Research indicates that AI companions may alleviate feelings of loneliness; however, specialists caution against emotional reliance and the potential dangers of substituting genuine human relationships.
Your LinkedIn session could be less private than you believe.
A recent report indicates that LinkedIn analyzes more than 6,000 Chrome extensions and gathers device information through concealed scripts, prompting significant privacy issues.
Microsoft invested years in promoting Copilot, yet it now advises against depending on it.
Microsoft claims Copilot is for “entertainment purposes only,” even with its extensive integration into Office and Windows, eliciting criticism regarding contradictory messaging.
I strongly suggest trying out these 3 essential games this weekend on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.
Certain weekends are meant for relaxation, while others bring a whirlwind of activity. This one? A mix of the two. Whether it’s exploring a gaming legend that shaped a generation, plunging into a dramatically enhanced open-world adventure, or sampling a cult classic of this generation that’s poised to exit Game Pass shortly, this selection offers variety. 1. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered […]
Sonos Play Evaluation: Merging Efficiency and Ease
It’s more streamlined and mobile than the bulky Move, yet sufficiently large to provide a fuller sound in comparison to the compact Roam. It can stay put on its charging stand like the home-focused Sonos Era 100, or follow you wherever you go. Fundamentally, it represents Sonos’ versatility, and now that it’s operating smoothly, it’s hard to resist.
Keep Playing
The unboxing of the Play’s brown cardboard box exudes a blend of Scandinavian elegance and sustainability, mirroring recent items like the Arc Ultra soundbar. Inside, a white cloth reveals a sturdy, cylindrical speaker with a rubber loop, measuring 7.6 x 4.4 x 3 inches and weighing just under 3 pounds. It comes with simple setup instructions and a wireless charging dock, but no wall adapter. You will need an adapter that supplies at least 9 volts and 2 amps (18 watts), but a 15-volt, 3-amp (45-watt) one is optimal for “best” charging. Sonos states that omitting the adapter is to help minimize e-waste, though they’ll offer one for $29.
Other than this, the Sonos app is all that’s needed for setup. Following a mandatory firmware upgrade, my Play was connected to my home network in minutes. Sonos directly supports over 100 streaming services, and you can also stream through third-party platforms like Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Apple AirPlay, and others. The speaker appears as a separate “Room” on the app’s main page, allowing you to swipe to pair it with other Sonos devices on your network, or access settings to modify features like EQ, Room name (crucial if you own more than one Play), and Sonos Trueplay for audio tuning to your surroundings.
A Battery Saver feature is available by default, powering down after being idle for too long. This feature, according to Sonos, caused the connection issues I faced while confirming the speaker’s 24-hour battery life claim. Sonos has pinpointed the main issue, and after the firmware update, I’ve let the speaker power down multiple times without experiencing any subsequent network problems during a week of further testing.
Peter Thiel’s significant wager on solar-powered cattle collars
Founders Fund has established its reputation by supporting what Peter Thiel refers to as “zero to one” companies — organizations that innovate significantly beyond existing concepts rather than merely enhancing them. Its investment portfolio features Facebook, SpaceX, and Palantir. Its most recent investment is in a startup from New Zealand that equips cows with solar-powered smart collars.
Halter, which secured a $220 million Series E round at a valuation of $2 billion last month, with Founders Fund at the helm, is not the type of firm that typically headlines tech news. There’s no advanced AI in play, nor any humanoid robots. However, there exists a substantial, largely unresolved issue: How can cattle be managed over some of the earth’s most isolated landscapes without the aid of dogs, horses, motorbikes, or helicopters?
Craig Piggott, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of Halter, has dedicated nine years to finding a solution. “For anyone managing a pasture-based farm, be it dairy or beef, the key factor is how you optimize the productivity of your land,” Piggott shared with TechCrunch in a recent chat. “Fences serve as the control mechanism — they dictate grazing areas for animals and manage land recovery. The concept of doing that virtually made complete sense.”
Halter’s system integrates a solar-powered collar, a low-frequency tower network, and a smartphone application enabling farmers to establish virtual fences, observe their livestock 24/7, and maneuver their herds without stepping outside the farmhouse. Cattle are conditioned to respond to sound and vibration cues from the collar — a training process that Piggott compares to how a car beeps while reversing toward a wall. He notes that most animals learn to navigate virtual fences after just three encounters. “Then you can lead them and redirect them using only sound and vibration.”
