It feels insane to think that just three years ago, in June ’23, an AI company raised a Series A at a $145M post-money valuation with a CEO and co-founder who was the Chairman of OpenAI, the creator of Google Maps, former CTO of Meta and former Co-CEO of Salesforce. Today, a 22yo MIT graduate can raise a pre-seed at the same valuation. #artificialintelligence
And in 2021 that was roughly what people were paying for a couple collections of ugly digital pictures aka NFTs
Well they may have been able to raise more and decided not to.
How can a 22-year-old graduate raise preseed so big without any proof? Elaborate please.
Oliver, which fundamentals justify same valuation across Series A and pre-seed? Market timing or product velocity creating comparable risk profiles?
Oliver Molander - Interesting post! Common Sense seems to have become an undervalued commodity. I’m aware of £50m invested in AI companies, tart ups, promising the earth! That was last year, everyone of them crashed and burned. The s/w industry needed a reset, but AI is the catalyst that’s finally woken up industry to reflect back on the approach. This critical eye is however also skeptic about the claims being made of AI, and let’s face it, token cost subsidies will disappear soon, and the real cost of AI and Tokenisation will hit home, making the Oil Price jumps recently look insignificant in comparison. LLM’s are nevertheless interesting, app integrated conversational AI, listening and then Vibing Apps, not Code, these are tectonic shifts, and it’s still not AGI. So a bit of Common Sense combined with pragmatism and there’s scope for the big bets to take it all. Interesting times ahead!