The Dealflow by Founders Capital - Edition 42

Key News and Trends

ChatGPT Gets Commercial

OpenAI will begin testing ads inside ChatGPT for free and low-cost users in the US, with placements appearing at the bottom of responses and clearly labelled. Paid tiers will remain ad-free, and OpenAI says ads will not influence answers or use user data for targeting. The move opens a new revenue stream as OpenAI looks to support rising infrastructure costs without undermining user trust. Read more here

Capital One snaps up Brex for $5.15B

Capital One agreed to acquire fintech Brex for $5.15B in cash and stock, gaining access to Brex’s corporate card, expense, and rewards technology used by thousands of companies. Brex oversees nearly $13B in client deposits, giving Capital One deeper reach into venture-backed and mid-market customers as banks look to defend share against fintech-native challengers. Read more here

Davos turns Nvidia into a geopolitical lightning rod

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, publicly criticised the US decision to allow sales of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to approved Chinese customers, warning of serious national security risks. The remarks were notable given Nvidia is both a key supplier and investor in Anthropic, highlighting how geopolitical concerns are beginning to override traditional partnership dynamics at the frontier of AI. Read more here

Founders’ Take: When Scale Meets Reality

Every platform that matters eventually faces the same tension: scale versus purity. ChatGPT has reached that moment.

OpenAI introducing ads - cautiously, clearly labelled, and limited to free users - is an acknowledgement of economic reality. AI at global scale is capital-intensive, and subscriptions alone rarely support category-defining ambition.

We’ve seen this cycle before. Google Search, YouTube, even mobile apps all faced backlash at monetisation - and survived by keeping ads separate from the core utility. Users didn’t revolt because the underlying value remained intact.

ChatGPT feels different because trust is the product. The real risk isn’t ads; it’s perceived influence. If answers are ever shaped by commercial incentives, the moat collapses. That’s why ad-free paid tiers and non-influenced responses are essential.

The initial backlash is inevitable. More interesting is what this unlocks: a blueprint for how other LLMs may diversify revenue beyond pure subscriptions.

If ads stay unobtrusive and optional, they’ll be palatable. How OpenAI manages it will shape trust in AI for the next decade. Time will tell if they can find the right balance.

Top Venture Deals

Humans&: $480M Seed (Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV, Emerson Collective, Forerunner)

• Human-centric AI lab Humans& raised a $480M seed round at a $4.48B valuation, one of the largest seed financings ever. Founded by former researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google and Meta, the company plans to spend the majority of the capital on compute as it builds AI systems designed around collaboration and human insight. Read more here

LiveKit: $100M (Index Ventures)

• Real-time voice and video infrastructure startup LiveKit raised $100M at a $1B valuation in a round led by Index Ventures. LiveKit powers ChatGPT’s voice mode and counts xAI, Salesforce, Tesla and emergency services among its customers, underscoring how voice is emerging as a core interface layer for AI applications as usage shifts from text to real-time interaction. Read more here

Inferact: $150M (Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Databricks Ventures)

• AI inference startup Inferact raised $150M in a seed round at an $800M valuation, led by a16z and Lightspeed. Built by the core team behind open-source project vLLM, the company is targeting the growing inference bottleneck as models scale, positioning software-level optimisation as the next efficiency frontier in AI infrastructure. Read more here

Upcoming Public Offerings

Ethos

• Insurance technology company Ethos has priced its IPO and is expected to go public next Thursday at a valuation of up to $1.26B, raising roughly $100M. Backed by Sequoia, Accel and GV, Ethos is profitable and positioning itself as an early test of public market appetite for software businesses outside AI hype cycles. Read more here

SpaceX

• SpaceX is lining up four major Wall Street banks to lead a blockbuster initial public offering, potentially one of the largest ever, building on its soaring private valuation and broad market interest. Read more here.

See you in the next edition,
The Founders Capital Team

Founders Capital is the trading name of FC Group Holding Ltd. FC Group Holding Ltd is an Appointed Representative of 8point8 Capital Ltd which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (reg. no. 936586). 

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