Weeks are months. Months are years. Years are decades.
Happy Tuesday. Before we get into it — I hope everyone is taking care of themselves. I saw a post from a founder stuck in Dubai who can’t get home safely. Thousands of American citizens are caught in the crossfire of what’s happening right now. We hope this war has a timely end.
Three stories today about where the money is actually going.
Databricks Just Overtook Snowflake. It’s Time to Go Public.
Tomasz Tunguz, GP at Theory Ventures and one of the most prevalent writers in the venture community, put out a post yesterday that got a lot of people talking. Databricks has officially overtaken Snowflake in quarterly revenue.
Here’s the setup. Snowflake bet on structured data — clean tables, SQL queries that ran fast and returned answers executives could read. The market agreed. Snowflake went public at a $70 billion valuation. Databricks bet on unstructured data — images, documents, logs, audio. Too hard to process. Too messy to query. Too expensive to store. Databricks raised private rounds at half of Snowflake’s valuation.
Then AI arrived. And everything changed. The data that was historically messy and hard to access was exactly what models needed to train. Unstructured data went from a liability to the key asset. If you think about AI today, the only moat in many businesses is having access to data that doesn’t already live inside these models.
Two years ago, Snowflake led Databricks by over $220 million per quarter. Today, Databricks leads by over $120 million. Growth is accelerating at scale — from 50% to 55% to 65% year over year. They’re already at $5 billion. By FY27, Databricks projects $8.9 billion while Snowflake guides to $5.7 billion.
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone watching the public-private dynamic. Databricks is valued at $135 billion privately. Snowflake trades publicly at $75 billion. It’s kind of weird to see companies be private this long and become so big that they’re actually trolling public companies.
My opinion: Databricks should go public. Now.
If you’re doing $5 billion in revenue growing 65%, I don’t know if you can ever top that in this market. You have this enterprise AI data infrastructure story. You’ve raised $6 billion in capital. Your CEO is supposedly a genius and a killer. At some point, your people want liquidity. From talking with folks who’ve worked at Databricks, there’s a read in the culture — when is this thing going to go public?
I think Databricks should be trying to be the first company to go public this year. Get ahead of SpaceX. Get ahead of OpenAI. Get ahead of Anthropic. Because if any of those companies, which are growing at a different scale, feel any frothiness or any kind of limiting success in the market, it would hurt Databricks. The bull case is massive — they’d be a pure-play AI data infrastructure company in the public markets. There’s literally nothing like them.
And there’s another angle people aren’t talking about. Databricks is playing a smart game right now by selectively sharing numbers. Snowflake is public and has to report everything. Databricks gets to share just enough to shape the narrative and win enterprise deals. That works when you’re private. But at some point, winning the narrative isn’t enough. You have to let the market actually price you. That’s when we’ll really understand which company is better.
We see this same dynamic at the payments level — Stripe and Adyen, where Adyen is pretty much neck and neck with Stripe in some capacity, but Stripe is substantially higher valued as a private company versus Adyen as a public company. These things will play out over the next 12 to 18 months.
Anduril Raises $4 Billion at $60 Billion — While War Rages
Anduril just raised another $4 billion at a $60 billion valuation. Thrive Capital — they’re involved in every big deal it seems like — and Andreessen Horowitz are co-leading. This nearly doubles the valuation from June. Shout out to the homie Trae Stephens, co-founder at Anduril, who became a billionaire last year. I guess he’s on pace for two times billionaire this year.
The timing could not be more relevant. This is day four of Operation Epic Fury. The US has launched strikes across 24 of Iran’s provinces. Six Americans have been killed. Iran has retaliated by striking US bases across the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz is essentially blocked. And real American citizens are stuck in the crossfire — founders, tech workers, families in Dubai who can’t get home.
Anduril already has counter-drone systems at US military bases in the Middle East as part of their DOD contracts. They’re already out there. And this is the question of war-based companies. Trae talks a lot about building businesses that really touch the life of people — not just apps and software. When you’re in a battle of war, companies like Anduril make sense.
The irony connecting all of this: last week, Anthropic got designated a “supply chain risk” for refusing to let the Pentagon use Claude for autonomous weapons. But now the latest news is they’re using Anthropic tools out at war anyway. It’s a lot going on right now. Same Pentagon, same week — Anthropic gets punished, Anduril gets $4 billion more to build. The defense AI market is splitting in real time.
I’ll say this — I don’t know anything about the specifics of the war technology. I’m not an investor in Anduril. I just try to support peace. Hopefully by the end of all this, we have peaceful relationships. But war is a part of life and something we have to endure right now. And it’s really rubbing up against tech.
Claude Crashed Because the People Are Speaking
If you’re in tech, if you’re in this bubble of Silicon Valley and you’re not using Claude, you’re probably contrarian at this point. If you tried to use it yesterday, you probably couldn’t.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2028903322732900764?s=20
Anthropic confirmed “unprecedented demand” crashed their consumer services. Claude.ai, mobile apps, Claude Code — all offline for hours. Over 2,000 users reported issues.
We’ve been tracking this Anthropic story since last week. The Pentagon standoff. Trump saying negative things about Dario and Anthropic. And it actually helped them. #CancelChatGPT went viral on X. It was kind of an indirect marketing platform that Trump created for Anthropic.
The numbers are wild:
Free users increased over 60% since January
Paid subscribers more than doubled since October
Daily signups broke all-time records every day last week
ChatGPT uninstalls in the US jumped 295% day-over-day
ChatGPT’s one-star ratings surged 775%
700,000 users pledged to cancel ChatGPT subscriptions
Claude’s US downloads rose 37-88% day-over-day
The people are speaking.
I don’t think the Pentagon deal was necessarily bad for OpenAI to announce. I think these things are being mismanaged in terms of what the consumer wants versus what the government wants. If you’re agreeing to move forward with what the government wants and the leader isn’t well liked by the wider demographic of your US user base, you’re going to have an issue.
Both companies are building great products. These products are changing people’s lives. But there’s always going to be a real winner. And I think this is a big week for Anthropic.
I’ve been an Anthropic user for three years. I’ve never been a very active ChatGPT paying customer like I have with Anthropic. I’ve voted with my pocketbook on which model layer company I believe is the best. And I think a lot of people are finding out it’s not just about the political piece — the product is great, it works, it’s built for business use.
The Through Line
Three stories about where capital flows when markets shift. Databricks is winning because AI changed what data is valuable. Anduril is winning because war changed what defense technology is valuable. And Anthropic is winning because trust changed what an AI brand is worth.
In all three cases, the company that bet on something the market initially undervalued — unstructured data, software-native weapons, ethical AI — is being rewarded.
The lesson: bet on what the market undervalues today. The correction is where the returns live.
This show is presented by ModernTax — AI and voice intelligence for government services. While the world debates how AI should be used in the military, we’re focused on a mission-critical use case: tax information. We serve SBA lenders, CDCs, banks, and fintechs where tax information is critical to compliant distribution of capital. 98% accuracy. 75% cost reduction. moderntax.io
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