, and its chief scientists described early-stage collaboration paths that could include either side consuming the other's models in different settings. Temporal raised a Series D from A16Z to back what it describes as the code execution layer for mission-critical workflows as agents move from generating output to taking actions across real systems.

8:29The firm argued that agentic AI often stalls after demos because production systems amplify failure modes like retries that break logic, state loss between steps, and external API failures, especially as agents run for minutes, hours, or even days. Temporal's pitch is durable execution with built-in retries, state management, orchestration, recovery, and deterministic replay so developers can focus on business logic rather than distributed system plumbing. The company said major AI labs and AI native companies, including OpenAI, Replit, Lovable, Abridged, Anthropic, rely on Temporal, and it cited enterprise customers such as JP Morgan, Airbnb, Snapchat, and Stripe.

9:13OpenAI uses Temporal to run ChatGPT images workflows at scale with Temporal describing millions of image generation workflows running reliably to completion, while Replit uses it to orchestrate longer coding agent sessions that plan, run, and debug code. mesh optical technologies raised$50 million series aid led by thrive capital to scale us manufacturing of optical transceivers the fiber and laser linked components used to move data at high speeds inside ai data centers so los angeles company founded last year by spacex alumni said its first product alpha c1 is faster and more powerful more power efficient and lower latency than existing transceivers, and it plans to build the largest optical manufacturing footprint outside of Asia by 2027.

10:04Mesh is targeting production of 1 ,000 units per day within a year, with qualification for bulk holders for 2027 to 2028. CEO Travis Brashears highlighted the scale math in large clusters, saying a million GPU systems can apply four to five times as many transceivers. The company also said its design removes a power-hungry component, which it estimates could reduce GPT cluster power usage by 3 % to 5%. That's a big deal. And it framed supply chain localization as strategic in a market it said is dominated by Chinese suppliers. Render, the cloud platform for deploying and scaling apps, websites, and databases, raised$100 million in an extension of its Series C at a$1.5 billion valuation, bringing total funding to$258 million.

10:54as investors double down on developer infrastructure, position for AI applications and agents. The company said it now has more than 4.5 million developers on its platform with over 250 ,000 new developers joining each month. Each year-over-year revenue growth is above 100%. Render has 100 employees and runs primarily in AWS and Google Cloud while testing use of its own servers to potentially reduce costs and improve pricing. Render's product thesis is that AI agents are long-running, stateful, and distributed workloads that do not fit short-lived request-response model of traditional web apps, and is building a more integrated runtime across workflows, storage, sandboxes, gateways, and observability.

11:36OpenAI is a Render customer. Statch Financial, a digital financial services company, signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Grab. It's a Southeast Asian super app and a deal based on 425 million enterprise value. Grab will purchase 50.1 % at closing and acquire the remaining stake over three years post-close at fair market value with initial consideration paid in cash and stock and follow-on payments in cash and or stock at Grab's discretion. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026 subject to regulatory approval. Stash operates as an SEC-regulated registered investment advisor with more than$5 billion in assets under management and over 1 million customers using its subscription app.

12:20The company's AI money coach launched in late 2024 and has driven engagement with about one in two users taking a positive financial action on the same day. A rate, Stash said, rose to nearly 40 % in 2025. Grab said Stash is expected to generate more than$60 million in adjusted EBITDA in 2028, and it plans to keep Stash as a standalone entity led by co-founders and co-CEOs Brandon Krieg and Ed Robinson. Grab reported more than$50 million monthly transacting users across eight Southeast Asian countries and said it will explore longer-term opportunities to bring Stash's investing tools to the region while remaining operationally focused on Southeast Asia in the near term.

13:05physical super intelligence or psi announced its seed funding this week psi is positioning itself as a vertically integrated factory for physics breakthroughs using artificial and super intelligence with a structure intended to move from theory through computational validation and experimental testing into commercialization the founder framed uh the pitch against the last century's physics milestone citing transistors in 1947 nuclear energy in 1951 and lasers in 1960s and argued that superintelligence could unlock a new era of physics-led innovation. PSI described a team of nearly 20 physicists, engineers, and AI researchers drawn from Google, OpenAI, Meta, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, and John Hopkins.

