Hours after Sam Altman and Jony Ive introduced on Wednesday that OpenAI was shopping for Ive’s firm, io, in an all-stock transaction valued at $6.5 billion, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski posted a surprising message on X.
Siemiatkowski’s household funding workplace, Flat Capital, had purchased shares in io six months earlier, he stated. Since that is an all-stock deal, these io shares can be transformed into shares within the for-profit arm of OpenAI.
“Excited that @FlatCapital was an investor in io and that we’ll now obtain much more shares in OpenAI at a hefty return for an funding we did some 6 months in the past,” Siemiatkowski tweeted.
The publish generated a lot curiosity that his funding agency issued a public statement confirming that io was the thriller, unnamed firm it backed when it announced its 4 investments in a “mini-portfolio” of U.S. AI firms. Flat Capital disclosed that it spent 34 million SEK on io, which converts to about $3.6 million.
Then got here one other stunning tweet from former Googler and designer Luke Wroblewski, who now works as a managing director on the secretive Silicon Valley VC powerhouse agency Sutter Hill Ventures.
In a since-deleted tweet and LinkedIn publish, Wroblewski wrote, “congrats to io on the $6.5B acquisition by OpenAI at this time. glad to have been traders on this one.”
In line with some who saw further now-deleted tweets about Sutter’s funding, the agency might have been the second largest investor in io. TechCrunch couldn’t verify that, although. Sutter didn’t reply to our request for remark, and Wroblewski deleted his posts after we reached out.
The most important investor in io was OpenAI itself, with a 23% stake, sources told Bloomberg, including that this stake was valued at round $1.5 billion. Which means OpenAI paid about $5 billion in inventory for the remaining shares. Different io backers, Bloomberg reported, included Laurene Powell Jobs’ agency Emerson Collective, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures, SV Angel, and the OpenAI Fund. As we beforehand reported, that fund isn’t backed with the AI model maker’s money however by exterior traders. Regardless of the deleted tweets, Bloomberg additionally confirmed Sutter Hill Ventures was an investor.