> Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B
They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.
The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors).
Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent.
This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral).
So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
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.
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.
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.
