Interestingly, according to Axios, the price was pretty limited: "Amplitude (Nasdaq: AMPL) acquired CommandAI, an SF-based software user experience startup, for $20m (net of cash). CommandAI (fka CommandBar) had raised around $23m from Insight Partners, Itai Tsiddon, Thrive Capital, and BoxGroup."
I would be curious to learn more about the rationale to sell the business as I understand the strategic value to Amplitude. Interestingly, these next-generation digital adoption platforms have generally been pretty challenged.
You almost don't have to snoop for details to have a good guess at what happened. If the acquisition announcement is the first time in a year or more that you're hearing from this company and they omit the sales price, you can bet this isn't the exit most parties wished for. Although by this stage the founder(s) is probably happy to find a buyer who will retain their team.
What’s interesting is how much it contrasts with TechCrunch’s story: ‘Most of Command AI’s 30-person, San Francisco-based team will be joining Amplitude. Command AI’s co-founder and CEO James Evans wouldn’t reveal the terms of the deal, but said candidly that an acquisition wasn’t something he’d been planning on. “Our growth was great and we had plenty of runway,” Evans told TechCrunch. “We weren’t out shopping ourselves or anything. But when Amplitude reached out a little while ago — this summer — we got really excited about the combination and became convinced that we could grow faster and reach more users together.”’
People want to save face. Some more than others. I also read the TC article and thought they were trying a bit too hard to make this seem like a good outcome.
Nothing against the founder. It's just how the game is played. And there's little to gain from deviating from the norms.
> you can bet this isn't the exit most parties wished for. Although by this stage the founder(s) is probably happy to find a buyer who will retain their team.
I've seen a startup that was bootstrapped 10 years ago but took on too much money and ended up getting acquired for "undisclosed sum" but at the same time everybody knew the investors were just recouping their money while founders got nothing (they had sold their equity for raising more money as their costs were way up but nobody was buying their product). Cue local news reporters don't know the nuances so they'll just announce "Startup X acquired by Y, wow!"
Founders place a lot of emphasis on getting "acquired" but there is roughly 95% chance of you selling at breakeven where the terms leave you with a year's worth of salary as a junior SWE
Get ready to see a lot more of these "acquired" news coming out in the near future. something around less than 1% chance of getting more money than you put in.
Startup has horrible odds especially if you are building a simple GPT wrappers
Congrats to both sides! As someone who used CommandBar (which became Command AI), Amplitude really leveled up their team. Not everything ends up being a standalone project, but that doesn't mean combining forces won't work better for everyone.
> First, some context for our customers: the Command AI product remains operational and will continue to be indefinitely. Over time, we will be migrating key infrastructure to Amplitude, so you may see some changes, but all of those will be communicated with plenty of lead time. There will be no disruption for your users; in fact, we think in the near term things will be getting better for them.
How long is indefinitely in this case?
would be interested to know if the "AI" in this is anything further than an OpenAI wrapper and RAG
literally 90% of AI startups right now are some combination of the above and their "edge" is just a long system prompt that tells them to "be this niche and output response that mimics an expert from that niche"
This was never going to work out because OpenAI is literally watching everybody and how they are using it including prompts. AI wrapper startups serve these functions:
- wrappers prop up NVIDIA which are owned by the people giving VCs the money to invest in wrappers who are long Nvidia too.
- wrappers give OpenAI RSU holders a fuzzy warm feeling and they are able to see what the market is doing with their product so they can pull "Amazon Basics"
- IRS, attorneys, accountants, politicians love them all because they all get to squeeze milk from the fume
While the space is hot and most will fail, I disagree with the general negative sentiment. The same could be said for most/all startups. They all can be distilled into some simple implementation.
Exactly. "All SAAS for b2b is just an SQL wrapper". That's until they do something distinguishing, make implementation easier/faster/cheaper or come up with a new technology. Yes the playing field is level now, but what can they do in 1,3,10 years? How will new models play into this?
Way more than just a tarpit.
In terms of unit economics, I think if the price per token goes down (less than $0.00002/1k) some extremely niche companies can survive.
The main problem with those companies is that none of them will have any moat and those businesses aren't defensible.