Adless monetization is a very difficult challenge - something I've worked on many times over the years (compute-monetization, shopping-commission monetization, payment interchange monetization) and it's always been very difficult to compete with ads. I think the waterfox approach of "ads if you're OK with it" opt-in and sane defaults is the better one, but it's very difficult to make ends meat compared to competitors offering full monetization on by default when you're only getting it (and getting less per search) if users opt-in.
Compute/resource monetization is the one after all these years that has done the best at replacing ads as a means of monetization for users, and it requires a very intelligent scheduling system + ethical ecosystem to work (most have just tried running crypto miners that cost users more electricity than they earn).
Also, the fact waterfox has almost zero telemetry out of the box and doesn't even have a bonafide number for active users as a result is a good hint at how sincere the "anti-tracking" ethos is applied. Most open source applications have some form of telemetry, even "anonymous" telemetry - but this does really stand out.
I know about 4 friends that have left their parent company, built a killer product that same company didn't think to build or didn't believe in, only to get acquired by that same company after a few years... some have done it multiple times.
I think this falls in exactly that situation. You see how janky these national companies are doing things, plot out a disruptive course, then disrupt them in a particular region so that you can extrapolate how much that will hurt at national scale and force a buyout that's way beyond the multiple you bought those small operators for.
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.
It seems you are one of the most active contributors there.
I would sincerely have understood better (and even wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you personally as an individual contributor than choose a strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the purchased company.
Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and millions burned.
Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea.
Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from 2021).
The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice is not enough, so they must have deeper motives.
To raise $4m seed from AAA partners usually requires connections + track record/credability of the founders - looks like they have that here since they raised 3 rounds with zero revenue.
…amusing how? CPython is written in C, JVM is written in mix of cpp and Java, Rust was written using OCaml initially. Don’t know why you’re snickering. Do you also find it amusing that by the time cpp/rust team scaffolds and compiles initial boilerplate, python team is already making money?
I think the more useful tool would be an LLM prompt proxy/firewall that puts meaningful boundaries in place to prevent both exfiltration of sensitive data and instructions that can be destructive. Using the same context loop for your conversational/coding workflow makes the task at hand and the security of that task very hard to differentiate.
Sending POST?DEL requests? risky. Sending context back to a cloud LLM with credentials and private information? risky. Running RM commands or commands that can remove things? risky, running scripts that have commands in them that can remove things? risky.
I don't know how we've landed on 4 options for controls and are happy with this: "ask me for everything", "allow read only", "allow writes" and "allow everything".
Seems like what we need is more granular and context-aware controls rather than yet another box to put openclaw in with zero additional changes.
Compute/resource monetization is the one after all these years that has done the best at replacing ads as a means of monetization for users, and it requires a very intelligent scheduling system + ethical ecosystem to work (most have just tried running crypto miners that cost users more electricity than they earn).
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