The Dealflow by Founders Capital - Edition 30

Welcome back to The Dealflow by Founders Capital - your inside track on the private markets. Each week, we cut through the noise to bring you the latest industry trends - along with our take.

Author

Sam Scott
October 03, 2025

Sora Steps Up: OpenAI’s TikTok Rival Debuts

OpenAI has released Sora 2, an upgraded video generator that follows real-world physics, alongside Sora, a TikTok-style social app. The app introduces “cameos,” allowing users to insert their likeness into AI-generated clips and share them on an algorithmic feed. With rivals like Meta adding short-form video to its AI app (“Vibes”), OpenAI is moving from enterprise to consumer social, positioning Sora as a potential new growth engine beyond ChatGPT. Read more here.

Murati’s AI Encore: Tinker Democratises Fine-Tuning

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has emerged with Thinking Machines Lab, a $12B startup backed by $2B in seed funding, unveiling its first product: Tinker. The platform lets businesses and researchers fine-tune large models like Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen with minimal infrastructure, opening frontier AI capabilities to a broader user base. With a founding team of ex-OpenAI heavyweights and early beta feedback citing power and ease-of-use, Tinker could shift fine-tuning from niche research labs to mainstream enterprise adoption. Read more here.

Electronic Arts: Record $55B Buyout by Saudi-Backed Group 

EA, the studio behind Madden, The Sims, and EA Sports FC, is set to go private in the largest leveraged buyout in history. The $55B deal, orchestrated by Jared Kushner, Silver Lake, and Saudi Arabia’s PIF, values shares at $210 each, a 25% premium. Investors are betting AI will slash costs in development, from playtesting to character design, while CEO Andrew Wilson remains in charge post-takeover. Read more here.

Gaming is a fascinating space, and EA’s $55B buyout proves it. Not only is this the largest LBO in history, but the cast of players, Kushner, Silver Lake, and PIF, makes it even more significant.

What stands out is that gaming studios are incredibly data-rich environments, and AI can dramatically optimise them. The real bet here isn’t just on EA’s catalogue; it’s on AI compressing costs and boosting margins in content-heavy industries.

For me, this highlights how institutional money increasingly views AI less as a frontier moonshot and more as an efficiency layer applied to existing IP. I expect we’ll see more roll-ups like this across other IP-driven sectors, from film and sports to publishing. Watch this space

Vercel: $300M Series F at $9.3B Valuation (Accel, GIC, BlackRock, StepStone, Tiger Global, Salesforce Ventures)

  • The team behind Next.js, v0, and the AI Cloud closed a heavily oversubscribed $300M round. The raise also includes a $300M secondary for early shareholders, as Vercel positions itself as the default infrastructure for AI-native web applications, counting OpenAI, PayPal, and Ramp as customers. Read more here.

Periodic Labs: $300M Seed (a16z, DST, Nvidia, Accel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos)

  • Former OpenAI and DeepMind leaders launched Periodic Labs to automate science with AI-powered robotic labs. The startup aims to invent next-gen superconductors and materials while generating proprietary physical-world datasets, an ambitious play to create true “AI scientists.”  Read more here.

Axiom Math: $64M Seed at $300M Valuation (B Capital, Greycroft, Madrona, Menlo Ventures)

  • Founded by 24-year-old Stanford dropout Carina Hong, Axiom Math is building an “AI mathematician” to solve proofs, generate conjectures, and discover new problems. With talent recruited from Meta’s FAIR lab, the startup is targeting applications from research-level math to chip design and quantitative trading. Read more here.

Wealthfront

  • After 17 years, robo-advisor Wealthfront has filed for an IPO, disclosing $339M in revenue and $123M net profit over the past year. With $88B in AUM across 1.3M customers, the firm has pivoted from pure investing into high-yield cash accounts and soon mortgages. A successful listing would mark one of fintech’s biggest public returns since Chime.  Read more here.

Ethos Technologies

  • Digital life insurance platform Ethos Technologies has filed for a Nasdaq IPO under ticker LIFE, aiming to “democratize access to life insurance”. Backed by Accel and Sequoia, the company posted $320M LTM revenue (+57% YoY) and $61M net income, with 450K+ activated policies. Its dual-class structure leaves founders with outsized voting control. Read more here.

See you in the next edition,
The Founders Capital Team

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