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Is this a cheat code for doing an acquisition without FTC scrutiny?
by bogwog 2y ago
Is this a cheat code for doing an acquisition without FTC scrutiny?
- tsunamifury 2y agoAnd screw investors
- agnokapathetic 2y agoper The Information -- investors don't get screwed, the board repurchased all shares at $88/share ($2.5B valuation).
- blackhawkC17 2y agoThe money to repurchase shares must be coming from an external source? I assumed Character.AI wasn’t profitable, like most AI startups.
- metadat 2y agoAbsolutely not yet profitable, not even close. Currently a money furnace.
- tsunamifury 2y agoThese two stories are hard to rectify unless the Google licensing deal is a lump sum of several billion dollars. Which feels borderline impossible. Even Microsoft didn’t do that with open AI and the AI trade is cooking very fast.
- fnbr 2y agoThey raised ~$200M total, and $150M at the series A. So if they're just paying back investors, they'd "only" need $500M.
- ko_pivot 2y agoYes. Character.ai usage is way down from the peak and it is only getting easier for startups to compete in the space. However, the plausibility of an actual FAANG acquisition is almost zero, so this is the next best option… at least for certain stakeholders. Microsoft did this with Inflection.
- tikkun 2y agoWhat was the peak? I see estimated 211 million visits in June 2024, vs 86 million in Feb 2023.
- tsunamifury 2y agoVisits is an entirely meaningless metric
- hackernewds 2y agoand conjecture is a better one?
- djhn 2y agoOut of curiosity, where can one find reliable estimates?
- rajnathani 2y agoThis almost seems exactly it, just as the last paragraph of the TechCrunch article hints at.