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Nov 05, 2025
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Happy Wednesday! Anthropic expects to generate as much as $70 billion in revenue in 2028. Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha passes leadership of the firm to two partners, Alfred Lin and Pat Grady. President Trump re-nominates Jared Isaacman, an ally of Elon Musk, to lead NASA.
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Anthropic expects to generate as much as $70 billion in revenue in 2028, up from roughly $4.7 billion this year, The Information reported on Tuesday. The company’s fast revenue growth may encourage investors to back the company again in the coming months. The company would likely target a valuation between $300 billion and $400 billion. Roughly 80% of Anthropic’s revenue through 2028 comes from sales of its AI models through an application programming interface to business customers. The rest comes from subscriptions to its premium features, including
its coding agent Claude Code. Claude Code is nearing $1 billion in annualized revenue. In total, the company generated close to $7 billion in annualized revenue last month, The Information previously reported. In its most optimistic forecasts, Anthropic expects to be cash flow positive as soon as 2027, when it expects to generate $3 billion in cash. The company expects $17 billion in cash the following year. Its gross margins were negative 94% last year but should improve to roughly 50% this year and about 77% in 2028, the company forecasts.
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Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha on Tuesday told the venture firm’s limited partners that he had passed leadership of the firm to two partners, Alfred Lin and Pat Grady. Botha said he will transition to a new role advising the partnership while continuing to serve on the firm’s boards. The announcement is unusual because Botha, age 52, only took the firm’s top, global role in mid 2022. Previous leaders of the firm, including founder Doug Leone and Mike Moritz, held the most senior roles for more than a decade each. Botha had led the firm’s U.S. operations since 2017. Botha didn’t give a reason for the change except to note that it was time for him to transition to the next generation. Prior to Botha’s departure, some Sequoia partners had concerns about his management style, according to two people with
knowledge of the discussions, though it’s not clear that those concerns directly led to the decision. The announcement shook up the staff, some of whom became visibly upset during a company meeting to discuss the decision, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. In the last two years, Botha managed through a period of intense competition among VC firms to win AI deals as well as increasing political polarization in tech. Last month, Sequoia Capital’s former chief operating officer, Sumaiya Balbale, resigned from her job after Maguire made posts on X she considered Islamophobic, according to the Financial Times. Botha has defended Maguire and has described Sequoia’s stance on politics as “institutional neutrality.” Botha joined the firm
in 2003 after taking PayPal through its initial public offering as its chief financial officer. At Sequoia, he invested in YouTube shortly after its founding, gaming company Unity, Block (then called Square), MongoDB and Instagram. (This article has been updated with details on Botha’s departure.)
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U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s re-nominated Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and ally of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, to lead NASA. Trump had previously nominated Isaacman to lead NASA in December 2024 before withdrawing the nomination this May, citing unspecified “prior associations” of Isaacman. Trump then appointed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator. In October, after Duffy said that NASA would seek rival bids for a Moon mission it had previously awarded to SpaceX, Musk publicly lambasted Duffy. Musk has repeatedly expressed support for Isaacman. Duffy will continue to lead NASA until Isaacman is confirmed by the Senate. Isaacman outlined a vision for streamlining NASA and privatizing parts of the space agency’s work in a memo he sent to Duffy over the summer, Politico reported. In a Truth Social post on
Tuesday, Trump praised Isaacman’s “dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy.”
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Shopify said Tuesday revenue in the third quarter grew 32% from a year earlier to $2.84 billion as the e-commerce software maker continues to add new merchants and expand its reach in newer markets like Europe and with brick-and-mortar retailers. Free cash flow grew 20% to $507 million, though net income fell 68% to $264 million due to increases in both R&D and sales and marketing. Shopify shares fell nearly 5% in premarket trading. CFO Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts that gross margin dipped slightly in part because of higher hosting costs to support larger transaction volumes, as well as increased costs due to higher AI usage. For the current quarter, which includes the all-important holiday shopping season for retailers, Shopify projected revenue growth in the mid-to-high twenties and for its free cash flow margin to be slightly higher than the third quarter. Shopify has been trying to win over more large retailers as customers for the past few years, though Hoffmeister said that in the third quarter, merchants with annual sales below $25 million still generated the “significant majority” of Shopify’s gross merchandise volume. But Shopify has been growing in other sectors, including winning more international customers and more retailers with large numbers of brick-and-mortar stores.
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China has ordered new data centers that receive state funds to use only domestically produced artificial intelligence chips, Reuters reported. Chinese authorities recently instructed operators with data center projects less than 30% complete to remove foreign chips from their systems or cancel plans to buy them, according to Reuters. The latest guidance could shut out companies including Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel from gaining market share in China, boosting domestic suppliers such as Huawei. The move comes as Beijing pushes for AI chip self-sufficiency and steps up efforts to purge foreign technology from critical infrastructure, even as bilateral trade tensions with Washington ease. China’s access to high-end AI chips from firms such as Nvidia
remains a sticking point in China-U.S. relations.
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K-Scale Labs, a one-year old startup developing humanoid robots, is shutting down, according to an email from CEO Ben Bolte to investors viewed by The Information. “The company currently has limited remaining runway and cash reserves of approximately $400,000,” he wrote. Bolte said he had expected it to be easy to raise $10 million to $15 million to continue the company, but those efforts failed. The company had raised about $4 million at a $50 million valuation in a seed funding round in February led by venture firm Fellows Fund. Investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross also invested $250,000 in the startup in April 2024. K-Scale | | | |
