E145: FigureAI's $675m capital raise, Stripe stock buyback at $70b, xAI Grok 2.0 differentiators

This Week in Pre-IPO Stocks

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00:19 | FigureAI (humanoid robots)
- AI and humanoid robots drive efficiency and will drive cost of goods/services to $0, drive unlimited GDP
- $675m raise $2.6b valuation; OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia
- 10b humanoid robots by 2040
- Musk is projecting 16b to 32b humanoid robots, Telsa Optimus is a humanoid robot
- humanoid robots fit easily into a human world to easily replace humans
11:49 | Stripe
- These companies are so big they’re doing share buybacks!
- Planning new tender offer to repurchase shares from employees
- Entire offer financed with Stripe’s own cash, a shift from external funding
- Generated $615M in free cash flow in June quarter vs. $500M cash burn in 2022
- Valuation at $70B (secondary), up from $50B in 2022 and $65B in last tender
- Up to 8,000 employees can sell up to $50,000 of vested shares at $27.51/share
- Expanding beyond core payments into billing software; segment on track for $500M annual revenue
25:39 | xAI
- xAI differentiators are becoming clear; real time data, most accurate answers, Musk effect (i.e. unlimited capital)
- AI large language model platform business
- Released Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini beta LLMs on X platform
- Enterprise API arriving later this month
- Top-four position on LMSYS chatbot leaderboard
- Grok-2 Mini: efficient, ideal for speed/resource-critical scenarios
- Focus on expanding multimodal understanding
- Available to Premium/Premium+ subscribers on X at $8/month
- Secondary market valuation: $25.7B (+6.9% vs May 2024 round)