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.

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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.

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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.