AGENDA:<br>00:04 China&#x27;s Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned 00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion? 00:21 OpenRouter&#x27;s Moment: Is This the Perfect Time to Sell? 00:31 Fireworks&#x27; $1.5B Raise Signals the Real AI Money Is in Infrastructure 00:39 Why Every Great AI App May Need to Build Its Own Model 00:50 Stripe&#x27;s Bold Play to Buy PayPal 01:01 The AI Funding Frenzy: Why Late-Stage Venture Is Winning 01:12 Nuclear Startups Go Wild While Databricks and Stripe Stay Private 01:15 The AI Supply Chain War: TSMC, ASML, DRAM—and Nvidia&#x27;s Next Move

20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell &amp; Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

[SPEAKER_00] The Quest for Equivalent Models at a Cheaper Price, It's Just Going to Keep Going Up. Is the OpenRouter, Low-Cost LLM Business A Good Business? I think it's a great time for OpenRouter to sell. All the good investments sure seem to be in the infrastructure.

[SPEAKER_02] At some point, the people spending a trillion dollars a year are going to want some apps to pay for all this. The only thing that matters is the OpenAI and Anthropic Growth Rate in 26 and 27. If you're growing 10X year on year and you have any kind of positive and improving gross margin, it just covers all the nut. Growth for the last two or three years has been a very attractive place to make money.

[SPEAKER_01] This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. It is my favourite show of the week. Rory O'Driscoll, the OG, Jason Lemkin, the total AI nerd, analysing the biggest news in tech this week. So, kicking us off, yep, we're heading to the model layer. China ships two near-frontier open models in a week, with Kimmy absolutely crushing it. And, yep, Washington moves to wall off. You guessed it, Chinese models.

[SPEAKER_01] Next, Databricks raising $3 billion, a Series M, I love this, a Series M, at a $188 billion valuation. And then, on top of that, we have Ramp releasing an OpenRouter competitor, just as OpenRouter are supposedly about to get bought. This and so much more in the conversation this week. But before we dive into the show today, you have the idea, but with most AI tools, you hit a wall. The setup, the config, the gap between what you pictured and what you actually ship.

20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell & Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell &amp; Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell & Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.