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Dealmaker: Nvidia Buys Coding Startup as AI Deal Blitz Grows

Dealmaker
Also, Kleiner Perkins finally makes an LLM bet. ͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­
Sep 2, 2025

Dealmaker

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Welcome back! 

We're in the midst of an M&A boom—for artificial intelligence startups. 

Among the latest: Nvidia last month bought Solver, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. The three-year-old startup formerly known as Laredo Labs has developed an AI coding agent that completes software development tasks for users. The company raised $8 million in financing from investors including Radical Ventures and Horizons Ventures. 

The Solver purchase is just one of a flurry of AI deals that is helping tech M&A rebound, as the chart below shows. On Tuesday, OpenAI said it had agreed to buy Statsig, a product testing startup, for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. And we expect many more acquisitions—both because larger startups are on the hunt for technology and people to build better applications and models and because public software companies are hungry to incorporate more AI in their products to stay relevant. 

Coding in particular has been a keen source of interest among would-be acquirers. 

In the past year, for example, OpenAI tried to buy Anysphere, the maker of the popular coding editor Cursor. It also almost bought Windsurf, and then lost out to Google, which in July hired its founders and key staff in exchange for a $2.4 billion licensing payment. 

At the same time, other buyers were circling. Elon Musk's xAI expressed interest in acquiring Anysphere after Google hired Windsurf's founders and some staff, according to a person familiar with the acquisition conversations, a detail that has not previously been reported. 

So far, Anysphere has turned away would-be acquirers, likely because it hasn't had any trouble raising money. Earlier this year, Anysphere CEO and co-founder Michael Truell had been targeting $400 million for the funding round it announced in June that valued the three-year-old startup at a nearly $10 billion valuation. But the startup raised $900 million in capital after investors poured in, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. 

Anysphere and other coding startups might also consider deals that are short of an outright acquisition. 

As I reported Tuesday, Anysphere has considered selling or licensing data on how engineers use its assistant to code to model makers including OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic. The data could help companies train their models—potentially even help them build competitive products! Such arrangements could also help offset the cost to Anysphere of running AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others.

The licensing deal interest shows that Anysphere is sitting on a gold mine of data, and potentially another revenue stream for the business—which is good news for investors worried about these coding startups' margins.

Investors also appreciate that the flurry of outright acquisitions means more cash, in theory, to return to their limited partners. Sequoia Capital, for instance, is likely to receive a more than seven-times return on its investment in Statsig, according to three people with knowledge of the investment. The Sand Hill Road firm led the startup's Series A and Series B in 2021 and 2022 and invested $36 million. It now owns almost 25% of the company, worth about $270 million, said one of the people. 

It also means that Iconiq, which led Statsig's latest round at a $1.1 billion valuation, will get shares of OpenAI from the deal to go with its previous stake in Anthropic. "They both can be enormously successful," said Iconiq partner Matt Jacobson on Tuesday.

The AI deal blitz has an asterisk, however. They don't always help with immediate cash returns, as some are all-stock deals or only partial payouts. Those terms may explain why we aren't feeling the usual euphoria that accompanies an M&A frenzy. — Kevin McLaughlin, Katie Roof and Sri Muppidi contributed to this report. 

The list of venture firms that haven't made a bet into OpenAI or Anthropic is getting smaller and smaller. The latest addition to the "in" list is early-stage investor Kleiner Perkins, which invested more than $100 million into Anthropic's latest $13 billion round at a $183 billion valuation including the new money, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.

Up until this point, Kleiner Perkins did not invest in any model makers, mostly backing application companies such as Harvey, an AI law business, and Glean, a startup that builds search chatbots for businesses. 

But Anthropic's recent launch of applications, specifically its coding assistant Claude Code, convinced the firm's partners to invest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the business. Claude Code is generating revenue at a more than $500 million in annual run rate, and it's less than six months old. 

The Kleiner Perkins' check is also another example of how firms known for backing very young startups are finding ways to invest at valuations typically associated with mature companies on the cusp of a public listing, or which have already gone public. While Kleiner Perkins does have a growth stage fund, this is one of the largest, and latest, investments into a new company it has made. The firm also invested in Databricks' $62 billion-valuation financing. 

For these venture firms, the move to later-stage checkwriting is a bet on where the best returns in AI will be, regardless of the (very steep) entry price. And already, some can point to the reason why this strategy pays off. As we wrote in late 2023, it seemed wild that early-stage firm Menlo Ventures was leading a $750 million investment into Anthropic at a $15 billion valuation, which ultimately rose to $18 billion. With Anthropic's latest round, that investment has shot up at least ten times. 


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Reporters Cory Weinberg and Natasha Mascarenhas tell you what's coming next, who's winning—and who's losing—in the high-stakes world of startup investing.

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