OpenAI Casually Passes $2B ARR

Also Notion acquires Skiff and Ex-Apple employee launches AI glasses.

Author

Adam Hardej
February 12, 2024

Daily(ish) news and live events for venture nerds.

The tweets below are not photoshopped. The Altman brothers are putting on a masterclass in public family tech banter. When he’s not posting bangers, Sam is apparently leading OpenAI to $2B in ARR. All in all, pretty solid 2024 for Sam so far. Meanwhile, Notion acquired a privacy focused productivity platform called Skiff and an Ex-Apple employee launched an AI glasses company that makes everyone look like Steve Jobs.

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Report: OpenAI Surpasses $2 Billion in Annualized Revenue

“The ChatGPT creator believes it can more than double this figure in 2025, thanks to strong interest from business customers who want to use its generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the workplace, the Financial Times (FT) reported Friday (Feb. 9), citing unnamed sources.”

Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff

“The company announced today that it has acquired Skiff, a platform that offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events, and email.”

Ex-Apple exec launches AI-powered specs

“Another former Apple employee is launching an AI hardware wearable — this time, it's a pair of round glasses that bear a striking resemblance to the spectacles often worn by Steve Jobs.”

Upcoming Live Events

Up Next: Personal Finance Apps Post-Mint

Join us live this week - Thursday, February 15th - at 3pm EST to learn more about the role of personal finance apps in a post-mint world.

For context: Mint was one of the largest personal finance apps in the world and it is being sunset by Intuit, who bought mint for $170M in 2020.

On Deck: Anduril and Defense Tech

Join us live on Thursday, February 22nd to learn more about Anduril and the Defense Tech sector. We're excited to be joined by:

Scott Sanders - Chief Growth Officer @ RRAI

RRAI is an industry-leading vehicle autonomy company providing autonomous driving solutions for defense and commercial applications. Founded in 2002, the Company has leveraged twenty years of experience customizing autonomous solutions to apply best practices across verticals and become a trusted technology partner to the public and private sectors. From people to platforms, at home or overseas, RRAI is driven to make the way you move smarter, safer, and more efficient. To date, their vehicle-agnostic Autonomy Kit has been deployed on four continents in over 10 countries.

Ross Fubini - Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital

Operating under the belief that execution solves all problems, XYZ is a venture firm that invests in early-stage founders to help them go faster. XYZ aims to support entrepreneurs in building enduring companies in fintech, enterprise and tech-forgotten industries like insurance and the public sector. The firm primarily backs talented founders at the earliest stages of company building -- people who have discovered a key insight and have an unfair advantage from “doing the work” or based on their own lived experience.

More Details Soon: NYC’s Definitive Demo Day

Really excited to put this event together alongside our friends at Verci. Our goal is to make this a monthly window into the best of what the NYC startup scene has to offer. Great founders building exciting solutions with smart questions from active investors.

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Previously on Sandhill

Most recently: AI & B2B SaaS

This was really great! Thank you to everyone who came out live. For those of you who missed it we had a really insightful conversation with this group of operators:

  • ​​Wade Foster is the Co-founder and CEO of Zapier.

  • ​​Des Traynor is the Co-founder and CSO of Intercom.

  • ​Benjamin Gammell is the CFO at Brex.

You can check out the full recordings below and I’ll be sharing clips on social soon:

​Another shoutout to Walter Chen from Sacra for helping put this together!

Semi-recently: Howard Lindzon and This Is Not Financial Advice

This was great and I think I’m a better investor now after talking to Howard. We even broke the news that he is returning to Stocktwits as CEO after 8 years away!

Check out the full recordings below and stay tuned for clips + key takeaways soon:

It was a winding Friday afternoon conversation that covered everything from what This Is Not Financial Advice is really about to how it’s important to know yourself to be a good investor.

Letters From The Editor

Misc. (short for miscellaneous)

Deeper Thoughts On Epic Games Price Movement

You may have seen this headline recently from The Information regarding the Disney investment into Epic Games: Disney’s Epic Deal Values Fortnite Maker at $22.5 Billion, a Sharp Cut

At face value, this would continue a narrative of discounts in Secondary markets. However, thanks to our friends at Notice.co and their secondary pricing data product - we can look a layer deeper here to see that $22.5B is actually a significant bump up compared to where it has been trading in the secondaries market the past 12 months. More specifically, you can see that for the past few months Epic has been trading in the 400 to 500 pps range. This equates to a valuation of ~$15B. At $22.5B we’re looking at a ~50% premium to where the shares have been trading.

What is, as The Information points out, a “sharp cut” is that this is still a ways down from their last institutional round of financing at the valuation of $31.5B in April of 2022. All in all though, this is a definitively positive push up for Epic shareholders from my point of view. I was surprised to not see The Information point to this type of data. They do mention Fidelity marks having been in line with this pricing (~$600pps which is close to the $22.5B value) however, those are classically a bit inflated and not reflective of where shareholders actually buy/sell.

I’d encourage you to check out the Notice.co platform for yourself if you haven’t already and I’m excited to bring you more data like this in the future.

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Talk soon,
Adam

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