The collar offers more than herding capabilities. Because it is constantly monitoring and collecting behavioral data, it also assesses the health of the animals, tracks reproductive cycles, and alerts when specific animals might be unwell, a functionality that Piggott claims has vastly improved as Halter has built what is likely the world’s most extensive dataset on cattle behavior. The company is currently on its fifth generation of hardware, and its reproduction tool is in beta testing with customers in the U.S.
“The product ranchers use now is dramatically different from what they purchased a year ago,” Piggott remarked. “We are introducing new features to our clients every week.”
Piggott grew up on a dairy farm in New Zealand, went on to study engineering, and had a brief experience at Rocket Lab, the aerospace company that gave him his first insight into the technology startup landscape. “Rocket Lab was my landmark into the tech and startup world, along with venture capital,” he said. “The awareness that one could raise funds, assemble a team, and pursue an ambitious mission was motivating. I aspired to apply that to agriculture.” He founded Halter at age 21. “Perhaps a bit naive in hindsight,” he acknowledged, “but that was acceptable.”
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After nine years, Halter’s collar is utilized on over a million cattle across 2,000+ farms within New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, where the company operates in 22 states. The financial case for farmers is clear: By providing ranchers with exact control over their herds’ grazing patterns, Halter can enhance land productivity by as much as 20% — not solely by reducing labor costs (though that occurs as well), but by maximizing the efficiency of grazing and minimizing leftover grass. “In some instances, we observe clients effectively doubling the productivity of their land,” Piggott stated. “The potential returns are very, very robust.”
Halter is not the only one recognizing this opportunity. The pharmaceutical behemoth Merck already has its own virtual fencing product for cattle, termed Vence, and newer competitors are emerging — recently, at Y Combinator’s latest “demo day,” a startup named Grazemate showcased a concept for utilizing autonomous drones to herd cattle (without the need for collars).
Piggott appears unfazed by either development. When asked about drones, he responds: “Can I envision drones playing a minor role in the future? Possibly. But I don’t believe a drone is suitable for the main function of virtual fencing. A collar will likely remain the ideal form factor for an extended period.” Regarding the broader competitive landscape, he maintains that the primary challenge isn’t rival technology. “The most significant competition is simply inertia,” he stated. “It’s sticking to what you did last year.”
What differentiates Halter, Piggott asserts, is the rigorous engineering challenge it has faced over nine years — a system managing a thousand animals must demonstrate high reliability, as even a 1% failure rate translates to ten animals potentially escaping at any moment. “Achieving those high levels of reliability takes time,” he expressed, “and that lengthy process is what we validated in New Zealand over many years before expanding internationally.”
Halter is also somewhat unique within the agri-tech industry, which has seen a downturn recently as startups struggled to convince farmers to adopt innovative products amidst escalating operational costs. Piggott attributes Halter’s growth to its unwavering focus on financial return. “From the very beginning, Halter has been constructed around delivering a solid financial ROI,” he stated. “If you can amplify land productivity by 20%, that positively impacts the whole business.”
Unlike most tech firms, Halter does not regard the United States as its primary market. “The U.S. market is crucial for us, but it’s not the biggest globally,” Piggott noted. “Agriculture exists worldwide, and we must reach those markets as well.” The company has now raised approximately $400 million in total and is focusing on expansion throughout the U.S., South America, and Europe.
However, the magnitude of the remaining opportunity is perhaps best illustrated by a single statistic — one that likely resonates with Founders Fund and Halter’s previous investors. Halter’s collar is attached to one million cattle, while there are one billion more globally. With less than 10% market penetration in its home market of New Zealand, “We have a long road ahead, and much more product to develop,” Piggott remarked.
You can listen to our discussion with Piggott in the latest episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, released on Tuesdays.
Embattled startup Delve has ‘separated from’ Y Combinator
The uproar surrounding Delve seems to have resulted in the compliance startup severing ties with accelerator Y Combinator.
Delve is no longer found in YC’s portfolio company directory, and the Delve page appears to have been taken down from the YC site. Moreover, the startup’s COO Selin Kocalar announced on X that “YC and Delve have gone their separate ways.”
“I still recall the day we had our YC interview at MIT,” Kocalar expressed. “We are incredibly grateful to the community and every fellow founder we have met.”
