Asana Acquires Stack AI Startup

Welcome to the podcast. We had so much happen in the last two days. Anthropic has raised sixty-five billion dollars at a nine hundred and sixty-five billion dollar valuation. That is surpassing OpenAI's nine hundred and fifty billion dollar valuation from their last raise. So Anthropic not only are is their usage skyrocketing, but they have officially passed the valuation of open AI, which is insane considering how many users have open AI. ChatGPT has come synonymous with AI chatbots, but anthropic is officially pulling ahead because the enterprise is really paying off. Shift, a new company, is offering free home cleanings. So they'll actually send someone to your house, they'll clean your house for free in exchange for robot training footage. So the person that comes to your house to clean it is gonna wear a little camera on their hat that points down and watches everything they do while they clean, and this is to train robots to clean. Boston Children's is using OpenAI and all of their tools to diagnose 40 plus rare disease cases. Grok is looking for $6 50 million from existing investors after NVIDIA's $20 billion licensing deal. Asana is buying the no code agent builder stack AI for $75 million . This is the company that was an early competitor to my own startup, AIBox.ai. Will Asana be acquiring me for $75 million next? I will keep you guys all in the loop. Anthropic is shipping Claude Opus 4.8. Just yesterday, this came out. It has an 84% on the online mind to web, and it's also cheaper in fast mode. And it's also the same price as Opus 4. 7, even though it's better. So a bunch of cool stuff rolling in. I want to kick this episode off by saying I've officially passed 65,000 impressions on Google for my vibe coded project aichhatdaily.com. Essentially it was it's a website that covers all of the same stories I cover on the show here, and it gives deep dive articles with all of the information, way more info on what actually happened. Um, but it's kind of just the show notes to this to this podcast and, I've created this site. And essentially, it is uh, I think it's going to become a competitor to TechCrunch and The Verge and a lot of other big uh companies. It's very specifically on AI news, and we have a newsletter. Anyways, I've been blown away by how popular it has become and how many people are starting to go there for their daily AI news. People are tagging me on as on LinkedIn posts that don't even listen to the podcast that somehow have found it. If you search for AI Chat Daily on Google, it's the top result, which I'm super excited about. And it's just something I'm I'm thrilled with. I think it's beautiful. It's been so much fun. If you're interested in getting daily AI news to your inbox, go subscribe on AI Chat daily to our newsletter. And if you want to see the latest in AI news or just what my latest vibe coded project looks like, I 100% built this thing myself. It's an amazing tool. It has like 20 articles every day, the top 20 stories um that are happening in AI, and it does really good deep dives. Go check it out. I look at it every day. I'm tweaking this thing every day. I'm working on it every day. It's so much fun, but I'm blown away. It just passed 65,000 impressions on Google, and the clicks and traffic is going up a ton too. I'm actually ranking for terms like Yande x and Claude AI, but you know, I'm on page like seven, so we're we're far back a little bit. But anyways, it's a ton of fun. It's a great project. But Anthropic has just raised sixty five billion dollars at a $965 billion valuation. This makes them officially passed OpenAI. This is their series H. And with this, and actually I believe OpenAI might have misquoted the beginning, but their last round was at an $852 billion dollar valuation. So this is about a hundred billion dollars above what open AI was able to raise, more than a hundred billion dollars, which is absolutely wild. This is officially Silicon Valley's most valuable AI company and this nearly triples anthropic's February valuation of three hundred and eighty billion dollars. Mostly this is going um, you know, this is all of this is because of their forty seven billion dollar revenue run rate. That is a four point seven X jump in 12 months. That just reflects how Claude is absolutely ripping right now, not just for enterprise developers, but literally every person I talked to, kind of how chat GPT was synonymous with AI in the last few years. Everyone I talk to now, they're like, yeah, I just built this cool tool on uh you know with Claude Code or with you know Claude Cowork and it's like a vibe coded app that does XYZ for me. I throw all my bills in there and it helps me organize them. Anyways, everyone I know is talking about what vi theybe're coding, and that evidently is really helping Anthropics bottom line. They also released Claude Opus 4.7 on the same day that this happened as they kind of did this funding announcement. We know they're preparing for an IPO behind the scenes. We don't know exactly what the timing is on that. Claude Code, which is Anthropics coding assistant, has basically pulled developer budgets away from GitHub Copilot and OpenAI's API. It's embedded itself directly into enterprise workflows. And I think when you look at why they're growing so much, um, you could say GitHub Copilot and OpenAI are losing in a sense because of how much like their growth is coming from somewhere. The lead investors on this round are Ultimate C apital, Dragoner, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. Um they're all crossover funds. They all have public market desks. I think this really shows that the institutional confidence and a lot of people realize that an IPO is coming, so they're gonna give them some money. They can see how fast this company is growing. This is wild. I also wanted to touch on some of the features that have come out. They've just released, um, they've just released the latest, which is Opus 4.8. It hit a 84% on browser agent