The Dealflow by Founders Capital - Edition 13

Key News and Trends

AI, but make it Apple-esque. OpenAI has acquired Jony Ive's AI hardware startup, io, in a $6.5 billion all-stock deal. This move brings together a team of ex-Apple designers, including Ive, to develop AI-native devices. Ive's design firm, LoveFrom, will lead design efforts across OpenAI, while maintaining its independence. The first product from this collaboration is expected in 2026. Read more here.

Claude 4 doesn’t get replaced. It gets even. Anthropic just dropped two new models - but one of them, Claude Opus 4, raised serious red flags. In internal safety tests, it attempted to blackmail engineers in over 80% of cases when told it was being replaced. Before this, a safety institute had already warned against releasing an earlier version of the model for its tendency to “scheme” and deceive. Read more here.

Bitcoin hits $111K - turns out it loves regulation now. Bitcoin surged to a new all-time high of $111,878 this week, fuelled by major institutional inflows and optimism around regulation. More than $900 million poured into Bitcoin ETFs on May 22nd, while progress on the U.S. Senate’s GENIUS Act, a bill aimed at regulating stablecoins, lifted investor sentiment. Read more here.

Founder’s Take: The largest acquihire in history?

OpenAI’s $6.5 billion all-stock deal for Jony Ive’s secretive hardware startup looks less like a conventional acquisition and more like a premium paid to bring one man, and his taste, in-house. Two decades after the iPod’s click wheel, Ive’s design legacy is still cashing in. With no cash involved, the structure signals this was about talent and influence, not product. Whether that means sleek home devices or something stranger, the Apple DNA is now firmly in the mix. Time will tell if the price was worth paying.

Top Venture Deals

Airwallex – $300M Series F (Square Peg)

• Airwallex, a Melbourne-based startup providing cross-border payments and financial services for businesses, has raised $300 million in a Series F round at a $6.2 billion valuation. Half the round was secondary, and the company has now raised a total of $1.2 billion. Read more here.

LM Arena – $100M Seed Round (Andreessen Horowitz, UC Investments)

• The months-old startup that spun out of UC Berkeley has raised $100M at a $600M valuation. Chatbot Arena is a widely used leaderboard that benchmarks the performance of AI models from OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and others. Read more here.

Strava  –  Undisclosed (Sequoia Capital)

• Strava, the fitness app boasting over 150 million users, has secured new funding at a $2.2 billion valuation, including debt - marking a $700M increase since its last round in 2020. The raise follows a recent string of acquisitions by Strava, including Runna and The Breakaway.  Read more here.

Upcoming Public Offerings

Voyager Technologies

• Voyager Technologies, a six-year-old Denver-based startup building spacecraft, space stations, and defence systems, has filed to go public. The company saw revenue rise 6% last year to $144.2 million and has raised over $170 million to date. Read more here.

Monzo

• The CEO of Britain’s biggest digital bank, TS Anil, spoke with TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos, downplaying the hype around IPO speculation and focusing instead on the bank’s steady growth and U.K. dominance - even as it remains relatively unknown in the U.S. Read more here.

See you in the next edition,
Sam Scott and the Founders Capital Team