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Getty Images signs OpenAI deal: The new agreement with the stock photo library brings their licensed content to OpenAI’s search and ChatGPT results. It’s significant both because, as Getty CEO Craig Peters explains, Getty results will make “AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy,” but also because of the sea change it represents in how media companies engage with AI products. Getty previously took a staunchly anti-AI position, banning all AI-generated art from its libraries and suing Stability for violating its copyrights. Today, the company hosts its own gen-AI image tool (powered by Nvidia) and also licenses content to Perplexity AI for search results. Also this week, indie darling movie studio A24 made news by accepting a $75 million investment from Google; the two companies will collaborate on fresh (behind-the-scenes) AI tools for filmmakers.
Meta names new WhatsApp CEO: Meta led a $900 million funding round for Indian fintech company CRED, which offers lending, insurance, wealth management, and other financial products to “affluent” consumers in the South Asian nation. The company is now valued at around $4.5 billion, post-money. For their cash, the Facebook and IG owners aren’t just getting a chunk of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “one of India’s most important technology companies”; they’ve also scored a new CEO for their WhatsApp team. CRED leader Kunal Shah will take over control of the iconic messaging app from long-time boss Will Cathcart, who’s transitioning into a “product-building role.” India remains, of course, the world’s largest market for WhatsApp, with more than 500 million domestic users.
Bending Spoons seeks $1.62 billion: The Italian tech conglomerate — which snaps up and grows tech products that have already found some level of product-market fit — is looking to sell 58 million IPO shares at $26-$28 a piece, according to Reuters. They’re expected to file the paperwork with the SEC formally at some point today. In total, Bending Spoons will offer about 60% of the total available stock, with the rest coming from current shareholders and investors. Reuters suggests that will give the company an overall valuation of around $19 billion, once the IPO hits some time in early July.
TWiST 500
All the talk of “SaaSpocalypses” starts with a core assumption: very soon, “vibecoding” will be able to replace the kinds of sophisticated software solutions on which enterprises once invested millions each year. But is any of this actually TRUE? Consulting firm Bain & Company is reportedly trying to find out.
Financial Times reports that B&C are attempting to vibecode their own versions of products from hundreds of potential acquisition targets, to determine both the companies’ long-term value and how their offerings might evolve in the future. The project started with a small team of software engineers in 2023 but has now reportedly exploded, and involves a large number of the firm’s consultants and associates.
According to FT, this has already moved out of the theoretical space, and Bain’s vibecoded alternatives are influencing acquisition and investment decisions in real-time. One private equity exec told the paper that they’ve slowed their deal making in light of Bain’s results, and are applying additional scrutiny to any and all SaaS ventures, while an other investor said that they dropped out of the bidding for an analytics company after seeing Bain’s vibecoded mock-up.
But not everyone is convinced that the strategy is entirely sound. On X, Friend of the Pod and Jason Bestie Chamath Palihapitiya suggested that vibecoding a mock-up of a powerful piece of software doesn’t necessarily give Bain or its clients a deeper or more nuanced understanding of the underlying business or technology. He asks “Do you think vibing the UI of Google search would even scratch the surface of helping you understand the complexity that sits behind it?” Ultimately, Chamath dismisses the initiative as “busy work,” and another example of the already-outdated push for AI “tokenmaxxing.” – Lon
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This Week in Startups
E2302: Anthropic stabbed Cursor in the back. Then SpaceX swooped in with $60 billion. Today, TWiST connects the dots on the biggest deal in AI since the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, and why it's a warning sign for every startup building on top of a frontier model. Jason is joined by Bling Capital’s Ben Ling, Banana Capital’s Turner Novak, and co-host Alex to go deep on the future of coding models, the current golden age of venture liquidity, OpenAI’s financials, and the ‘Four Ds’ of venture investing. The show closes with a tribute to Josh Baer, the founder of Capital Factory.
E2301: Lon and Jason chat with Skyler Chan, the founder of GRU Space. You may have heard of them during their viral press run earlier this year, after announcing plans to build a hotel on the Moon. (Reserve your spot today for just $1 million!) But beyond the marketing hype, GRU has a real plan to autonomously manufacture bricks out of lunar regolith, which can then be used to build any kind of structure, including an American moon base. PLUS we’re selecting the winner of our $5K bounty for a live AI podcast fact checker. Lon demos all three finalists, then Jason selects his fave.
E2300: Two days before SpaceX launches the largest IPO in history at a flat $135/share, our VC roundtable drops a scorcher: The top 1% of seed deals might actually be underpriced. Plus: the "Sequoia scam" dual-tranche controversy, tokens-for-equity deals, and whether Claude Fable 5 is a true step function.
Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures), Michael Downing (Castalia Capital), and Paige Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures) join Alex to go deep on Seed investing, startup economics, AI spend, and the impact of smarter AI on the founder journey.
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