Bending Spoons IPO Opens 11% Above Pricing

SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of coding startup Cursor on Friday in an all-stock transaction. The deal was announced as an option in April as part of a partnership agreement that allowed Cursor to use SpaceX resources. The acquisition marks a significant move by SpaceX into the AI-powered developer tools space.

AI training companies like Mercor are actively acquiring internal communications and code from startups, offering payments up to $300,000 for Slack threads, GitHub records, and meeting transcripts. Warmly's CEO received four such acquisition offers within days of the company's HubSpot acquisition announcement. The practice highlights how internal startup data has become a commodity for AI model training, even as acquirers may not want the same datasets.

AI chip shortages are creating acute pressure on startups building proprietary models, forcing founders to negotiate constantly with cloud providers for GPU access. Evan Morikawa of Generalist, which trains AI models for robotics, recently contacted 17 different providers to secure compute capacity. The scarcity has made GPU pricing and availability a critical business variable for model-training startups with limited funding.

Thrive Holdings, an OpenAI-backed enterprise AI company, has raised $2 billion in Series funding at a $12 billion valuation. The round was led by investors including SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. The funding reflects growing investor appetite for AI applications targeting business customers rather than consumer markets.