E249: TENDERS! Stripe ($159B), Anthropic ($350B), Plaid ($8B); Cerebras files IPO; OpenAI raises $110B; + more

0:00AG Dillon:Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon is closing five pre-IPO stock funds on March 31st, 2026. Andrel, Together AI, Harvey, Glean, and 1X 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. 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.

0:46AG Dillon:Here is the pre-IPO stock update for February 27, 2026. Stripe, the online payments company, priced a new employee and shareholder tender at$159 billion valuation. That mark is up 74 % versus the$91.5 billion round a year ago and up 67 % versus the$95 billion round in 2021. Investors in the tender include Thrive Capital, Co2, and H16Z. Stripe is also repurchasing shares. Current and former employees are eligible to sell shares. Management reiterated that an IPO is not a near-term priority and framed the business as self-funding. Stripe also released its 2025 annual letter this week. The company said that the businesses on its platform generated$1.9 trillion of volume in 2025.

1:37AG Dillon:That's equal to roughly$1.6 billion of global GDP and up 34 % from 2024. Its revenue suite is on track for a billion annual run rate in 2026. Stripe powers 90 % of the Dow Jones industrial average and 80 % of the NASDAQ 100, and it supports 5 million businesses directly or through platforms. The company shipped 350 plus product updates last year, reinforcing the pace of iteration across payments and adjustment modules. The 2025 customer cohort grew about 50 % faster than the 2024 cohort with 57 % of new companies based outside of the United States. The counter of companies reaching 10 million ARR within three months was 2x that of 2024 count.

2:19AG Dillon:Stripe also pointed to an increasingly global revenue mix, including a statistic that among businesses with mostly international revenue, 30 % of that revenue came from countries outside of their home market and outside of the top 10 global economies. AI commerce and stablecoins were positioned as core product vectors. It cited work with OpenAI on an agentic commerce protocol, plus an agentic commerce suite and machine payments using stablecoin macro payments. It said stablecoin payment volume in 2025 doubled to about$400 billion, was 60 % estimated as business-to-business, while bridge volume grew 4x+.

3:00AG Dillon:Stripe referenced Privy at$110 million plus programmable wallets and described Tempo, a blockchain built for payments with second subfinality and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems. Stripe is considering an acquisition of all or parts of PayPal. Although deliberations remain early, PayPal shares rose 6.7 % to$47.02, implying a market value of$43.3 billion on the report, I should say. The price moves imply roughly 921 million shares outstanding based on the stated market cap and share price. Stripe's tender valuation of$159 billion applies a valuation multiple of 3.7x PayPal's equity value at the quoted level.

3:49AG Dillon:PayPal has struggled with modernizing its payments technology as rivals such as Apple and Afflebet have seized market share. Leadership turnover adds to the transition. Enrique Loura is set to become CEO on March 1, replacing Alex Chris, who was ousted this month. PayPal's fourth quarter profit and revenue missed estimates and results pointed to a continued slowdown in payment volume. Plaid, the fintech infrastructure company, allowed employees to sell shares at$8 billion valuation. The mark is a 31 % increase versus its$6.1 billion in April of last year when Plaid raised a$575 million round that also supported employee liquidity and helped cover taxes related to converting expiring RSUs into shares.

4:36AG Dillon:The step up implies a valuation increase of$1.9 billion versus the prior year mark. The transaction underscores how private companies are using structured liquidity to support retention and reduce pressure to accelerate IPO timelines. Even after this step up, Plaid remains 40 % below its$13.4 billion peak in 2021, reflecting the post-2021 fintech valuation reset. Employee liquidity transactions have become more common across late-stage private companies, with recent examples cited including Stripe at$159 billion, as well as Clay, Eleven Labs, and Linear. The mechanism also functions as a balance between employee compensation outcomes and longer-term control over public market timing.

