> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.

I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

> Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetization" – thanks to Anthropic, we can skip that chapter entirely and focus on building the best JavaScript tooling.

I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.

▲ Karrot_Kream 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.

Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?

▲

robertjpayne 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They had a second round that was $19m in late 2023. I don't doubt for a second that they had a long runway given the small team.

	▲	Karrot_Kream an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thanks I scrolled past that in the announcement page. With more runway comes more investor expectations too though. Some of the concern with VC backed companies is whether the valuation remains worthwhile. $26mm in funding is plenty for 14 people, but again the question is whether they can justify their valuation. Regardless happy for the Oven folks and Bun has been a great experience (especially for someone who got on the JS ecosystem quite late.) I'm curious what the structure of the acquisition deal was like.
	▲	steve_adams_86 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't like all of the decisions they made for the runtime, or some of the way they communicate over social media/company culture, but I do admire how well-run the operation seems to have been from the outside. They've done a lot with (relatively) little, which is refreshing in our industry. I don't doubt they had a long runway either.

▲ n2d4 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

    > They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

This isn't really true. It's more about who wanted them to join. Maybe it was Anthropic who really wanted to take over Bun/hire Jarred, or it was Jarred who got sick of Bun and wanted to work on AI.

I don't really know any details about this acquisition, and I assume it's the former, but acquihires are also done for other reasons than "it was the only way".

▲ papichulo2023 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic is still a new company and so far they seem "friendly". That being said, I still feel this can go either way.

▲ serial_dev 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I believe this a bit less.

They weren’t acquired and got paid just to build tooling as before and now completely ignoring monetization until the end of times.

	▲	velcrovan 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe they were though. Maybe Anthropic just wanted to bring a key piece of the stack in-house.

▲ drakythe 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Given the worries about LLM focused companies reaching profitability I have concerns that Bun's runway will be hijacked... I'd hate for them to go down with the ship when the bubble pops.

	▲	Karrot_Kream 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is my fear. It's one thing to lose a major sponsor. It's another to get cut due to a focus on profitability later down the line.