Elad Gil

And then the next day, I was talking to some other VCs about something totally different, and I thought I was wasting their time, like, and I'm like, "Hey, I had this idea kicking around.

Do you guys wanna hear it?" And they said yes, and, um, it was, you know, Martin Casado from A16Z and Elad Gil, and, um, Martin said, "You just had the partner meeting, uh, how much do you want?"

Hmm.

And I'm like, "I don't know."

The new valuation would be nearly double Applied Compute's worth from just four months ago, with its valuation growing faster than YC's fastest unicorn, AfterQuery.

Angel investor Elad Gil is the lead investor, with participation from existing backers including Lux Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

Patil says the new influx of capital will go mostly to buying more chips to build out its cloud with a, quote, massive fleet of compute.

The company works with big enterprises to help them build special-purpose AI models and agents from open-source models like Alibaba's Quen or Moonshot's Kimi, a much more cost-effective proposal than relying on OpenAI or Anthropic.

I don't get it other than it seems intuitively to me if, r- right now, and this is Open Rider too, right now is the moment in time to benefit from the lift of open weights, right? The demand is so strong.

Just like Elad Gil said, "Sell if you have an AI asset right now," right? I think even better, if you have a AI product that's benefiting from the transition to open weights, there can't be a better time to sell than plus or minus 90 days from today.

It's just a phase transition.And your numbers are gonna look amazing for nine.

Like, they said OpenRouter was growing 15% at 150 million, right? The Information said when Stripe bought it.