@nmasc_ @ericvishria @EverettRandle They seem not to be sticking to investing only in Series As, as they have historically. @EverettRandle first investment at the firm was a Series B into Gumloop. techcrunch.com/2026/03/12/gum…
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Marina Temkin
189 posts
Marina Temkin
@MTemkin
Financial analyst turned journalist. Covering VC/startups at @TechCrunch. Previously @PitchBook, @VCjournal. email for Signal: [email protected].
San Francisco, CA Katılım Eylül 2013
660 Takip Edilen2.6K Takipçiler
Remember when I said Benchmark was going to do more growth stage investing? 😉
While everyone knows about Benchmark's first check into Cerebras, a funny scoopy bit that came up during my interview with @EricVishria.
Last year, Benchmark newcomer @EverettRandle told Eric that Cerebras such a uniquely special product and that he'd put his own money into it. The convo spiraled and led to Benchmark's current and former partnership putting btwn $65m-$80m million of their personal capital into the co at a $23 billion valuation, and Benchmark LPs pouring in the rest.
A first for the firm, and something that Eric says was very specific to Cerebras and its imminent plans to go public.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Scoop confirmed: exactly two weeks later, Anthropic's $900B looks done.
Techmeme@Techmeme
Sources: Anthropic has agreed to the terms of a $30B fundraising at a $900B valuation, with Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter co-leading the round (@georgenhammond / Financial Times) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
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Marina Temkin retweetledi
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I've said it before, but CVF is one of the most interesting financials products that we offer founders at GC.
TechCrunch@TechCrunch
Musely secures $360M from General Catalyst without giving up equity techcrunch.com/2026/05/01/mus…
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@amir Had many of the same details LAST week
- negative margins until recently, that just turned slightly positive
- annualized rev of over $6 bn base case, $7 bn+ is target case (didn't include)
- obviously pressure from Claude Code
techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/sou…
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👀Cursor had -23% gross margins earlier this year.
That is low for a company generating as much revenue as it is.
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@pitdesi Many of the details in my story LAST week, another one after SpaceX announced.
- negative annualized rev until recently
- base case annualized rev of over $6 bn. $7 bn according to sources = target case.
- Need to continue to raise.
techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/sou…
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Cursor at -23% gross margin in January
$2.7B annualized revenue, up 14x YoY, expects $7B eoy
but Claude code caught up fast, hard for cursor to raise
xAI only at $3.2B 2025 rev, mostly twitter, really wants Cursors revenue
🍿 to see how it shakes out
theinformation.com/articles/behin…
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I seem to have a talent for scooping AI coding startup fundraises right before M&A.
Last year, I broke @windsurf's last round, but the deal fell through, resulting in an eventual acqui-hire by Google.
Last week, I scooped @cursor_ai round, which was just killed by SpaceX.
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@hey_james_00 @martin_casado Yes. That's exactly what I am pushing for. Define your "revenue."
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it would be great if all the growth firms provide a breakdown of their valuation frameworks in these new AI-native / outcome-based economies.
terms / definitions / use-cases & edge-cases.
we all receive the dilligence items, i don’t think it’s unreasonable to provide more up to date & nuanced guidance that mitigates ambiguous reporting.
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This is such a dumb and ill informed take.
There are a lot of funny games in startup reporting, creative annualized run rates, passing off GMV as ARR, gross margin shenanigans, etc.
But using exit ARR as current is both not that common, and generally less problematic.
Scott Stevenson@scottastevenson
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M). They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now. The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract. In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation. On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins. At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing. And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
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@martin_casado I'd be happy with GAAP and ARR or run rate, as long as it's clearly defined (aka, exactly how it's calculated and what's included and excluded.)
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@martin_casado We'd love to compare all these companies, especially the ones that are claiming to have hundreds of millions in so-called ARR on apple-to-apples basis. Problem, of course, is that GAAP doesn't capture the growth trajectory -- the thing that matters in startups.
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@martin_casado This is getting a little ridiculous. We are clearly not talking about revenue, which is the top line of a GAAP income statement.
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@martin_casado I have a finance background, which I think you don't. I set and passed all three levels of the CFA and built many, many financial models. Revenue is a generic term. You sell one widget for $1, that's revenue.
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@martin_casado I understand GAAP and non-GAAP alright. What I want to understand is how to compare all the so-called run rate revenue apples-to-apples? One companies run rate "Apple" is another company's "Orange."
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@MTemkin I honestly think this is the bigger problem. The people discussing / reporting on this don't even have basic literacy on the topic.
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@martin_casado Revenue, all types of revenue, needs to be defined. When the press learns a certain company hit $2B in revenue run rate, what kind of revenue is that? How was it calculated?
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@martin_casado So you are saying that most stories we write likely have wildly overstated revenue figures (one way or another)?
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