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>Photoroom hit $65M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up 195% year-over-year, and built the biggest mobile-first generative AI app in the world by giving eBay merchants a one-tap way to upload better listing photos.</li><li>Photoroom found product-market fit as an AI-powered image editor for eBay, Depop, and Poshmark merchants to remove the backgrounds from their photos and create professional-looking listings—by August, they were at 300K monthly active users (MAUs) and $1M ARR, growing 50% month-over-month.</li><li>With the launch of their API, Photoroom is moving upmarket from their SMB-like prosumers, selling programmatic image editing into content brands like Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Netflix as well as marketplaces like Wolt, Faire, Zomato and Shopify that host large amounts of user-created content.</li></ul>

Photoroom hit $65M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up 195% year-over-year, and built the biggest mobile-first generative AI app in the world by giving eBay merchants a one-tap way to upload better listing photos.Photoroom found product-market fit as an AI-powered image editor for eBay, Depop, and Poshmark merchants to remove the backgrounds from their photos and create professional-looking listings—by August, they were at 300K monthly active users (MAUs) and $1M ARR, growing 50% month-over-month.With the launch of their API, Photoroom is moving upmarket from their SMB-like prosumers, selling programmatic image editing into content brands like Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Netflix as well as marketplaces like Wolt, Faire, Zomato and Shopify that host large amounts of user-created content.

Photoroom: The $65M/year Background Removal App

<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>Scale (2021 valuation: $7.3B) launched in 2016 as a Mechanical Turk for machine learning, providing an API and workflow into Filipino, Nigerian and Kenyan workers for machine learning data labeling tasks—in 2022, Scale AI grew 61% to ~$290M in revenue.</li><li>In the post-zero interest rate environment of 2022-23, AV data labeling workloads have declined alongside the decreasing investment in R&D—see the closure of AV startups like Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.5B) and Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) and Uber (NYSE: UBER) discontinuing their self-driving car units.</li><li>Scale’s vertically integrated platform helps them sell into enterprise and government—who have a greater need for consolidation and a harder time hiring to build and secure their own ML infrastructure—with Scale already winning $300M+ in contracts with the Department of Defense to work on image and text analysis for national security.</li></ul>

Scale (2021 valuation: $7.3B) launched in 2016 as a Mechanical Turk for machine learning, providing an API and workflow into Filipino, Nigerian and Kenyan workers for machine learning data labeling tasks—in 2022, Scale AI grew 61% to ~$290M in revenue.In the post-zero interest rate environment of 2022-23, AV data labeling workloads have declined alongside the decreasing investment in R&D—see the closure of AV startups like Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.5B) and Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) and Uber (NYSE: UBER) discontinuing their self-driving car units.Scale’s vertically integrated platform helps them sell into enterprise and government—who have a greater need for consolidation and a harder time hiring to build and secure their own ML infrastructure—with Scale already winning $300M+ in contracts with the Department of Defense to work on image and text analysis for national security.

Scale: The $290M/year Mechanical Turk Of Machine Learning

<ul><li>Adobe announced today that it has agreed to buy Figma in a deal valued at $20B.</li><li>Figma is at about $340M ARR now, growing 100% YoY and projected to cross $400M ARR by end of year.</li><li>Even with instant distribution to 26M+ Creative Cloud customers, Adobe XD failed in its attempt to use bundlenomics to dislodge Figma’s dominant position among designers.</li></ul>

Adobe announced today that it has agreed to buy Figma in a deal valued at $20B.Figma is at about $340M ARR now, growing 100% YoY and projected to cross $400M ARR by end of year.Even with instant distribution to 26M+ Creative Cloud customers, Adobe XD failed in its attempt to use bundlenomics to dislodge Figma’s dominant position among designers.

<ul><li>At the beginning of last year, we really started going-to-market and actually just focusing on the FP&amp;A use case.</li><li>The value of the rest of the product is very real, but harder to quantify.</li><li>We do scale up and down from that sweet spot, but it’s the 100-500 person, series-C-ish companies who we try and target, specifically.</li></ul>

At the beginning of last year, we really started going-to-market and actually just focusing on the FP&amp;A use case.The value of the rest of the product is very real, but harder to quantify.We do scale up and down from that sweet spot, but it’s the 100-500 person, series-C-ish companies who we try and target, specifically.

Taimur Abdaal, CEO Of Causal, On The Primitives Of Financial Modelling

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Photoroom: The $65M/year Background Removal App

TL;DR: Photoroom hit $65M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up 195% year-over-year, and built the biggest mobile-first generative AI app in the...

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

Scale: The $290M/year Mechanical Turk Of Machine Learning

Scale (dataset), formerly Scale AI, built a $290M/year revenue business indexed on labeling data for AI in the world of atoms, from autonomous...

Sacra

How Figma Defied Adobe's Bundlenomics

Figma's $20B sale to Adobe reflects both that it beat back Adobe's attempt to break it with bundle economics, and that it faced the daunting task...

Sacra

Taimur Abdaal, CEO Of Causal, On The Primitives Of Financial Modelling

Sacra interview with Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder of Causal.

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