Twitter revenues, Indian IPOs, and how to raise twice in one year
🏠 CO Updates: We’re prepping a new product at Cautious Optimism: An economic calendar that blends important upcoming data and earnings-related information. It will exist as a living document and should come out this week. It should prove useful if you care about the intersection of tech and money.
📈 Trending Up: France … VC capital calls … power laws … online tracking … electoral chaos … flooding … US-Japan relations … political toxicity of China-US investment flows …
📉 Trending Down: TikTok’s ability to stay in the United States … Apple TV+ … Amazon’s patience with Twitch … peace in the Middle East … rents in Austin …
🤔 What Else?
Twitter is still shrinking: The NYTimes reported over the weekend that X (Twitter) revenue sourced from the United States came to $114 million in Q2 2024. Per the Times, that was “a 25 percent decline from the first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the previous year.”
Both figures are post-acquisition. So, what can we compare to?
Q2 2022, the final quarter before X sold, saw $1.18 billion worth of revenue at the company and no geographic breakdown. (Q1 2022 was similar.) Q4 2021, however, saw $1.57 billion of revenue at X (+22%) and “US revenue totaled $885 million.” But that was a seasonally-boosted quarter, so it’s not a good comparison.
So, how about Q2 2021? “US revenue totaled $653 million, an increase of 79% year over year,” X reported at the time. Sure, that was a different time in macroeconomic terms, especially amongst tech-sourced spending, but I still worry about my little bird app that I have loved for so long.
The Indian IPO market is cooking: Ola Electric Mobility is about to start taking orders for its IPO, the WSJ reports. All told the two-wheeled electric vehicle company is looking to raise $657 million.
That’s a lot! Even more, the Journal reports that India “has had 80 IPOs in year to date [and more] than 85% of these newly listed companies have risen in value since going public.”
Perhaps I should start tracking Indian IPOs more carefully.
Open source AI
Commercial incentives, national pride, and geopolitical concerns fuel the debate about open-source AI. Some folks think that we should have closed-source AI models to maintain national competitiveness both in business and security terms. Some of those folks hold shares in OpenAI, which has a largely closed-source approach to the market.
At the same time, others favor open-source AI development because it’s a proven way to spread and speed technological progress. I reckon Meta is the largest proponent of open-source AI in terms of impact today.
Concerns that China will hoover up American AI technology that is open source and thus beat sanctions and challenge U.S. technology supremacy won’t be helped by a recent article noting that freely available code is helping Beijing advance quickly. In the piece, the Times points out that some tech from American companies and engineers is making its way into Chinese products. Then near the end:
Around the same time, a team from Stanford University in California unveiled Llama 3-V, claiming it outperformed other leading models. But a Chinese researcher soon noticed that the model was based on an open-source system originally built in China.
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?
The state of fintech
Earlier in July fintech startup Coast raised $40 million, mere months after it raised $25 million. TechCrunch covered the successive funding rounds, which caught my attention because how often do we see double-click funding rounds in 2024? I thought we had left them behind in 2021.
To learn more, I got Sheel Mohnot on the horn. Mohnot is part of Better Tomorrow Ventures and is one of fintech’s better-known investors, I reckon. Critically, Better Tomorrow led Coast’s Seed round back in 2021. So, he’s been around the company for some time.