Anthropic Raises $13BN & OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1BN All Stock

Cliff Obrecht (Canva COO), Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll debate Anthropic’s $183B valuation, OpenAI’s Statsig acquisition, and whether AI is eating SaaS margins.

• Anthropic’s $183B post-money is ~8-9x next-year revenue if growth holds: $100M ARR two years ago → ~$1B → projected $5-9B by year-end, implying ~$20B gap revenue in 2026.
• OpenAI bought Statsig at exactly the same $1.1B price as its May growth round (Iconic-led); $75M ARR; Iconic used the deal to roll nine figures into OpenAI after being blocked from its Anthropic-led round.
• Meta’s Scale deal was structurally hollow: VCs immediately extracted the $14B cash, leaving an asset-free shell; Rory expects auditors to force a writedown on Meta’s $14B balance-sheet investment by early next year.
• Lovable closed at $1.8B on July 17; Replit closed at $3B thirteen days later — both at ~$100M ARR — illustrating pure demand-driven pricing with no fundamental basis for the gap.
• Canva: approaching $4B ARR at ~40% growth, profitable for 8 years, $1B+ cash on balance sheet, 240M MAUs; Fidelity is anchor of current secondary round.
• Canva already spends more than 10% of revenue on AI compute and is shifting to a hybrid seat-plus-consumption credit model to protect margins as new AI products launch in October.
• Canva is the #5 domain ChatGPT refers users to; ChatGPT-sourced image uploads to Canva grew from 0.02% to over 5% in 18 months, replacing some SEO loss.
• Jensen’s $3-4T AI infrastructure bet requires roughly $800B in annual profit at 20% ROE to justify — equivalent to building four new Microsofts or Facebooks.

2025-09-04 · Watch on YouTube