News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Nvidia reportedly eyes another investment in Perplexity AI at a $30B valuation
Nvidia reportedly eyes another investment in Perplexity AI at a $30B valuation Nvidia Corp. is reportedly considering making another investment in the artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity AI Inc. A report by The Information says the chipmaker is holding talks with Perplexity over an investment that could push the startup's valuation to more than $30 billion. That would represent a jump of more than 50% from the $20 billion valuation Perplexity finalized about a year ago, when it last raised money. The size of Nvidia's potential investment was not disclosed, and there's no guarantee that any deal would be reached, The Information said, citing anonymous sources who are familiar with the discussions. Neither Nvidia nor Perplexity would comment on the reported discussions. Perplexity is an attractive target for investors for its business has continued to grow at a rapid rate. According to The Information, the startup has grown its annualized revenue run rate to an impressive $750 million, up from less than $250 million at the start of the year. If true, that would mean it has managed to triple its revenue run rate in just eight months. One of the main reasons for that impressive growth is Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent that was first released in April for Mac computers and later expanded to Windows devices. Perplexity Computer is designed to automate computer tasks for professional users. It acts as a general-purpose digital worker that can access authorized files and applications on a user's computer. Users can ask it to create or edit Word documents, update Excel spreadsheets, organize files, conduct online research and complete workflows involving multiple applications. The proposed investment would deepen an existing relationship between Nvidia and Perplexity. The chipmaker is already one of its main financial backers, alongside Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos and SoftBank Group Corp. Nvidia has become an increasingly important partner for AI startups like Perplexity, and sees its bet on the startup as an investment in its future. As the world's top supplier of silicon for high-frequency AI inference, it has a vested interest in making sure that the search layer - which is a massive compute ecosystem - remains aligned with its chip ecosystem. What Nvidia doesn't want is for the likes of Perplexity and others to go sniffing around rival chipmakers such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Cerebras Systems Inc., which both offer alternative chips for AI inference. In that way, Nvidia is investing in Perplexity as a kind of insurance policy to safeguard its future revenue stream against possible shifts in AI search architecture. Perplexity's strategic importance to Nvidia is amplified by its distribution efforts, such as its integration with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s Bixby assistant, which brings its search capabilities to around 800 million devices globally. The AI search firm is also believed to be fixed on a 2028 initial public offering, which means Nvidia has a clear timeline to realize a return on its investment. Nvidia's broader portfolio includes many of its major compute customers, including OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC, SpaceX Corp.'s xAI, Poolside Inc. and Safe Superintelligence Inc. It shows how the chipmaker has taken a systematic approach to ensuring its market dominance. By supplying the critical infrastructure and acting as a key investor at the application layer, Nvidia has effectively built a self-reinforcing cycle of demand for its chips. Nvidia is also trying to provide direct funding to customers that need to invest in its AI compute hardware. It recently struck a deal with six of Wall Street's biggest financial institutions to provide more than $500 billion in financing for AI infrastructure projects, including its own and those of its customers. Meanwhile, Perplexity has been racing to build out the infrastructure foundation it needs to support its own growth. Earlier this year, it struck a $750 million deal with Microsoft Corp. that will see it adopt that company's Azure cloud services to help run its AI workloads.
xAI asks US appeals court to reverse dismissal of trade secret case against OpenAI | MLex | Specialist news and analysis on legal risk and regulation
( August 24, 2026, 22:26 GMT | Official Statement) -- MLex Summary: xAI argues a US judge erred by dismissing the company's lawsuit accusing OpenAI of running a coordinated campaign to poach xAI engineers and acquire trade secrets through them in an opening brief to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The lower court misapplied the Defend Trade Secrets Act and improperly discounted corroborating allegations from former xAI employees, xAI said. "The district court's decision sets an impossibly high bar for pleading trade secret claims ... supplying a roadmap for bad actors to evade liability," xAI said.See attached brief.... Prepare for tomorrow's regulatory change, today MLex identifies risk to business wherever it emerges, with specialist reporters across the globe providing exclusive news and deep-dive analysis on the proposals, probes, enforcement actions and rulings that matter to your organization and clients, now and in the longer term. Know what others in the room don't, with features including: * Daily newsletters for Antitrust, M&A, Trade, Data Privacy & Security, Technology, AI and more * Custom alerts on specific filters including geographies, industries, topics and companies to suit your practice needs * Predictive analysis from expert journalists across North America, the UK and Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific * Curated case files bringing together news, analysis and source documents in a single timeline Experience MLex today with a 14-day free trial.