YC is not the sole investor distancing itself from Delve. Insight Partners also seems to have removed mentions of its investment in the firm, although its main blog post was eventually restored.
At the same time, Delve is actively responding to anonymous allegations that it misled clients regarding compliance with privacy and security standards while purportedly neglecting critical requirements and generating reports for “certification mills that simply approve reports.”
These allegations first emerged in an anonymous Substack article attributed to “DeepDelver,” who identified as a former Delve client that became wary after receiving leaked information concerning the startup’s clients.
DeepDelver later published additional articles sharing what they claimed were Slack messages and video content from the company, as well as accusing Delve of misappropriating an open-source tool without giving due credit or obtaining permission from the original developer. A security researcher also claimed to have accessed sensitive Delve information.
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Simultaneously, Delve found itself involved in a related dispute when malware was identified in an open-source project created by Delve customer LiteLLM.
In their latest blog entry, Delve’s COO Kocalar and CEO Karun Kaushik asserted their aim to clarify “the truth regarding anonymous accusations.” They stated that the firm has engaged a cybersecurity company “to help us comprehend what occurred,” and remarked that the “evidence indicates a malicious attack rather than a legitimate whistleblower.”
“It appears an attacker acquired Delve under false pretenses, maliciously extracted data, including Delve’s internal company information, and utilized it for a coordinated smear campaign against us,” they stated. The blog post also featured a screenshot they claimed “demonstrates the attacker extracting our audit tracking spreadsheet via file.io.”
Aside from this allegation, Delve characterized DeepDelver’s critiques as “a combination of false claims, selectively chosen screenshots, and information taken out of context.” For instance, they noted DeepDelver “dismisses our AI yet acknowledges that it automated 70% of a security questionnaire.”
Regarding the use of open-source tools, Delve explained that it “built upon an Apache 2.0 open-source repository, which explicitly allows commercial usage, and considerably modified it for compliance applications.”
Nonetheless, the executives also indicated they have been implementing measures to reassure customers “about our platform and compliance results.”
These measures reportedly include cleaning up the company’s network to eliminate auditing firms “that don’t align with our standards,” “offering complimentary re-audits and penetration tests to all active clients,” and clarifying that Delve’s templates for items such as board meeting notes “are intended to serve as initial guides only.”
In a post on X, Kaushik reiterated many of the same assertions but also remarked, “[W]e expanded too quickly and did not meet our own standards. To our customers, we sincerely apologize for any disturbances caused.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Y Combinator and DeepDelver for their responses to Delve’s statements.
Anthropic announces that Claude Code subscribers will incur additional costs for utilizing OpenClaw.
Claude Code subscribers are about to face higher costs when utilizing Anthropic’s coding assistant alongside OpenClaw and other external tools.
As indicated in a customer email circulated on Hacker News, Anthropic announced that beginning at noon Pacific on April 4 (today), subscribers will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.” Instead, they will have to pay for additional usage via “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.”
The company stated that while the change starts with OpenClaw today, the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be expanded to more soon.”
Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, mentioned on X that the company’s “subscriptions weren’t designed for the usage patterns of these third-party tools” and that Anthropic is now focused “on being intentional in managing our growth to continue serving our customers sustainably in the long run.”
This announcement follows OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger’s statement about his transition to Anthropic competitor OpenAI, while OpenClaw will persist as an open source project with backing from OpenAI.
Steinberger stated that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to reason with Anthropic” but could only postpone the price increase by one week.
“It’s amusing how the timings align, first they replicate some favored features in their closed harness, then they exclude open source,” Steinberger remarked.
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However, Cherny asserted that members of the Claude Code team are “great supporters of open source” and that he himself “recently submitted a few [pull requests] to enhance prompt cache efficiency specifically for OpenClaw.”
“This is more about engineering limitations,” he noted, adding that Anthropic continues to provide full refunds for subscribers. “We understand that not everyone realized this isn’t something we support, and this is an effort to clarify that.”
In the meantime, OpenAI has recently discontinued its Sora app and video generation models, reportedly to optimize computing resources and as part of a broader initiative to reorient toward attracting software engineers and enterprises that are increasingly depending on products like Claude Code.
Following years of battling malware, this cybersecurity expert is currently infiltrating drones.
