#76: IPO Radar Rapid Fire! Oura, Anthropic, Kraken, Carbon Robotics, Cognition, Ramp, Mistral, ElevenLabs

Craig (0:00)

This week is a Radar Rapid Fire episode. The show covers what you need to know right now about Anthropic, Aura, Kraken, Carbon Robotics, Cognition, Mistral, ElevenLabs and Ramp. Let's get started. I'm Craig from Access IPOs. New show format this week, eight companies, 60 seconds each. Start the timer. Radar Rapid Fire. The Wall Street Journal picked up on what I talked about in last week's show, yes, they're fans, that Robinhood is an underwriter for the Aura IPO. The IPO Roadshow could arrive as early as next week. Back in June, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev announced on X that Robinhood Securities is now approved to serve as an underwriter. Becoming an underwriter and not just a selling group member is the natural next step to better serve our customers and our issuers. We intend to be disruptive in this space. The Wall Street Journal notes that working as an underwriter should give Robinhood more influence over the number of shares ultimately set aside for its customers. Sounds familiar. When it comes to IPOs, Robinhood customers are often disappointed and that's in part due to their lousy allocation algorithm which this podcast helped to expose last year. The Wall Street Journal said about SpaceX, On listing day, X was littered with gripes about those who received far fewer than they requested. Anecdotal reporting at best. Our Patreon has the data to prove it. Robinhood you may want more shares but you could implement a fairer and less illogical allocation algorithm and more transparency about the whole process would be helpful too. Radar rapid fire. Kraken's parent company Payword Inc. has officially delayed its IPO even further. Now to Q2 2027 at the earliest. This wasn't widely reported but CoinDesk seems to get a lot of the Kraken scoops. Kraken filed confidentially on November 19th, 2025 and they were planning to IPO in Q2 2026 and it was number one on my January list of upcoming IPOs but then Kraken fired their CFO and went on to blame market conditions for freezing their IPO as crypto prices tanked. Speaking at Consensus in Miami on May 5th, Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the crypto exchange was about 80% ready to go public and that was six months after they filed confidentially. A few days later we learned they were trying to raise new funds and at $20 billion valuation, that's the price that Citadel and Jane Street paid last November but retail investors weren't having it. CapLight estimates the value at around $9 billion right now and there's plenty of liquidity on the secondaries. As for Kraken's business, if your share price is going to be tied to short term crypto prices, it's time to diversify and maybe don't file for an IPO until you're 100% ready. Radar rapid fire. The Anthropic IPO is delayed until late October. Until then we can thank people like Jacob Coxon who spent the last three years building superhuman systems that could kill us all before 2030 He's now taking the high road in resigning after all that ground breaking work that might end the world. Presumably, he'll be cashing in his open AI shares to build a survivalist bunker under a 10.8 million Palo Alto modern farmhouse. Coxon says, do not underestimate the power of this technology. Bro, nobody is underestimating AI. Literally every person on every social media platform tells us how powerful AI is going to be every second of every day. Meanwhile, colleague Evan Hubinger affirms the widespread internal fears of AI Armageddon at Anthropic, assigning a greater than 10% chance of human annihilation. So you're telling me there's a chance. Evan goes on to say he gives humanity a generous decade more to live and points us to 186 page white paper to calm our near term concerns. Radar rapid fire. Finally, some news from a less terrifying AI robot future. Carbon Robotics, the super cool laser weed zapper start up, surpassed 100 million in ARR last year. CEO Paul Miccel said in an interview with AgFunder News AFN, we intend to keep scaling. It's our intention to get to the point where we're an independently publicly traded company. So that would involve going through an IPO. That's the path we're on. He says the total addressable market is thousands of weed zappers and 30,000 to 40,000 autonomous tractors per year. Carbon Robotics hired a CFO with Public Company Experience back in March, but seems like this quiet agricultural startup may be a new addition to the upcoming IPOs list this week. And as a laser zapper and autonomous tractor company, it won't be able to blame the price of Bitcoin for delaying its IPO. Radar Rapidfire. More news on the terrifying autonomous AI frontier. Cognition is a startup that makes AI agent vibe coders that take the human software engineer out of the loop almost entirely. Just last week, we learned that Cognition was fielding $10 billion in interest from top tier VCs at a $40 billion valuation. This Tuesday, the company announced that it closed at Series E, raising $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. That's up from just $26 billion in May. And $10 billion back in September. Founder Scott Wu was inspired to start Cognition on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI. In just two and a half years, he's created nearly $50 billion in wealth from scratch. Ask yourself this, what have you accomplished in the last 30 months? Radar rapid fire. If you don't like human voices, then you're going to love ElevenLabs, the voice AI company that builds tools for generating and cloning human speech. What good is AI video slop without a realistic AI generated voice track? Who doesn't love that?