September 26, 2024

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Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Smartsheet

PE firms Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone have agreed to take Smartsheet private for $8.4B.

That's a 41% premium over the stock's 90-day average closing price.

In Q2, Smartsheet reported annualized ARR of $1.1B, so it's being acquired at an ~8x multiple on its annualized revenue.

Smartsheet competes in the crowded collaboration & project management software market.

Its public competitors include Monday.com and Asana.

In the private market, Airtable (valued at $11.7B) and Notion ($10B) both reached their valuations in 2021.

Smartsheet's multiple indicates just how much revenue private companies in the market, like Airtable and Notion, need to justify their current valuations.

We previously broke down the market here.

Not: Amazon RTO

Last week, we asked you to vote on whether Amazon's decision to mandate 5 days back in office was a bullish or bearish sign for the company.

Nearly half of you said it was a bearish sign (a bad signal for Amazon). A common thread among replies was that it may signal a layoff in disguise.

Hot: Interplanetary travel

We have dreams of achieving interplanetary travel and resource extraction, but conventional rockets can only take us so far.

Enter advanced nuclear propulsion.

While experimental, startups are exploring this method for deep space exploration — and they're drawing industry backing.

Helicity Space, for example, has secured seed funding from Airbus and Lockheed Martin over the past year.

Advanced nuclear propulsion is one of 9 technologies featured in our Game Changers 2025 Report — check out the others here.

Not: Synthetic data startup deal activity

Funding and deals to synthetic data startups have dropped dramatically.

But this doesn't mean that synthetic data has fallen out of vogue — its ability to mimic real patterns for training AI without the privacy baggage is still seen as valuable.

The drop in startup funding is likely being influenced by big tech's movement into the space.

Big tech companies are not only using AI to generate synthetic data on their own (Microsoft, Meta) but also releasing developer tools for synthetic data generation (IBM, Nvidia).

Dive deeper into the big tech-startup dynamic in synthetic data here.