April by D’Ornano + Co.: Rubrik S-1 teardown, a look into Mistral.ai’s economics and what the future holds for Venture Capital and Private Equity, two challenged asset classes

This is our monthly newsletter dedicated to Tech x Investments.

Dear readers,

Generative AI (genAI) continued to advance rapidly last month. Foundational models such as the Meta Llama 3 8B and 70B models were released in April, while French company Mistral.ai was speculated to be raising funds at a valuation of over $5 billion. Both companies require large amounts of capital to finance expensive hardware, such as graphic processing units, which explains the high levels of funding required. Additionally, interesting to note that both companies are open-source.

While there is no doubt about the technological advancements in this field, the economics of these models still need to be found to ensure that LLM providers can generate robust cash flows in the long term. Several companies, including Cohere, Stability AI, and Inflection, are struggling, and public investors are increasingly expecting clear guidance on this point. Meta's share price dropped after revealing a significant uptick in capex needs, despite the technological success of the Llama 3 so…