Daily Tidbits

Evening all

calling your pub before to check if they’d be showing the rugby match? Very pre-2022. I woke up today, as a friend sent me a video of an NVIDIA earnings call streaming party hosted at his local pub. While I entertain the possibility that this could be the sign that AI may have reached bubble territory, I share today’s tidbits.

Cheers
Philip

Read

• Attio raises 33m. Redpoint, Balderton, Point9 and 01.A in the lead. A lot of fresh capital. Just a year into operations and three years into development. The product: CRM leveraging LLMs. Attio’s product manifesto proposes a paradigm shift in the 89bn CRM market. The team is building a CRM system that can understand, interact and take agency of complex unstructured data. Big market, likely big valuations and big capital deployment. If this works properly I can already picture the smiles of first-year analysts as they bid DealCloud and Salesforce goodbye.

• Speaking of AI: OpenAI reported to be in talks of raising fresh money @ a valuation north of 100bn. Thrive Capital leading the round with 1bn so far. MSFT also looking to participate again. Use of proceeds are expected to be in part for the Google rivalling product: SearchAI.

Visual

• Post-NVIDIA day reactions and soundbites have flooded all channels this AM. Reminder of just how high the AI bar is set. Below some highlights.

  • Q2 revenue: 30.0bn (+4.1% beat vs. consensus)

  • Q3 top line guidance: 32.5bn (+0.6bn vs. consensus expectations for guidance)

  • 50bn in proposed buybacks

  • All this and still: Shares more than 7% after hours yesterday. Less than the priced in 9.8% moves discussed in yesterday’s issue. Alas, big swings on such strong results.

    • Potentially the QoQ gross margin decline of 3ppts. Albeit this was attributed to Blackwell production issues - something that had been known by investors for a while and should likely have been baked into the price already

• US Q2 GDP revised up to 3.0% for the second reading (vs. the first reading’s 2.8%). While in Germany GDP is currently rooted firmly in govvy spending, the consumer (Inventories + Consumption) drives positive impact in the US. Revision in second reading to 2.9% (vs. 2.3% in Q2’s first reading)

• PE Funds are sitting on a mountain of dry powder ready to be deployed - how much of this will go into buying the restrictive shares in the newly available asset class of NFL teams?