| ▲ | suddenlybananas 9 hours ago |
| What are they buying? |
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| ▲ | rvnx 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs. The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors). The acquisition is just a collateral effect. |
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| ▲ | tgtweak 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent. This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral). So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | They raised 4M USD, they have 26 full-time employees (they pay 120<->200K / yr, cf https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 ). It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job. It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution. Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them. | | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So I don't see how the acquisition is collateral - it's an acquihire plain and simple, if anything else it would be supply chain insurance as they clearly use a lot of these tools downstream. As you noted the licensing is extremely permissive on the tools so there appears to be very little EV there for an acquirer outside of the human capital building the tools or building out monetized features. I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors. OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools. | |
| ▲ | zanie 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A brief note, your numbers are way off here — Astral subsequently raised a Series A and B (as mentioned in the blog post) but did not announce them. We were doing great financially. (I work at Astral) | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It seems you are one of the most active contributors there. I would sincerely have understood better (and even wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you personally as an individual contributor than choose a strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the purchased company. Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and millions burned. Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea. Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from 2021). The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice is not enough, so they must have deeper motives. | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean you pirouetted onto the AI hype train before running out of working capital - I guess that's doing great financially by some definitions. |
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| ▲ | waynesonfire 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They raised 4M USD What was their pitch? | | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | To raise $4m seed from AAA partners usually requires connections + track record/credability of the founders - looks like they have that here since they raised 3 rounds with zero revenue. |
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| ▲ | jon-wood 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can see why the former investors and Astral founders would like that, what I don't see is what OpenAI get out of the deal. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx an hour ago | parent [-] | | Maybe OpenAI literally considers themselves as the ultimate non-profit company. Hmm… |
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| ▲ | KeplerBoy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem. |
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| ▲ | bootsmann 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here? | | |
| ▲ | nilkn 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate well with their agent. They want codex to become the "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated into popular open source software. | | |
| ▲ | MoreQARespect 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This makes much more sense as an zoom-buys-keybase style acquihire. I bet within a month the astral devs will be on new projects. Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything. |
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| ▲ | __float 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "uv" is a very widely used tool in the Python ecosystem, and Python is important to AI. Calling it "a random Python packaging org" seems a bit unfair. | |
| ▲ | everforward 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is all about parsing the code into something machines can analyze, which to me feels like something that could potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make "find and replace" work sanely and what not. I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Writing a parser is not that much of work to buy a company in order to do it. Piggybacking on LSP servers and treesitter would be more efficient. | | |
| ▲ | dcreager 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The parser is not the hard part. The hard part is doing something useful with the parse trees. They even chose "oh is that all?" and a picture of a piece of cake as the teaser image for my Strange Loop talk on this subject! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2R1PTGcwrE | |
| ▲ | everforward 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Writing a literal parser isn’t too hard (and there’s presumably an existing one in the source code for the language). Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python. Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy). | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you’re talking about magic methods/properties enabled by reflection and macros, then you’re no longer statically analyzing the code. |
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| ▲ | OJFord 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What you're not seeing, edited inline, is: Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare. | |
| ▲ | mcmcmc 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This just seems like panic M&A. They know they aren’t on track to ever meet their obligations to investors but they can’t actually find a way to move towards profitability. Hence going back to the VC well of gambling obscene amounts of money hoping for a 10x return… somehow | |
| ▲ | KeplerBoy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The dev market? Anthropic's services are arguably more popular among a certain developer demographic. I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services. | |
| ▲ | aldanor 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of the popular products on the planet acquires the most popular python packaging org | |
| ▲ | Ygg2 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I didn't know Claude bought Astral! /S |
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| ▲ | contagiousflow 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement? | | |
| ▲ | KeplerBoy 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | They can, everyone can. Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool. | | |
| ▲ | freetonik 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | OpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "– how to do x in Python? – Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..." | |
| ▲ | drgiggles 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly integrates with subscription based openai products...likelihood of openai product usage increases. Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen what those integrations are and if it translates to more subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base -> cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base. | |
| ▲ | cesarvarela 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But new tools (like uv) start with no market share. | |
| ▲ | suddenlybananas 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why would that marketshare be valuable? |
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| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | huqedato 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years. |
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| ▲ | ainch 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | What competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team working on fast Python tooling? | | |
| ▲ | huqedato 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I have no idea but for sure they did their homework before making this step. I suppose they're grabbing these business just to stay ahead, in order to prevent the competitors to buy those instead. | | | |
| ▲ | cozzyd 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | $ uv install claude-agent-sdk
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that
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| ▲ | noodletheworld 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| uv |
