StrictlyVC

Happy Juneteenth, and happy Father's Day to all the dads reading! We've been in transit and mostly offline today, so we're sending you into the weekend with an abbreviated newsletter — see you Monday. P.S. For those of you looking for some pictures from last night’s event, you can find them here.

Top News SpaceX agreed to buy Anysphere – the three-year-old San Francisco company behind AI coding tool Cursor – for $60 billion in stock, a deal meant to bolster SpaceX’s AI ambitions by pairing Cursor’s developer base and coding-agent business with Musk’s Colossus supercomputer. TechCrunch has more here.

Looking forward to Thursday night in L.A.! Chang Xu of Basis Set Ventures is joining an already stacked roster that includes Founders Fund's Delian Asparouhov, M13's Carter Reum, Shinkei Systems' Saif Khawaja, and Mach Industries' Ethan Thornton, all under the roof of Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, which feels like the right spot, given SpaceX's IPO. More details here.

Top News Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the first public version of its powerful Mythos model, making the technology available through its API and enterprise plans while blocking or deferring answers in high-risk areas like cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillation. The launch comes with a mandatory 30-day data-retention policy for all Fable 5 and Mythos 5 traffic, which Anthropic says is needed to detect jailbreaks and other novel attacks. TechCrunch has more here.

Top News OpenAI filed confidentially to go public, following rival Anthropic and setting up a potential IPO race among two of the biggest AI labs and SpaceX even as OpenAI faces questions about its massive compute spending, missed growth targets, governance, lawsuits, and when it can generate more cash than it burns. TechCrunch has more here.

Top News SpaceX is eyeing a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation in its IPO next week and is expected to sell less than 5% of its shares, or about $60 billion to $80 billion worth, with pricing expected June 11th and trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX expected June 12th. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Thanks very much to the hundreds of you who joined us at the StrictlyVC event today in Athens; it was a wonderful day. Enormous thanks again to our partner in the affair, Endeavor, whose team brings exceptional care to everything they do. For those of you who missed it, we’ll have more coverage and photos soon. We’re moderating some founder discussions on Thursday and sitting down with Neil Rimer of Index Ventures on Friday for a fireside chat.

Top News OpenAI is reportedly preparing to confidentially file a draft of its IPO prospectus as soon as tomorrow (Friday). CNBC has more here. Speaking of OpenAI, the company generated roughly $5.7 billion in first-quarter revenue, about $1 billion more than Anthropic. However, Anthropic has since appeared to pull ahead, with annualized revenue nearing $45 billion versus approximately $30 billion for OpenAI.

Our newest StrictlyVC Download is out, featuring Amjad Masad of Replit — recorded at our recent San Francisco evening. It was a great night, and we have two more coming up in quick succession. First, Athens on May 29, in partnership with global entrepreneurship organization Endeavor. We were there last year and it was truly a highlight — rooftop party included. Then Los Angeles (El Segundo) on Thursday, June 18, in partnership with Aerospace Corp. We'd love to see you at either one.

Top News DeepSeek could be valued at up to $50 billion in its first-ever fundraising round, with the Chinese AI startup reportedly seeking to raise $3 billion to $4 billion from investors including a state-backed AI fund and potentially Tencent. Reuters has more here.