5:19AG Dillon:Saronic, the autonomous submarine boat defense company, is raising as much as$1.5 billion and an indicated valuation of$7.5 billion before including the investment. So that would be$9 billion post money. The round would be led by Kleiner Perkins and would imply a valuation of 121 % increase from about$3.4 billion roughly a year ago. Saronic generated just over$200 million in revenue last year and proposed valuation equates to about 38x that of prior year revenue. The raised size and valuation imply usually large capital formation for a hardware forward defense startup at this stage. The funding push is tied to expanding production of large unmanned ships and scaling towards larger U.S.

6:05AG Dillon:Navy contracts. Defense startups carry concentrated customer risk due to a primary buyer dynamic, and they can require far more capital to reach profitability than typical software companies. Profound, the Gen.ai marketing intelligence platform company raised a$96 million Series C at a$1 billion valuation led by Lightspeed with participation from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Saga VC, Southport Commons, and Advantik. Total funding is now$155 million plus. That implies$95 million raised prior to this round. The company reached the financing milestone one day shy of its 18-month anniversary, highlighting the pace of capitalization behind enterprise AI tooling tied to marketing and discovery.

6:50AG Dillon:Profound positions itself around AI-mediated discovery and answer engine optimization. It's kind of like the AI equivalent to SEO. It said it serves 10 % plus of the Fortune 500 and supports 700 plus enterprises across CPG, financial services, retail, pharma, consumer tech, and B2B tech. The company said 500 plus customers use Profound agents daily and described agents as compressing time from concept to execution via autonomous workflows. Profound also cited G2 recognition as the number one leader on the AEO grid and a 34 ranking in G2's best software products 2026 list across all B2B software.

7:35AG Dillon:Cerevis, the AI-focused semiconductor company, confidentially filed for an IPO and has been meeting with investors with a listing that could take place as soon as April. Previous expectations cited an IPO target in Q2 2026, and the refile reflects renewed momentum after a prior withdrawal. The company is positioned as an AI chip and systems designer competing with large GPU vendors and newer inference-focused challengers. Cerebus signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI to provide 750 megawatts of compute power through 2028, framed as about$10 billion in value. Cerebus completed a$1.1 billion funding round in October that valued at$8.1 billion, then withdrew IPO plans shortly afterwards.

8:20The company later raised$1 billion in a private round, valuing at$23 billion, including the new investment.

8:29AG Dillon:Accelera AI, the AI-focused semiconductor company, raised$250 million to build power-efficient inference semiconductors designed to run models after training, with an emphasis on edge developments. The round was led by innovation industries and included BlackRock with participation from Sandstone Catalyst as an existing investor. Accelera did not disclose a valuation. The company said it raised$450 million plus across the equity grants and venture debt since incorporating 2021. Accelera tied the raise to expanding inference market and rising scrutiny of data center power requirements. The company said its customer base is more than tripled in the past year.

9:11signaling growing demand for accessible compute and improved efficiency. Basis, the accounting AI application company, raised$100 million at$1.15 billion valuation led by Excel with GV and Lloyd Blankfein, the former Goldman Sachs CEO, participating alongside Coastal Ventures and other existing backers. The company was founded in 2023 and has raised$138 million to date, applying$38 million raised prior to this round. The Rays frames AI agents as a response to structural accounting labor constraints and rising platform complexity. BASIS said its platform is used by about 30 percent of the top 25 accounting firms and 20 percent of the top 150 firms.

9:54It positions long horizon agents that can work for hours or days on tasks such as financial statements, tax returns and expense tracking. Basis said it built an agent that can autonomously complete a partnership tax return, a workflow that requires individualized partner documents and multi-state handling. It plans to expand deeper into tax and audit capabilities with the new capital.

10:20AG Dillon:Anthropic, the AI large language model company, said Claude Opus 4.6 identified 500 plus high severity vulnerabilities in production open source code bases after decades of review and millions of hours of fuzzing. Anthropic published the research on February 5 and launched Claude Code Security 15 days later on February 20 as a limited research preview for enterprise and team customers. The product is positioned as reasoning-based scanning with multi-stage self-verification, severity ratings, and confidence scores, and it requires human approval for patches. Anthropic anchored credibility with multiple benchmarking points.