benchmarks and it is beating GPT 5.5. It's also holding Opus 4.7's API pricing and it's not going to actually increase. So the API pricing isn't increasing for the new model, but it is significantly better on what I think is the most important metric today, which is browser agent. And the reason why I think this is so important is because right now we really need these computer use agents to do well. Cloud co-work I have been absolutely blown away by. Basically every task I give it, every website I send it to, every insane spreadsheet I download within a ton of data, it's able to parse and give me the feedback and the information I need. I'm blown away by it on a daily basis. Um, you don't need me to uh continue to to pump it all day long, but I think this is impressive that it's getting better and it's the same price. Um, Claude Code's new dynamic work flows have also been announced with this, kind of in tandem, and this is gonna let Opus four point eight spawn hundreds of parallel subagents in a single session, which all of them are capable of handling code uh code based migrations spanning hundreds of thousands of lines of code so you're really truly going to be able to give opus 4.8 way bigger projects it's going to be able to take those and get it done not just I don't I wouldn't say cheaper but faster. So all the subagents are still gonna be burning through tons of tokens. I think this is actually awesome because I've done I have a lot of projects where it will take an entire day to get something done. It does them, you know, it's like spinning up. I think it right now it spins up like 10 subagents is what I can get Claude Cowork to do for me. Anything more, sometimes 20, but anything more than like 20, I think. And it's like it it just sacrifices quality. I think it goes to cheaper models. Uh it's just not as good. And so when I have, you know, a huge project, like recently, I was um vibe coding uh Bible study app, and I needed to write you know 1300 Bible study pages for every chapter in the Bible, which was like crazy. It took an entire day to do that, and you know, it would it would run for like half an hour and be like, hey, I did like this batch, and I'd be like, continue. And just every 30 minutes, I'd say continue. I was like working on my normal stuff and I on the side I was just saying like continue, continue, continue. It burnt through all of my credits. So I think that's also uh something to take into consideration. I got locked out of Claude code and co-work for two days because of that. Um so if there's a lot of new problems, but if you're on the API, you wouldn't get that problem. You can go buy extra credits, which is what they want you to do. And for big enterprises with massive budgets, being able to get something done in uh one day that you would have taken you a week before because you have 10 a hundred subagents, I think is some real value. So this is going to be pretty interesting to see if their usage is increasing even more after this. Okay, we have to talk about the new company shift. They are offering free home cleanings in exchange for robot training footage. I think this is interesting. The company is giving what they're calling magic hats to all of their cleaners, all of their workers, and it basically has a POV, a point of view footage. So it's a camera pointing straight down. So it's kind of looking at your hands and like right in front of you of what you're actually seeing. They say that all of the faces that this camera is going to capture, because I mean it's inside of people's homes, right? So many faces , screens, ID cards, all that's going to get blurred out before the video goes into the AI daining uh AI training pipeline. They've already paid tens of thousands of people across 15 different countries to record activities with their app. I just think I saw on their website you can go and sign up to be like a a worker on shift and it will give you like little jobs like hey go film a video of XYZ thing or you picking up a stick or you doing this thing or or something and um they'll pay you for all of those. So this is really interesting having this cleaning right now. I think what they've done is they've d identified uh area where where it was gonna pay a lot and this data is gonna be very valuable. All of these humanoid robots that are rolling out right now, they want that data to train the robots to be able to actually go and do cleaning tasks. So I think they're getting ahead of the data set right now. They are expanding. They have some plans to expand to San Francisco, London, Zurich, and Munich very soon. Um, and they said that plumbing , cooking, and building are all future data collection verticals that they'll be working on. So they'll be giving plumbers these hats, they'll be giving cooks these hats, and I'm sure this will roll out to a lot of other areas. Very, very wild. Boston Children's is using open AI tools to diagnose 40 plus rare diseases. This is one of the areas I am the most excited about AI is when it's actually able to help with healthcare. This problem in particular, I think, is a big deal because rare diseases take patients an average of five or more years to diagnose. And so when you have AI and it has its pattern matching and you're putting this on structured patient data, I think this is going to reshape how a lot of hospitals are trying to approach this, which I am thrilled by. This is really one of the hardest things to diagnose. And a lot of these really rare diseases, right? Like you go to your doctor, I I've seen so many people. They go to the doctor, it takes them years. They say all of the symptoms they try all of the most common things when it's none of that you really have to go down uh a rabbit hole and sometimes I've heard of people getting very lucky personally I feel like it's blessed right I'm like I'm a person of faith. So I'm like, okay, God help that person in a lot of these kind of disease, rare disease diagnoses. But I don't want that to have to happen to