E94: Epic Games takes $1.5b from Disney, Adam Neumann aims to “buy back” WeWork, ByteDance’s CapCut to drive AI innovation, Buy Now Pay Later moving to subscriptions, FTX’s $1.4b Anthropic stake, Databricks 4th acquisition in last 1yr, Hugging Face partne

This Week in Pre-IPO Stocks

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00:10 | Epic Games takes $1.5b from Disney
- $22.5b valuation, Disney gets 7% stake of Epic
- Star Wars, Marvel, Avatar character’s in Fortnite
- Lego invested $1.0b at a $31.5b valuation in Apr 2022
- Disney transaction is -29% from Lego valuation
- Disney transaction is +118% from secondary market valuation of $10.3b
- 5.1x revenue multiple based on Disney transaction value and Sacra revenue estimates
02:32 | Adam Neumann aims to “buy back” WeWork
- Flow Global is Neumann’s new business
- Andreessen Horowitz invested $350m into Flow in Aug 2022
- Neumann founded WeWork and drove business to $47b valuation before toilet bowling the company in its S-1 IPO filing
- Tbd if Neumann will be able to secure financing to buy WeWork
03:45 | ByteDance’s CapCut to drive AI innovation
- Kelly Zhang to step down has head of China operations to focus on CapCut and its AI efforts
- ByteDance delivered $110b in 2023 revenue (vs Meta’s $134b)
- ByteDance has a $289b secondary market valuation; +8% from a Dec 2023 announced stock buyback at a $268b valuation (vs Meta’s $1.2 trillion market cap)
05:41 | Buy Now Pay Later moving to subscriptions
- Afterpay Plus Card with a $9.99 monthly fee; allows for Pay it in 4 at nearly any merchant
- Affirm Plus; 0% APR on loans up to $2,500, 4.75% APY savings account
- Klarna Plus; $8/month, no service fees, double reward points, and $30/month off popular brands
- Klarna has $8.3b secondary market valuation; +24% from last primary round in Jul 2022
07:19 | FTX’s $1.4b Anthropic stake
- FTX owns 8% of Anthropic valued at $1.4b vs its $500m investment
- FTX aims to sell Anthropic stake opportunistically after the current Anthropic current $18b primary capital raise currently in progress
- Based on my research, appears FTX may have enough capital to pay back creditors and return some capital to equity holders
08:36 | Databricks 4th acquisition in last 1yr
- Buys Einblick a natural language data science notebook developer
- Terms not disclosed
- Other acquisitions; Arcion ($100m), Mosiac ML ($1.3b), Okera (undisclosed amount)
- Databricks has a $48.5b secondary market valuation; +11% from last primary round in Sep 2023
09:40 | Hugging Face partners with Google Cloud
- Enables external developers on Hugging Face's platform to build, train, deploy AI models without a Google Cloud subscription
- Seamless access to TPUs and GPUs like Nvidia’s H100s
- Hugging Face has a $9.6b secondary market valuation; +113% from its Aug 2023 last primary round
11:15 | Anduril wins US Navy contract
- New product; Iris is a passive airborne imaging and targeting sensor system for aircraft
- New gov’t contact; US Navy to purchase Anduril’s Dive-LD (autonomous underwater vehicles)
- Anduril has $10.5b implied secondary market valuation; +23.8% from last primary round in Dec 2022
12:48 | Pre-IPO -0.83% for week, 0.99% for last 1yr
- Week winners: Revolut +7.1%, Deel +5.5%, Stripe +2.9%, OpenAI +2.9%, ByteDance +1.4%
- Week losers: Rippling -12.0%, Chime -11.2%, Epic Games -8.8%, Cohere -7.7%, Hugging Face -3.7%
- Top valuations: ByteDance $289b, SpaceX $187b, OpenAI $94b, Stripe $59b, Databricks $49b lead in current valuation