11:02Anthropic frame the release is deliberately constrained with access limited to enterprise and team customers and expedited access for open source maintainers, while emphasizing governance risks tied to dual-use capabilities.

11:18AG Dillon:Antropic said daily consumer cloud signups have tripled from November 2025 to February 2026. Paid subscribers have more than doubled since October, and free users grew 60 % last month. The surge was tied to demand for cloud code, which was available to paid subscribers, and cloud coworker positioned an agent for automating other white-collar tasks. Revenue MISC underscores the strategic importance of consumer growth, even if API remains dominant. Anthropic previously estimated that 86 % of roughly$4.5 billion in 2025 revenue was expected to come from API sales, with about$600 million from chatbot subscriptions.

11:58A consumer scale was framed against peers with ChatGPT at 910 million weekly active users and Gemini at 750 million monthly active users, reinforcing the runway implied by Anthropic's current growth rates. Anthropic is preparing an employee tender at a valuation of about$350 billion and has lined up$5 to$6 billion for the share sale, the final amount depending on employee participation. Anthropic's latest funding round earlier this month valued at$350 billion pre-money. The transaction is structured as outside investors buying employee shares rather than Anthropic repurchasing stock. And eligibility requires 12 plus months of employment.

12:41The tender provides liquidity without forcing near-term public market entry, a dynamic that has become central in competitive AI labor markets. The transaction also reinforces the widening role of private market liquidity as a compensation and retention lever at late stage valuations.

13:01AG Dillon:Anthropic announced COBOL specific functionality for CLAWD and published a code modernization playbook aimed at organizations running COBOL on IBM mainframes. IBM investors reacted with a 13 % stock decline in the period cited. the initiative targets industries where COBOL remains embedded in business critical workflows and where modernization is constrained by both technical risk and talent availability. COBOL scale remains massive in critical systems. COBOL handles an estimated 95 % of ATM transactions in the U.S. and hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL running in daily production. Anthropic Positions AI is compressing modernization timelines from years to quarters.

13:44and by automating exploration, dependency mapping, workflow documentation, risk identification, while keeping strategic planning and validation under expert human oversight. OpenAI, the AI large language model company, closed$110 billion funding round at an$840 billion post-money valuation. The round includes$50 billion from Amazon and$30 billion each from NVIDIA and SoftBank. The mark is up from$5 ,500 billion in an October secondary financing, an increase of$230 billion to 46%. Amazon's investment is staged starting with$15 billion and followed by$35 billion when conditions are met. OpenAI paired the raise with large infrastructure commitments.

14:25It is expanding an existing$38 billion AWS agreement by$100 billion over the next eight years. and AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI's enterprise platform, Frontier.

14:39AG Dillon:OpenAI also committed to three gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and two gigawatts of training capacity on NVIDIA Verirubin systems. OpenAI is targeting roughly$600 billion of total compute spend by 2030 and projected$280 billion of total revenue in 2030 with near equal consumer and enterprise contributions. OpenAI has 200 plus people working on a family of AI hardware devices. The first device is a smart speaker priced at$200 million,$300 million with a camera and a face ID like feature intended to support purchasing through identification. The company does not expect shipment until February 2027 at the earliest.

15:22Smart glasses were described as unlikely to reach match production until 2028, and a smart lab remains a prototype with uncertain release timing. The organization is structurally separated from the core company. The Devices Group formed about nine months ago after OpenAI acquired IO products and operates out of a downtown San Francisco office in Jackson Square near Love From. Love From leads the industrial design, while OpenAI's internal team owns hardware, software, and privacy engineering. The build plan emphasizes ambient observation and nudges tied to user goals, extending OpenAI's products into an always-on consumer context.