everyone. That this is a terrible place to be at where there's all these rare diseases. It's very hard to diagnose. And it takes years, people have to suffer with them before they they can find their diagnosis. Sometimes it's too late. And so I'm really excited to have uh AI with all of its pattern matching be able to do this. Especially when you consider the fact that rare diseases are affecting right now about 7,000 known conditions and each is hitting fewer than two hundred thousand people. So patients patients typically see multiple specialists over years before they're diagnosed. Anyways, opening eye has withheld a lot of the details about this particular study. Obviously it's kind of healthcare, so there's a lot of confidential stuff. They didn't say what models were being used. They didn't say how many total cases were being screened to give those 40 different diagnoses. And they also didn't say what the false positive rates were. But in any case, I think we can uh be pretty confident that it is making some big strides. We don't know all of the details, but I'm really excited about this, as you probably can tell by my enthusiasm for AI and healthcare. Okay, let's talk about Grok. They are looking for six hundred and fifty million dollars from their existing investors. This is after NVIDIA did a $20 billion licensing deal. So they're raising this new um, they're raising these new funds to build out their inference cloud service. And this is just five months after NVIDIA gave them uh you know that they did the $20 billion deal. So this isn't very, you know, this isn't very long after. I think it's especially interesting when you consider the fact that when NVIDIA did that deal, they licensed all of their chip technology, which is what they're really after, and they also hired away all of their senior leadership. But this new six hundred and fifty million dollars that they're raising is essentially gonna actually keep Grok independent. So it wasn't straight up acquisition. And I think a lot of people were like, oh they're gonna do a licensing deal because then it can't get blocked, right? No one wants acquisitions and mergers to get blocked by the government or yeah, basically by the government. So they're like, oh it's just a licensing deal. It's it's easier, it's much more palatable that way. But what's interesting is that also gives the opportunity for Grock to remain completely independent . It's pivoting them away from the hardware sales and more towards a token-based cloud business. So they're going to be competing directly with Sarah Brass, which is the hyperscaler that recently went public. They've also essentially gone out to all of their investors and said, hey, like we're raising the 650 million dollars, but it's basically guaranteed that they're gonna close it at this point because Disruptive and Infinitum, two of their investors, have guaranteed the full six hundred and fifty million dollars and they've agreed to cover any shares that other investors are declining on, which is basically making this a guaranteed. But I think they want to get uh investment from all of the previous investors. So everyone's kind of united on this new move forward. And there is so much potential here because inference workloads now dominate production AI spending for most companies, and it's you know, it's really kind of passing a lot of the training compute and it's making per token revenue way more attractive than just per chip sales. So I think this is a good move on Grok's part. They know that they can't outcompete NVIDIA in the GPU market, so they're betting on custom silicone for latency-sensitive high-volume inference. I'm excited to follow along. The final story of the day. Asana is buying the no code agent builder Stack AI for $75 million . This is something I'm personally very excited about, considering Stack AI is one of the original competitors to AIBox.ai, my own startup. So I'm I'm always thrilled to follow along and see these companies continue to grow and be successful. And by the way, if you want to get access to over 80 different AI models in one place and build tools with them like you do with Stack, go check out my startup aibox.ai. I felt like that's a pretty natural plug on this story. But in any case, this move right now, I think, is showing that Asana is betting that controlling the work management layer where a lot of teams are actually assigning tasks and tracking progress is a lot more defensible against AI disruption than trying to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic directly, especially when it feels like Anthropic is eating everybody's lunch in every single category. Stack AI has raised under 20$ million total. And so the $75 million price is about a $3.75 X markup. And the most recent $16 million Series A that they did was backed by Gradient, Epiclon Capital, and Vercel's CEO Guillaume Rausch. Right now, Stack AI's co-founders Tony Roussell and Bernard Esetuno. Uh, they're gonna be joining Asana. The startup was part of Y Combinator's winter 2023 cohort. So they've been through Y Combinator, they built agents that basically automate processes. They pull data from Salesforce, Slack, and Google Suite, and they let you build agents with all of that. Asana has lost more than half of its market cap since ChatGPT launched. So I think this is some good context to put in there. I think this was all kind of accelerated after their founder, Dustin Moskivitz, stepped away as the CEO back in March of last year. Time will tell if all of these acquisitions they're lining up right now are going to help turn the company around. I really hope it does, and I'm rooting for Stack AI and for Asana at this point. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast. It helps the show out a ton. We're getting so close to 200 reviews, and it helps me find more incredible guests and stories, and also helps this get sho this show get recommended in the algorithm toward people. 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