Mikko Hyppönen is moving back and forth on the stage, with his distinct dark blonde ponytail cascading over a pristine teal suit. An experienced speaker, he aims to convey a significant message to an audience filled with hackers and security researchers at a global annual gathering of the industry.
“I frequently refer to this as ‘cybersecurity Tetris’,” he states to the audience with a grave expression, outlining the rules of the classic video game. Completing an entire line of blocks causes that row to disappear, allowing the remaining ones to drop into a new line.
“Your victories vanish, whereas your setbacks accumulate,” he communicates to the audience during his keynote at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2025. “The difficulty we encounter as cybersecurity professionals is that our efforts remain unseen… when you execute your tasks flawlessly, the ultimate outcome is that nothing occurs.”
Nonetheless, Hyppönen’s contributions have certainly been noticeable. As one of the cybersecurity field’s most enduring figures, he has dedicated over 35 years to combating malware. When he began in the late 1980s, the term “malware” was not yet commonly used; the terms predominantly employed were computer “virus” or “trojans.” The internet was still a privilege for a select few, with some viruses relying on infecting computers via floppy disks.
Since that time, Hyppönen estimates he has scrutinized thousands of various types of malware. Thanks to his regular presentations at global conferences, he has emerged as one of the most identifiable figures and esteemed voices within the cybersecurity sector.
While Hyppönen has devoted much of his life to preventing malware from entering prohibited areas, he is now engaged in a somewhat similar endeavor, albeit with a different focus: His current task is to safeguard individuals from drones.
Hyppönen, a Finnish national, mentioned during a recent interview that he resides about two hours from Finland’s border with Russia. An increasingly antagonistic Russia and its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where the majority of casualties are reportedly due to drone attacks, have led Hyppönen to believe he can make a significant impact by addressing drone threats.
For Hyppönen, it is also crucial to acknowledge that while enduring challenges in the cybersecurity realm persist—malware remains a constant threat, and new issues loom on the horizon—the industry has achieved remarkable advancements over the past twenty years. He cited the iPhone as an example of an exceptionally secure device. In contrast, the cybersecurity elements of drone warfare still represent largely uncharted territory.
From viruses and worms to malware and spyware…
Hyppönen’s entry into cybersecurity began with hacking video games during the 1980s. His passion for the field arose from reverse engineering software to find a way to bypass anti-piracy measures on a Commodore 64 home computer. He honed his coding skills by creating adventure games, and refined his reverse engineering talents by investigating malware at his first job with Finnish company Data Fellows, which later became the well-known antivirus provider F-Secure.
Since then, Hyppönen has been at the forefront of the battle against malware, observing its transformation.
In the early days, virus creators often wrote their malicious code purely out of enthusiasm and curiosity to explore the limits of coding. While some instances of cyberespionage were present, hackers had yet to realize monetization strategies for hacking akin to those seen today, such as ransomware attacks. There was no cryptocurrency facilitating extortion or a black market for stolen data.
Form.A, for instance, was among the most prevalent viruses in the early 1990s, which spread by floppy disk. A variation of that virus did not cause damage—often merely displaying a message on the user’s screen. Yet, this virus traversed the globe, including making it to research stations at the South Pole, as Hyppönen noted.
Hyppönen recalled the notorious ILOVEYOU virus, first identified by him and his colleagues in 2000. ILOVEYOU was a worm, meaning it propagated automatically from one computer to another. It arrived through email as a text file, supposedly a romantic letter. If the recipient opened it, it would overwrite and damage some files on their computer, and then distribute itself to all their contacts.
This virus infected over 10 million Windows computers globally.
The landscape of malware has drastically changed since then. Hardly anyone develops malware purely as a hobby anymore, and crafting self-replicating harmful software practically guarantees quick detection by cybersecurity experts equipped to neutralize it and possibly apprehend its creator.
According to Hyppönen, nobody engages in it for the thrill any longer. “The era of viruses is firmly in the past,” he stated.
Instances of self-replicating worms are now rare—except for a few notable cases, such as the damaging WannaCry ransomware attack attributed to North Korea in 2017 and the NotPetya widespread hacking campaign launched by Russia later that year, which severely impacted the Ukrainian internet and power infrastructure. Currently, malware is predominantly utilized by cybercriminals, espionage agents, and mercenary spyware developers who create exploits for state-sponsored hacking and surveillance. These entities typically operate clandestinely, aiming to conceal their tools to maintain their operations and evade cybersecurity defenders or law enforcement.