16:06That's right. Devices that are always listening to everything that you do and say and see. OpenAI launched Frontier alliances with BCG, McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini to push enterprise adoption in 2026. Program pairs OpenAI's forward-deployed engineering team with consultants to implement OpenAI Frontier across enterprise stacks. Frontier launched in early February and is positioned as a no-code platform to build, deploy and manage AI agents spanning OpenAI models and third-party systems. The strategy aims to convert experimentation into scaled operational changes. Consultants are being positioned as the channel to redesign workflows, incentives, and governance so that AI deployment produces measurable outcomes rather than isolated pilots.

16:53OpenAI also cited recent enterprise deals with Snowflake and ServiceNow and it aimed Barrett Zoff to lead enterprise sales, reinforcing prioritization of enterprise distribution in 2026.

17:05AG Dillon:AMD is backstopping a$300 million Goldman Sachs loan for cloud provider Caruso and the AI data center company to buy AMD AI chips for an Ohio data center. The backstop includes AMD agreeing to rent its own chips from Caruso if the startup cannot find customers, a structure intended to reduce lender risk and improve financing terms. The deal helped Crusoe earn a secure and interest rate of roughly 6 % as materially below what it would have otherwise received. The financing structure mirrors tactics used to accelerate AI chip adoption through emerging cloud providers. AMD has targeted tens of billions in annual AI chip sales by next year and at least 10 % share of the broader market and credit enabled deployments can support those goals.

17:53Crusoe was described as valued at$10 billion and as projecting cash burn of$2 to$4 billion annually into the next decade. Crusoe targets$18 billion in annual cloud revenue by the end of the decade and previously raised$750 million credit facility from Brookfield.

18:10AG Dillon:Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet provider, introduced a$50 per month low-cost tier in the U.S. and in some cases gave away terminals that costed the$600 each to manufacture. year. Starlink ended last year with 9.2 million subscribers and at 10 million in February 2026, reinforcing continued subscriber growth even as pricing trends lower. SpaceX revenue was cited at around$16 billion in 2025, below a widely circulated projection of$19 billion, despite subscriber counts exceeding the projection that modeled 6 million users. Pricing was moved sharply over time and varies by market. Starlink launched in 2020 at$99 per month and rose to 110 in 2022 and 120 in 2023, then reversed towards lower cost, quote unquote, light plans as cheap as$50.

19:00Standard US terminal pricing fell to$349 from$399 in its 2023 introduction, with deeper discounts in areas with excess capacity. In Europe, subscription pricing was cut earlier, including a move to 50 euros in France in 2022. SpaceX has a$1.47 trillion secondary market valuation. That's up 17.9 % versus the XAI merger price earlier this year. I should note most of Starlink's growth is going to come from frontier markets like Africa, South America, and certain parts of Asia.

19:37AG Dillon:Canva, the AI-focused graphic design software company, announced acquisitions of Calvary focused on 2D motion animation and Mango AI focused on reinforcement learning for systems to improve video ad performance. The additions extend Canvas push towards a full stack professional creative suite building on Affinity, which it acquired in 2024 and made free. Canvas said Affinity has been downloaded 5 million plus times since the change, signaling a strong top of funnel pull among professional users. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenue with 265 million users and 31 million paid users.

20:15The company highlighted Canva Grow as an early but fast progressing product for asset creation and performance measurement with growing spend from large brands. The dual acquisition supports a stated focus on expanding into video creation and more granular measurement, positioning Canva to capture a larger share of performance marketing budgets. Canva has a$47.4 billion secondary market valuation. That's up 13 % versus its August 2025 round. Mistral AI, the European AI large language model company, and Accenture has signed a multi-year partnership to develop enterprise technology powered by Mistral's models.

20:53Financial terms and duration were not disclosed. Accenture will also become a Mistral customer and roll out Mistral technology internally to employees, indicating both distribution leverage and direct usage at scale. The partnership reflects a broader enterprise AI go-to-market pattern centered on consultants. Mistral's deals signals that European model providers are competing for the same enterprise implementation channels as US peers using integration partners to convert pilots into standardized deployments. Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks and see you guys next week.