August 09, 2024

E142: Revolut's $45B valuation with employee share sale, Anduril’s $1.5B round pushes valuation to $14B, Groq’s $640M Series D boosts valuation by 143%, Google acqui-hires Character.AI team, Reddit acquires Memorable AI, JPMorgan rolls out LLM suite to 60

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WEBINAR ANNOUNCEMENT: AG Dillon will be hosting a webinar on August 14 at 1:30pm ET titled “How RIAs Can Invest into Venture Capital and Still Custody at Schwab”. Step by step details of investing into alternatives at Schwab and we’ll explore how AG Dillon venture capital funds are specifically designed to eliminate incremental RIA operational and administrative work when investing into alternatives. Register at www.agdillon.com/webinar.

Weekly pre-IPO reports…
- Valuations, revenue multiples, performance = www.agdillon.com/reports
- Market update pdf = www.agdillon.com/update
- Index fact sheet = www.agdillon.com/index

00:06 | Revolut's $45B Valuation with Employee Share Sale
- Online bank initiated $500M share sale at $45B valuation (secondary)
- Europe’s most valuable start-up
- Eligible employees (7,000 staff) can sell 20% of vested shares at $865.42/share
- Secured UK banking license; 9M UK customers, 45M globally
- 2023: £438M pre-tax profit, revenue almost doubled to £1.8B
- Valuation surged from $15B, Jan secondary market valuation, to $45B in 8 months (+200%)

01:19 | Anduril’s $1.5B Round Pushes Valuation to $14B
- Defense tech company
- Raised $1.5B, new valuation $14B
- Significant increase from $10B in Dec 2023
- Revenue doubled to $500M; 28x valuation multiple
- Funding led by Founders Fund, Sands Capital; new backers: Fidelity, Baillie Gifford
- Investment to expand "Arsenal" manufacturing platform; 5M+ sq ft for mass production of military systems

02:40 | Groq’s $640M Series D Boosts Valuation by 143%
- Semiconductor company focused on AI inference chips
- Raised $640M in Series D, valuation up to $2.8B (primary)
- 143% increase from Feb 2024 round
- Backed by Cisco, Samsung, BlackRock
- Funds to scale tokens-as-a-service and deploy 108,000 LPUs by 2025
- Aims to challenge Nvidia in AI chip market

03:18 | Google Acqui-hires Character.AI Team
- Custom AI chatbot company
- Google licensed Character.AI's technology in an acqui-hire deal
- Co-founders and some team members to join Google
- Character.AI’s valuation rose to $2.5B (secondary), up from $1B
- Company will operate independently with interim CEO Dominic Perella
- Users sent 371M messages to chatbots; introduced voice features

04:06 | Reddit Acquires Memorable AI
- Reddit’s first acquisition since IPO
- Acquired Memorable AI to enhance ad content with generative AI
- Memorable AI founded in 2021; optimizes ad effectiveness
- Reddit generates 98% of its revenue from ads ($804M in 2023)
- Terms of the deal not disclosed

04:42 | JPMorgan Rolls Out LLM Suite to 60,000 Employees
- JPMorgan Chase launched generative AI tool LLM Suite
- Tool assists with tasks like email writing, document summarization
- Rolled out to 60,000 employees; part of broader AI integration strategy
- Aims to boost productivity, avoid dependency on a single AI model provider
- Key for operations, including global payments business moving $8T daily

05:22 | Ola Electric Pops 20% on IPO
- Indian electric scooter company surged 20% on IPO
- Raised $731.6M, valuation $4.8B
- India’s largest IPO since May 2022
- Fiscal year revenue grew 90% to $603M; net loss of $191M
- Delivered 330,000 electric scooters, more than doubling sales
- Proceeds to fund capital expenditures and R&D

05:58 | Pre-IPO Stock Market Weekly Performance
- www.agdillon.com/reports for full pdf

06:29 | Pre-IPO Stock Vintage Index Weekly Performance
- www.agdillon.com/index for pdf with constituent level performance by year