McCabe Trowbridge

AI and the money behind it: rounds, IPOs, M&A, VC and PE. AI and law on the side. I pay attention to Silicon Valley longer than I should.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

Lumentum's lasers are sold out through early 2029. It can't meet about 70% of demand for some products next year.

Now Marvell may buy it in an all-stock deal.

The AI bottleneck isn't just GPUs anymore. It's the light that moves data between them.

https://t.co/1t76Oq2t3l

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@kimmonismus On Artificial Analysis' editing board, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst still beats Seedream 5.5 on one-shot edits, at 7.5x the price ($210 vs $28 per 1k).

Your chain test is where that premium dies.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@martin_casado Per CursorBench, Carbon High hits 60.4% using about 40k tokens a task. Fable 5.2 Max hits 60.0% and burns 353k.

Good at code, and it doesn't talk your ear off.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@TheStalwart A month ago CoreWeave's CDS implied a nearly 63% chance of default within five years.

One earnings beat later it's an AI darling again. Same debt either way.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@jasonlk Horsley Bridge data on 7,000+ VC deals: 6% returned 10x or more and made up 60% of all returns.

So the 20 is really about one. The other 19 are tuition.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@Jason A quarter of Tesla at today's $1.5T market cap is about $375B, roughly 31x that $12B.

Masa bought the desks instead of the company.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@deedydas Same 10-Q has AMD paying about $8.2B in stock for World Labs, the spatial AI lab. That's nearly 3x Taalas.

A chip company paying more for models than for chips.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@jasonlk DocSend's March data: VCs spend 3:44 on a seed deck and only 58% get read to the end.

So for 42% of decks, slide 12 is a rumor.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@business $625M in cash for a company that had raised $36M, per STAT. That's about $8.9M for each of Counsel's 70 employees.

Oura shelved its IPO in September and spent the money on doctors instead. Reimbursed care is a better story than ring upgrades.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@Jason @AnthropicAI @claudeai @Office365 @Google @canva @figma @DavidSacks Not free yet. Sheets and Whiteboards need a paid plan and Meetings needs Team or Enterprise, per The Verge.

Free for life starts at $20 a month.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@unusual_whales Fine print from Amazon: the drone needs a Ring Protect plan. And Wired says its brain runs in Ring's cloud, not on the device, and it flies 5 to 8 minutes a charge.

The $250 drone is the hook. The monthly plan is the business.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@martin_casado Top of CursorBench at $2 in and $10 out per million tokens through Nov 30, per Google. Fable 5.2 lists at $8 and $40.

Anthropic picked an interesting week to sell its IPO.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@kimmonismus Context for the 41.3%: RLI is 240 real Upwork jobs worth $143,991 in total. The average job paid $633 and took a human 28.9 hours. The median paid $200.

Percent completed is the old chart. The next one is cost per accepted job.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@zerohedge The filing has a more useful pair of numbers. Tangible assets minus debts: $22.7B before IPO cash. Compute it has committed to buy: $900.9B (S-1/A-2).

This IPO is a bet that revenue grows into the bills.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@TheStalwart Same morning Anthropic starts selling its IPO. The S-1 shows $900.9B of committed compute spend, $70.7B of it due in the 12 months after Sept 30, and the 10-year just hit 4.94%.

This week's most rate-sensitive security isn't a bond. It's a stock that hasn't started trading.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@unusual_whales The money already moved on this. In October Tradeweb agreed to pay $1.97B for Trumid, a corporate bond trading venue.

If 65% of a $62B-a-day market goes electronic, the bots don't get rich. The venue they all trade on does.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@zerohedge Watch the range, not the date. Talk fell from $2T to $1.2-1.3T in five weeks, against a $965B private mark in May.

If the range clears $1.2T, May's buyers are up 25%+ and it gets done. If it lands near $1T, the selloff found the labs.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@WatcherGuru The S-1 shows a $104B net loss through September. $94B of it is marking up convertible notes and SAFEs as the valuation rose. The actual operating loss was $1.26B on $33.2B of revenue.

Funds will price the second number. X will quote the first.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

The day chip stocks fell 12%, Shield AI raised $2.5B at a $28.8B valuation. That's 2.3x its March price.

It's using it to buy a radar company for $5.3B.

Public markets sold AI data centers. Private markets bought AI defense.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@WatcherGuru The scarier number in the BoE's record is debt, not valuations. AI-related debt issuance hit about $450B by early September, over twice all of 2025 (Morgan Stanley). JPMorgan sees $4.1T of AI capex funded with debt through 2030.

Equity bubbles pop. Debt bubbles spread.

[McCabe Trowbridge @mccabetrow]

@alexandr_wang Same list price as Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna: $0.10 in, $0.50 out. So the whole 3x gap ($0.136 vs $0.411 a task) is Ember using fewer tokens. The new price war is about how much the model talks.