13:50PSI investors include SV Angel, Valkyrie, Balaji, Solari Capital, Zero21T Capital, and leaders affiliated with OpenAI, SoftBank, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Google DeepMind, World, and Thiel Micro. Figma is partnering with Anthropic to launch Code to Canvas, a feature that converts code generated in cloud code to fully editable designs inside Figma. The feature is designed to move agent-generated interfaces into the design workflow, enabling teams to refine designs, compare options side by side, and align on decisions, even as agentic coding tools increase the speed at which working products can be produced, framed the move as a bet that designs remaining critical while also flagging the risk that increasing capability, capable coding agents, excuse me, could eventually compress or bypass traditional refinement loops.

14:51Anthropic has a$418 billion secondary market valuation that's up 10.2 % from its recently closed primary round. Anthropic launched Claude Sonic 4.6 in its second major model release in less than two weeks following the launch of Claude Opus 4.6 just 12 days earlier. Anthropic said Sonic 4.6 improves computer use, coding, design, knowledge work, tasks, and large data processing, and it will become the default model for free users and paid pro users across Claude and Claude coworker tool. Stripe subsidiary Bridge received conditional approval from the Office of Comptroller of the Currency to organize a federally chartered national trust bank with the OCC database showing an application filed in October and a conditional approval dated February 12.

15:44If fully approved, the charter would allow Bridge to custody digital assets, issue and orchestrate stablecoins, and manage stablecoin reserves under direct OCC oversight. And Bridge said its compliance framework is aligned with stablecoin guardrails under the Genius Act. The OCC has issued a broad wave of trust charter activity, including conditional approvals in December for Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets. The OCC received 18 charter applications in 2025 across trust and full-service national charters. Final approvals appear to be coming fast, too, with Erebor Banks roughly four months in a conditional approval phase before it received final approval for a full-service national charter.

16:32Stripe recently completed a$140 billion tender offering. Cohear, the AI large language model company, launched Tiny Aya, a family of open-weight multilingual models that support more than 70 languages and are designed to run locally on everyday devices like laptops without an internet connection. The base model has$3.35 billion parameters, and Cohere also released Tiny Aya Global for strong instruction following, plus regional variants, including Tiny Aya Earth for African languages, Tiny Aya Fire for South Asian languages, and Tiny Aya Water spanning Asia Pacific, West Asia, and Europe. Coeer said the models are trained on a single cluster of 64 H100 GPUs and are optimized for on device usage that requires less compute than many comparable models, supporting use cases such as offline translation and linguistical diverse markets like India.

17:26The models are available through Hugging Face and the Coeer platform. Coeer said it will release training and evaluation data sets and a technical report. The company ended 2025 with$240 million in annual recurring revenue, supported by 50 % quarter-over-quarter growth throughout the year. Coher completed a$6.8 billion primary round in August 2025. 11 Labs, the AI voice agent company, launched what it called the first AIUC1-backed insurance policy for AI voice agents, arguing that insured agent behavior could help enterprises move from pilots to production. 11 Labs said 11 agents power more than 3 million voice agents deployed globally across customer support, sales, scheduling, and other workflows, and said its technology is used by employees at more than 75 % of Fortune 500 companies.

18:22The AIUC1 certification process run by the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company includes more than 5 ,000 adversarial simulations, and 11 labs said its agents completed 5 ,835 technical tests across 14 risk categories spanning security, safety, reliability, privacy, and accountability. 11 Labs said its agents built on its platform can be up to 75 % of the way towards certification by default, with customers able to achieve full certification in weeks, citing one customer that certified a 24-7 property inquiry agent in four weeks. 11 Labs has a$12.2 billion secondary market valuation that's up 10.9 % versus its February 2026 round.

19:05Mistral AI, the European AI large language model company, completed its first acquisition with the purchase of infrastructure startup Koyeb as it looks to strengthen computing capabilities and reduce developer friction. Mistral said Koyeb's platform helps developers run and scale AI workloads without infrastructure bottlenecks. And Koyeb described the deal as a way to build AI infrastructure capacity in Europe. Koyeb's team of 16 engineers, including its three co-founders, will join Mistral in March, while the product will continue operating during the transition and become quarter mistral's complete compute over the coming months.

19:43Financial terms were not disclosed, and Coyab said it will focus on the pro plan and higher subscription tiers. Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks, and see you guys next week.