Anthropic Is Worth Much Less Than SpaceX
Anthropic is a pure play in what appears to be the faltering AI space. At least SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) has a rocket and an internet division. Recently, it became clear that at least some large corporations are willing to take slightly less AI firepower than Anthropic offers. And, by the way, Anthropic has tens of millions of dollars of obligations for data centers and Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) chips. (For some reason, Nvidia always seems to come out on top in all of these transactions.) A large group of investors believes an Anthropic IPO will top the record set by SpaceX. The main reasons are revenue and the fact that AI may be the most important invention in human history. Anthropic is outpacing its rivals' revenue run rates, which is one reason it is such a hot investment. The estimated run rate for this year is $65 billion; OpenAI's is as low as $40 billion based on the same calculation. The primary reason is corporate and institutional adoption. Anthropic's Claude has become the industry leader. Investors don't want to see individuals running Claude on their laptops. They want to see its AI functions at the world's largest companies because that is where the real money is. But the FT recently ran a headline that read, "Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive." This happens at the same time inexpensive Chinese models are rushing into the market. No one could have anticipated this Chinese surge even a year ago. Only days ago, newspapers reported that Anthropic has also largely dodged the concern that AI is just too expensive, even for large companies. However, some others have said the investment has not yielded a strong ROI and have cut back spending, at least temporarily. For "temporarily" to go away, AI ROI has to improve significantly. The SpaceX IPO gave the company a valuation of $1.77 trillion on the first trading day, and it raised $86 billion. That money is disappearing quickly and has gone to the SpaceX xAI division. So why the enthusiasm for Anthropic compared to SpaceX? SpaceX has the rocket business cornered. Its Starlink should become the de facto internet access for most of the world. However, its AI business is not attractive, even a little. Even with capex of $18.4 billion in the most recent quarter, it is not enough. Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, said the capex sum must be much, much bigger. He needs more and more AI data center capacity. However, his models benchmark much behind those from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, at least. And then,, again, there are the Chinese. But if you look at the bets an investor takes, a shareholder in SpaceX is betting on three divisions. An investor in Anthropic is only looking at one. Anthropic is an AI pure play, the sector's consensus leader. SpaceX was a rocket and internet business with an AI business bolted on. That means that the IPO value of SpaceX won't be topped by Anthropic. Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Anthropic Expects Its IPO to Match or Beat SpaceX's $86 Billion Record - Memeburn
Users on X are questioning whether the product justifies the valuation, citing rate limits, invisible watermarks and pricing Anthropic is preparing what could become the largest initial public offering in history. The Claude developer expects its upcoming IPO to match or exceed the $86.2 billion that SpaceX raised when it went public in June, Bloomberg reported on August 20, citing people familiar with the matter. The company could file its IPO paperwork publicly as soon as the end of this month. If it clears that mark, 2026 would set the record for total US IPO volume, with companies that debuted on public markets already bringing in $160.6 billion as of August 19. But the mega-listing arrives alongside a quieter, more telling shift. Anthropic is also walking back a controversial data retention policy that had alarmed enterprise customers for months. And on social media, users are asking a blunter question: does the product actually justify a valuation this large? The Numbers Behind the Record Attempt Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are managing Anthropic's offering, the same banks that ran SpaceX's blockbuster listing earlier this year. SpaceX initially targeted $75 billion but ultimately raised $86.2 billion once its overallotment option was exercised. Anthropic's financial trajectory is the core of the pitch. Its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion by late July, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That is more than a sevenfold increase in roughly seven months. Preliminary second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, and investors told the Financial Times they expect annualized revenue to land between $100 billion and $120 billion by year-end. The company also reported its first positive adjusted operating income during Q2. