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OpenAI Alums Have High Odds of Founding a Unicorn; SpaceX Alums Have Average Odds
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By Yuliya Chernova, WSJ Pro
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Good day. OpenAI alumni have a much higher probability than ex-employees of other companies to launch a startup that becomes a unicorn, according to research by Ilya Strebulaev, professor of private equity and finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The odds for SpaceX’s ex-employees, meanwhile, are just average. “Working at SpaceX does not increase your odds of founding a unicorn,” Strebulaev said.
Strebulaev’s team identified prior employers of 3,778 U.S. unicorn founders, as well as the backgrounds of 2,641 founders of a randomly selected set of venture-backed startups. It calculated the unicorn-founding odds ratio of an ex-employee as the share of unicorn founders who worked at a given company divided by the share in the random sample.
An ex-employee of OpenAI has an almost 15 times higher chance of launching a company that becomes a unicorn than a typical venture-backed startup founder, per Strebulaev’s research.
Ex-OpenAI employees founded 21 unicorns, according to Strebulaev’s count, including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab.
OpenAI ex-employees’ odds are highest among all companies Strebulaev found.
Next in line is Check Point Software Technologies, an Israeli cybersecurity company whose ex-employees’ odds of founding a unicorn were 11 times higher than average, according to Strebulaev’s research. Others in Strebulaev’s data include Flagship Pioneering, whose alumni are 7.3 times more likely than an average founder to create a unicorn, Uber at 7 times the average, PayPal at 4.2, Tesla at almost 4, and Google at 2.8.
SpaceX ex-employees, meanwhile, spawned nine unicorns. The lower absolute number might have to do with churn, which refers to how long employees stick with their employers. Their unicorn-founding odds-ratio is 1.05, according to Strebulaev, pretty much average.
Why would that be? Strebulaev said that his team hasn’t measured why some companies are more likely than others to spawn unicorns, but he has some conjectures.
“Culture is important and network is important,” Strebulaev said. The experience acquired at an employer also likely influences those odds.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
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And now on to the news...
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U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. CARLOS JASSO/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Social-media restrictions. The U.K. said Monday it will force leading social-media companies to restrict access to their sites for teens under 16 years old, joining a growing list of countries to ban access to the platforms after an outcry by parents and campaigners. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the ban, which should come into force early next year, will include Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Starmer said the U.K. government will also ban under 16s from livestreaming themselves on other platforms and curb the ability of strangers to send direct messages to under-16s. Messaging services WhatsApp and Signal won’t be included in the overall ban.
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Cyber Startup Ent Raises $100 Million in Seed Funding
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Cybersecurity startup Ent has raised $100 million in seed funding to help companies gauge unusual behavior on desktops, laptops and other devices, shutting down potential data risks at lightning speed.
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The early-stage round was led by Decibel Venture Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis and In-Q-Tel.
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Lou Manousos, Ent’s chief executive, said the outsize funding reflects both the potential size of the startup’s market and the scope of the problem it is trying to solve: a fire hose of detected vulnerabilities with little time to patch them.
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Anthropic Sued Over Limits on Its $200-a-Month AI Plans
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A consumer is demanding that Anthropic reimburse customers of its priciest artificial intelligence subscription plans, alleging in a new lawsuit that the company oversold the usage allowances it offered. A federal lawsuit, filed Monday on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based customer Karl Kahn, claims that the maker of Claude AI misled consumers about the usage limits of its premium “Max 5x” and “Max 20x” subscription plans. The suit is seeking class-action status on behalf of individuals like Kahn who have purchased the plans since April of last year.
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ALEXANDRA CITRIN-SAFADI/WSJ; ISTOCK
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Work from home. The past couple of years have seen a drumbeat of big companies announcing, to great fanfare, that they were requiring employees to spend more time in the office. Home Depot, Target, Microsoft, 3M, Intel—the list goes on and on. But across the broader economy, the evidence suggests that the return to the office has stalled out. An average of 26% of paid, full days were worked from home in May, according to a monthly work-from-home survey run by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis. That is down, but not by much, from the 27% registered two years earlier.
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Funds
New York-based early-stage investor Gutter Capital closed its third fund at $75 million.
Exits
Advanced Micro Devices acquired Mext, a developer of technology addressing memory-related bottlenecks across cloud and enterprise environments, for an undisclosed amount.
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Cyera, a New York-headquartered data security platform, scored $600 million in Series G funding at a $12 billion valuation. Evolution Equity Partners led the round, which included participation from Accel, Spark Capital and others.
NewCore, a workforce identity security platform based in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding from investors including Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners.
Arcade.dev, a San Francisco-based action layer for production AI agents, nabbed $60 million in Series A funding. SYN Ventures led the round, which saw participation from Morgan Stanley and Wipro. Jay Leek, managing partner at SYN Ventures, will join the company’s board.
Interchecks, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based instant payments platform, landed $50 million in Series C funding from investors including Commerce Ventures and Thayer Street Partners.
Undo, a U.K.-based startup helping companies implement AI-powered root cause analysis for complex software issues, closed a $37 million funding round led by Elsewhere Partners.
Podium Automation, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup that manufactures industrial control panels, raised $18 million in Series A funding. Construct Capital led the investment, with Managing Partner Dayna Grayson joining the company’s board. Andreessen Horowitz and others also invested.
Cortea, a Berlin-based startup building an AI quality layer for audit firms, was seeded with a €12 million (about $14 million) investment led by Dawn Capital.
Magnitude, a San Francisco-based autonomous AI workforce provider for continuous third-party risk-management teams, emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding led by Ballistic Ventures.
El Dorado, a Buenos Aires-based cross-border payments startup, picked up $9 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm.
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Pop star Benson Boone introduces Taco Bell’s Crème Brûlée Crunchwrap Slider at the chain’s ‘Live Más Live’ marketing event. The chain worked with a clipping agency to turn the event into short video ads. TACO BELL
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