Another notable change is that the estimated worth of the cybersecurity industry has reached $250 billion. The field has professionalized, partly as a necessity, in reaction to the rise in malware assaults. Defenders transitioned from offering their software without cost to monetizing it through paid services or products, noted Hyppönen.
Computers and newer innovations such as smartphones, which started gaining traction in the early 2000s, have become significantly more challenging to hack. If the resources required to exploit an iPhone or the Chrome browser amount to six figures or even several million dollars, Hyppönen argued, this makes an exploit prohibitively expensive, limiting accessibility to only well-funded entities, like governments, rather than financially motivated cybercriminals. This is a considerable victory for consumers and a testament to the achievements of the cybersecurity sector.
From fighting spies and criminals… to countering drones
In mid-2025, Hyppönen transitioned from cybersecurity to a different realm of defense work. He took on the role of chief research officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based firm that creates a drone defense system for law enforcement and military agencies.
Hyppönen expressed that his enthusiasm for entering this emerging field was influenced by the developments in Ukraine, a conflict characterized by drone warfare. As a Finnish citizen with military reserve duties (“I can’t disclose my role, but I can share that they don’t equip me with a rifle as I am far more dangerous with a keyboard,” he shared), and with two grandfathers who battled the Russians, Hyppönen is keenly aware of the adversary just beyond his nation’s frontier.
“The situation holds significant importance for me,” he stated. “It feels far more relevant to work against drones, covering not just the current drones we see, but also those of the future,” he emphasized. “We are positioned alongside humans confronting machines, which may seem somewhat science fiction-like, yet that is precisely what we do.”
While the fields of cybersecurity and drone defense may appear worlds apart, Hyppönen notes evident similarities between countering malware and countering drones. To tackle malware, cybersecurity firms have developed mechanisms known as signatures to recognize which software is malware and which is not, and subsequently detect and neutralize it. In the context of drones, Hyppönen elaborated that defenses involve crafting systems capable of locating and jamming drone radio signals while recognizing the frequencies controlling the unmanned vehicles.
Hyppönen explained that it is feasible to identify and monitor drones by capturing their radio frequencies, referred to as their IQ samples.
“We extract the protocol from that information and develop signatures for detecting unidentified drones,” he described.
He further elucidated that if the protocol and frequencies controlling the drone are identified, it is possible to initiate cyberattacks against it. This could cause the drone’s system to fail, crashing it to the ground. “In many respects, these protocol-level attacks are much more straightforward in the drone realm because the initial step is also the concluding step,” Hyppönen emphasized. “If a vulnerability is found, you’re finished.”
The parallels in strategies employed in combating malware and confronting drones are not the only aspects of his life that remain unchanged. The perpetual cat-and-mouse dynamic of deriving methods to counter a threat, while the adversary adapts and formulates new strategies to bypass defenses continuously, applies equally to the domain of drones. Additionally, there’s the identity of the adversary.
“I have devoted a substantial portion of my career to resisting Russian malware strikes,” he stated. “Now I am standing against Russian drone strikes.”
Anthropic is currently experiencing significant attention in the private markets; SpaceX might disrupt the celebration.
Since 2010, Glen Anderson has been facilitating trades in shares of private companies, a time when the count of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market was minimal. He now claims that the number has grown to thousands.
As the head of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which specializes in private securities markets — executing transactions involving around 1,000 stocks — Anderson has a prime view of one of the most intense periods in the secondary market’s history. Currently, he points out that the narrative centers around three major players: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.
However, the plot is far more intricate than it appears in the headlines.
Anderson’s assessment of Anthropic aligns with Bloomberg’s report from earlier this week: the demand for the company’s stock has reached an almost unquenchable state. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, CEO and founder of Next Round Capital, mentioning that buyers signaled they had $2 billion in cash ready to invest in Anthropic, despite approximately $600 million worth of OpenAI shares struggling to find buyers.
Anderson sees a parallel at Rainmaker. “The most challenging stock to secure in our market is Anthropic,” he shared with TechCrunch yesterday from his residence in Miami. “There are simply no sellers.”
Anderson argues that part of what has fueled this demand is Anthropic’s highly publicized conflict with the Department of Defense — a situation that initially seemed detrimental but has turned into an unexpected advantage.
