I’ve never had a serious growth spurt (I’ve been extremely 5’4” since middle school).
But I’ve been thinking about growth spurts lately, because in AI there are a lot of them right now—capital throughout this year has quickly been cascading into a real but simultaneously select number of companies, with eyebrow-raising valuation jumps to boot.
There are the examples you’ve perhaps heard of, companies on which much digital ink has been spilled. Like Anthropic—which in March raised at a $61.5 billion valuation and is now at $183 billion—or Cursor, which finished 2024 with a $2.6 billion valuation and now, after two funding rounds, is valued by investors at $29.3 billion.
Over the holiday weekend, we published a story diving into who’s raising rapidly this year, and it’s far from just the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world. Companies that have raised two or more rounds through 2025 include Reflection AI, OpenEvidence, Lila Sciences, Harmonic, Fal, Abridge, and Doppel.
And this isn’t inherently bad, to be clear—often, multiple rounds in a year is an indication of serious growth and traction. But there are factors in this equation I find myself worried about: The startups, for example, valued in the tens of billions that aren’t too big to fail as the bubble deflates and AI spending retracts. And the sheer fact of capital, that there’s more money sinking into these companies than was imaginable during the dotcom boom.