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao has led recent investor briefings but has declined to discuss specific valuation targets, according to Bloomberg's sources. None of this came cheap. Anthropic posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, driven by enormous compute costs. It has committed $50 billion to AI infrastructure across data centres in Texas and New York. CEO Dario Amodei has publicly acknowledged the stakes, warning that even a one-year miss on growth could threaten the company's survival. Some backers have floated a potential $2 trillion listing valuation by October, which would dwarf SpaceX's $1.77 trillion debut. But the IPO raise itself the amount of capital Anthropic actually collects from selling shares is the more immediate benchmark. Getting past $86.2 billion would give Anthropic the outright record. Anthropic Reverses Course on Data Retention The IPO news broke alongside a separate Bloomberg report: Anthropic plans to let enterprise customers store data on their own cloud infrastructure rather than Anthropic's servers. The shift matters because of what came before it. When Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 in June, it introduced a mandatory 30-day data retention policy for its most powerful models. Every prompt, every output, stored for a month with no opt-out. The policy was designed to help the company detect misuse and monitor for cybersecurity threats, but enterprise customers pushed back hard. Microsoft reportedly restricted employee use of Anthropic's latest models while reviewing the policy. Salesforce and more than 100 other customers spent months working with Anthropic on alternatives. The revised approach keeps the 30-day retention requirement but gives businesses the option to host that data within their existing cloud setup. Anthropic says it expects to roll out the new safety system later this year. The timing is not a coincidence. Palantir CEO Alex Karp had publicly criticized AI companies for what he described as a data grab. OpenAI responded first, previewing its own zero-retention safety processing system for enterprise customers. Anthropic's reversal followed within 24 hours. For a company about to ask public investors for $86 billion, appearing to cave on data privacy under competitive pressure is a story the S-1 roadshow would rather not have running in the background. Users Aren't All Buying It While investors prepare for the biggest AI IPO ever, some of Anthropic's own users are greeting the news with scepticism. One widely shared post on X from user @jumperz summed up the frustration in a list: expensive flagship model, rate limits that cut users off mid-workflow, an invisible text watermark embedded in outputs, and a product they described as "out of touch with what users actually want." The replies leaned into it. One user said their first move would be to short the stock. Another compared the company unfavourably to SpaceXAI, pointing out that Elon Musk's combined entity launches reusable rockets and runs a global satellite internet service on top of building AI. "Why would you ever invest in Anthropic over SpaceX?" they asked. These are social media reactions, not institutional analysis. But they reflect a gap that Anthropic will need to address once it becomes a public company: the distance between what growth-stage investors see in the revenue numbers and what daily users experience in the product. Anthropic has dealt with product controversies before. Its export control clash with the White House in June forced it to disable its most capable models worldwide for weeks. Its multi-agent testing revealed AI coordination failures that made headlines. Each incident chipped at the narrative of a company that moves carefully and gets things right. An IPO prospectus will lay bare the financials. What it won't resolve is whether the product experience matches the price tag. What Happens Next Anthropic is running financial analyses ahead of a potential public filing by the end of August. If the company does file, the S-1 will contain the first public disclosure of detailed revenue, costs, and operating losses, figures that until now have come only through investor briefings and media leaks. The IPO is expected to list on the Nasdaq, with an October 2026 debut as the most likely timeline. OpenAI, which filed its own confidential S-1 in June, may delay its listing to 2027, potentially giving Anthropic a clear window to dominate public market attention. For context, SpaceX's own post-IPO run was anything but smooth. Shares surged 67% in four days, then crashed 49% over the following weeks before stabilising. AI IPO investors should expect similar volatility. The question is no longer whether Anthropic will go public. It is whether an AI company that lost $42 billion last year, changed its data policy under pressure, and is drawing public complaints about its product can convince both Wall Street and Main Street that the growth curve justifies the record. FAQs Will Anthropic's IPO be bigger than SpaceX's? Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is targeting an IPO raise at or above the $86.2 billion SpaceX collected in June 2026. SpaceX currently holds the record for the largest first-time share sale in history. Clearing that figure would give Anthropic the outright record. When is Anthropic expected to go public? Anthropic could file its IPO paperwork publicly as soon as late August 2026, with an October 2026 listing on the Nasdaq as the most likely target. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are managing the offering. What is Anthropic's current revenue? The company's run rate reached $65 billion by late July 2026, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. Backers project that figure will land between $100 billion and $120 billion by year-end. Preliminary Q2 revenue exceeded $11.5 billion. Why did Anthropic change its data retention policy? Anthropic introduced a mandatory 30-day data retention policy for its most capable AI models in June 2026. Enterprise customers objected, and the company responded in August by offering an alternative: businesses can now retain the required data within their own cloud environments rather than handing it to Anthropic. Is Anthropic profitable? Not yet on an annual basis. The company's 2025 financials showed heavy losses driven by compute spending. However, Anthropic posted its first positive adjusted operating income in Q2 2026, and investors project annualized revenue could reach $100 billion or more by year-end, suggesting a path toward sustained profitability is forming.