“The app gained more popularity, and people began to rally around the company as a sort of hero, standing up to big government,” he said. “I think it enhanced the narrative and made it stand out even more from OpenAI.”
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This differentiation is becoming increasingly significant for investors maneuvering through a market that has, for years, favored betting on all players. Anderson points out that numerous institutional investors still seek exposure to both Anthropic and OpenAI. “The jury’s still out,” he mentioned, regarding which AI model will ultimately prevail – but the momentum, at least in the secondary market, has altered.
That does not imply that OpenAI has plummeted. Anderson slightly counters a simplistic view of the situation.
“I wouldn’t categorize it as a one-or-the-other scenario,” he stated.
Yet, the enthusiasm is lacking. “It’s not nearly as dynamic a market as Anthropic at this moment,” he acknowledged.
Regarding valuation, Anderson largely affirmed Bloomberg’s report indicating that OpenAI shares on the secondary market are trading as though the company were valued at $765 billion — a notable discount compared to the company’s latest $852 billion primary-round valuation. He noted he was recalling from memory, but insisted the Bloomberg figure was “in the correct range.”
OpenAI itself has attempted to exert more control over secondary trading. “People should be very cautious of any firm claiming to have access to OpenAI equity, including through an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, emphasizing that the company had set up authorized channels via banks, without fees, to counter what it referred to as a high-fee broker model.
Notably — at least for the time being — banks such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have started offering OpenAI shares to their high-net-worth clients without imposing carry fees, according to Bloomberg. Goldman, on the other hand, is implementing its standard carry – often between 15% and 20% of profits – for clients wishing to invest in Anthropic.
None of this accounts for SpaceX, which stands out amid the changing sentiments surrounding these other significant brands. Anderson describes it as one of the very few entities in Rainmaker’s portfolio that did not undergo the severe correction that affected much of the private market from 2022 to 2024, a time when shares of many private firms dropped by 60% to 70% from their highs (after their valuations had surged just as quickly).
The aerospace and satellite giant has “been strikingly consistent in its upward trajectory,” Anderson remarked.
Anderson, naturally, has a financial interest in portraying the company and its early investors positively, credits SpaceX’s management with maintaining disciplined pricing and avoiding the temptation to extract every possible dollar from each funding round or tender offer.
“Many companies will succumb to the urge to maximize their stock price in every round,” he observed. “The downside is that it doesn’t allow for any margin of error.”
In contrast, SpaceX has taken a conservative approach by “not being overly greedy,” resulting in substantial rewards for earlier investors. “Consider if someone invested in 2015 how much profit they’re seeing today,” Anderson stated.
To clarify that statement: SpaceX was valued at about $12 billion in 2015, when Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion in the firm. An investor who entered at that valuation is now experiencing a gain of more than 100x, with the company valued at over $1 trillion ahead of its anticipated IPO.
That IPO now seems imminent. SpaceX submitted a confidential filing this week for an initial public offering, paving the way for what could be one of the largest market entries in history, with Elon Musk reportedly aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, potentially in June. Only Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut, which valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion, has approached that scale.
Unsurprisingly, the anticipated filing has already altered the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX shares, according to Anderson.
“Today, I noticed a surge of SpaceX investors reaching out, asking, ‘Can you provide me SpaceX?’” he observed. “It’s been an extremely active buying side.” However, supply is diminishing. The closer a company moves towards an IPO, the lesser the incentive existing shareholders have to sell, as they can see the liquidity event approaching.
This is where the situation becomes a bit precarious for OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are reportedly considering their own public offerings and have indicated they could proceed this year. However, by filing first, SpaceX is about to evaluate the market’s appetite extensively, and Anderson suggested that any following will face a disadvantage.
“SpaceX is going to absorb a lot of liquidity,” he asserted plainly. “There’s only a limited amount of money allocated to IPOs.” The first mover accesses the resource first; those who follow may encounter both increased scrutiny and, potentially, diminished capital.
This dynamic plays out in every so-called vertical, and the AI companies are not entirely shielded from it despite the current attention directed toward them. If you time your IPO too early, you’re the one testing the market’s receptiveness. If you wait for others to go first, you might find that the largest investments have already been made.
Listen to more of our conversation with Anderson in the upcoming episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, releasing every Tuesday. Meanwhile, catch recent episodes featuring Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.