Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing, Sacra

Sacra

Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing

Bringing transparency to private markets so investors, founders, and employees can build on conviction. Sacra delivers deeply researched insights on the private companies shaping tomorrow's markets. By surfacing the data, context, and operator perspective that are missing from private markets today, we help secondary buyers and sellers price equity accurately and unlock liquidity for the people building these businesses.

Private Capital Markets

<ul><li>Hugging Face was founded in 2016 as a chatbot for teens, but they found product-market fit in 2018 after they open-sourced the Transformers library they built to run it, hitting 15,000 stars on Github in just one year.</li><li>Sacra estimates that Hugging Face hit $70M annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of 2023, up 367% from 2022, primarily off the growth of lucrative consulting contracts with many of the biggest companies in AI—Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft.</li><li>Just as GitHub (NASDAQ: MSFT, ~$1.5B in revenue in 2023) in the early days prioritized user and network growth over monetization—giving away unlimited public repos and charging just $25/mo for private repos—Hugging Face lets users host unlimited models for free, charging only for their hosted inference offering and for enterprise features like SSO.</li></ul>

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 as a chatbot for teens, but they found product-market fit in 2018 after they open-sourced the Transformers library they built to run it, hitting 15,000 stars on Github in just one year.Sacra estimates that Hugging Face hit $70M annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of 2023, up 367% from 2022, primarily off the growth of lucrative consulting contracts with many of the biggest companies in AI—Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft.Just as GitHub (NASDAQ: MSFT, ~$1.5B in revenue in 2023) in the early days prioritized user and network growth over monetization—giving away unlimited public repos and charging just $25/mo for private repos—Hugging Face lets users host unlimited models for free, charging only for their hosted inference offering and for enterprise features like SSO.

Hugging Face: The $70M/year anti-OpenAI Growing 367% year-over-year

<ul><li>CoreWeave started in 2017 as a crypto mining company using graphics processing units (GPUs) to mine Ethereum—and then pivoted in 2019 to AI, repurposing its GPU clusters for the heavy computational demands of AI workflows.</li><li>Sacra estimates that CoreWeave generated $465M of revenue in 2023, up 1,760% from $25M in 2022, with CoreWeave projecting $2.3B in 2024 based on enterprise deals in the pipeline.</li><li>Nvidia has partnered closely with CoreWeave—investing in the company and using its 98% market share over scarce chips—to build it up as a counterbalance to cloud compute giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which are each building competitive AI hardware.</li></ul>

CoreWeave started in 2017 as a crypto mining company using graphics processing units (GPUs) to mine Ethereum—and then pivoted in 2019 to AI, repurposing its GPU clusters for the heavy computational demands of AI workflows.Sacra estimates that CoreWeave generated $465M of revenue in 2023, up 1,760% from $25M in 2022, with CoreWeave projecting $2.3B in 2024 based on enterprise deals in the pipeline.Nvidia has partnered closely with CoreWeave—investing in the company and using its 98% market share over scarce chips—to build it up as a counterbalance to cloud compute giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which are each building competitive AI hardware.

CoreWeave: The $465M/year Cloud GPU Startup Growing 1,760% YoY

<ul><li>Mid 2022, Scale’s bread-and-butter of autonomous vehicle (AV) data labeling workloads went into a decline alongside falling R&amp;D investment and VC funding, with GM’s Cruise (2021 valuation: $30B) suspending operations and Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.B), Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), and Uber (NYSE: UBER) shutting down their AV programs.</li><li>In 2023, Scale’s revenue exploded to $760M ARR, up 162% YoY, with $18B in capital inflows to foundational model companies like OpenAI ($1.3B ARR in 2023), Anthropic ($200M ARR in 2023) and Cohere and generative AI apps like Runway ($237M raised) and Harvey ($106M raised) alongside the integration of gen AI-features into every app.</li><li>The very source of Scale’s near-term revenue re-acceleration poses the gravest long-term existential threat to its business, with LLMs getting closer to parity with humans on data-labeling tasks while being cheap and 20x as fast.</li></ul>

Mid 2022, Scale’s bread-and-butter of autonomous vehicle (AV) data labeling workloads went into a decline alongside falling R&amp;D investment and VC funding, with GM’s Cruise (2021 valuation: $30B) suspending operations and Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.B), Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), and Uber (NYSE: UBER) shutting down their AV programs.In 2023, Scale’s revenue exploded to $760M ARR, up 162% YoY, with $18B in capital inflows to foundational model companies like OpenAI ($1.3B ARR in 2023), Anthropic ($200M ARR in 2023) and Cohere and generative AI apps like Runway ($237M raised) and Harvey ($106M raised) alongside the integration of gen AI-features into every app.The very source of Scale’s near-term revenue re-acceleration poses the gravest long-term existential threat to its business, with LLMs getting closer to parity with humans on data-labeling tasks while being cheap and 20x as fast.

<ul><li>Gamma started as a kind of Notion for slides which made it easy to create slides—to be presented and read.</li><li>Last summer, we were at a point where we’d come a long way as a product.</li><li>The difference between our original launch in August and our launch in March was like night and day.</li></ul>

Gamma started as a kind of Notion for slides which made it easy to create slides—to be presented and read.Last summer, we were at a point where we’d come a long way as a product.The difference between our original launch in August and our launch in March was like night and day.

Jon Noronha, co-founder Of Gamma, On Building AI-powered Slides

<ul><li>Copy.ai hit $10M ARR in October 2022—up 346% from last year—growing at a rate of about 20% MoM since July.</li><li>Copy.ai has raised a total of $19.82M across 4 funding rounds.</li><li>Copy.ai's biggest cost center (after salaries) is paying for access to OpenAI's models, load balancing, and compute facilities they rely on.</li></ul>

Copy.ai hit $10M ARR in October 2022—up 346% from last year—growing at a rate of about 20% MoM since July.Copy.ai has raised a total of $19.82M across 4 funding rounds.Copy.ai's biggest cost center (after salaries) is paying for access to OpenAI's models, load balancing, and compute facilities they rely on.

United States

Workflow automation platform for go-to-market teams using AI to generate personalized outreach

Price Gauge
52-week Range	0.00 - 0.00
Market Cap (USDm)	0.00
P/E	0.00
Dividend (Yield)	0.00

Copy.ai (AI US)

Hugging Face: The $70M/year anti-OpenAI Growing 367% year-over-year

TL;DR: Since launching in 2016, Hugging Face has become one of the most influential companies in AI and the face of an insurgent open-source...

Sacra

CoreWeave: The $465M/year Cloud GPU Startup Growing 1,760% YoY

TL;DR: CoreWeave hit $465M of revenue in 2023, up 1,760% from 2022, reselling GPU compute to fuel the generative AI boom. For more, check out...

Sacra

Scale At $760M ARR

TL;DR: Sacra estimates that Scale grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) 158% to $760M in 2023 riding the LLM wave just as their previous bread-and...

Sacra

Jon Noronha, co-founder Of Gamma, On Building AI-powered Slides

Sacra interview with Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma.

Sacra

Primer: Copy.ai - 17 Nov 2022

Workflow automation platform for go-to-market teams using AI to generate personalized outreach

Sacra

Price Gauge

52-week Range

Market Cap (USDm)

P/E

Dividend (Yield)