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Cognition's $40B Bet, Anthropic's $2T IPO & DeepSeek's Price Shock
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
AI coding valuations are defying gravity: Cognition eyes a $40B raise, Anthropic targets a $2T IPO, and DeepSeek just hiked prices 355%. Today's briefing unpacks what these moves signal about the real state of AI economics.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Cognition AI is in early talks to raise at a forty billion dollar valuation. That's a fifty percent jump from the twenty-six billion dollar raise it closed just ninety days ago.
The broader sector is moving just as fast. Before AI, venture rounds in enterprise software typically came eighteen to twenty-four months apart.
On the acquisition side, SpaceX is expected to close its deal to acquire Cursor this week. Cursor is a code editor that reached two billion dollars in annualized revenue, which is a number that would have seemed implausible for a developer tool a few years ago.
Anthropic is now being discussed at a two trillion dollar IPO valuation, with a potential debut as early as October of next year. That would exceed SpaceX's own record IPO at one point seven seven trillion.
DeepSeek made a different kind of move this week. The Chinese AI lab raised V4-Pro output token prices from eighty-seven cents per million to three dollars and ninety-six cents at peak, a jump of roughly three hundred and fifty-five percent.
The regulatory picture is worth tracking. Economist Mani Basharzad has made a direct critique of how AI policy is being built right now.
Pulling back, the thread connecting most of this is timing and proof. Cognition's forty times revenue multiple is sustainable only if doubling continues.
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