Comment by mritchie712

Comment by mritchie712 17 hours ago

20 replies

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> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.

I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

> Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetization" – thanks to Anthropic, we can skip that chapter entirely and focus on building the best JavaScript tooling.

I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.

Karrot_Kream 15 hours ago

> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.

Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?

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  • robertjpayne 14 hours ago

    They had a second round that was $19m in late 2023. I don't doubt for a second that they had a long runway given the small team.

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    • steve_adams_86 13 hours ago

      I don't like all of the decisions they made for the runtime, or some of the way they communicate over social media/company culture, but I do admire how well-run the operation seems to have been from the outside. They've done a lot with (relatively) little, which is refreshing in our industry. I don't doubt they had a long runway either.

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    • Karrot_Kream 13 hours ago

      Thanks I scrolled past that in the announcement page.

      With more runway comes more investor expectations too though. Some of the concern with VC backed companies is whether the valuation remains worthwhile. $26mm in funding is plenty for 14 people, but again the question is whether they can justify their valuation.

      Regardless happy for the Oven folks and Bun has been a great experience (especially for someone who got on the JS ecosystem quite late.) I'm curious what the structure of the acquisition deal was like.

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n2d4 15 hours ago

    > They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
This isn't really true. It's more about who wanted them to join. Maybe it was Anthropic who really wanted to take over Bun/hire Jarred, or it was Jarred who got sick of Bun and wanted to work on AI.

I don't really know any details about this acquisition, and I assume it's the former, but acquihires are also done for other reasons than "it was the only way".

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  • n2d4 10 hours ago

    Can't edit my comment anymore but Bun posted a pretty detailed explanation of their motivation here: https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic

    Sounds like "monetizing Bun is a distraction, so we're letting a deep-pocketed buyer finance Bun moving forward".

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    • brabel 4 hours ago

      Isn’t Anthropic itself also burning investors money? I thought no AI company is making any profit.

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papichulo2023 14 hours ago

Anthropic is still a new company and so far they seem "friendly". That being said, I still feel this can go either way.

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  • VerifiedReports 7 hours ago

    Yep. Remember when "Open"AI took a bunch of grant money and then turned for-profit?

    And kept their fraudulent name.

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serial_dev 16 hours ago

> I believe this a bit less.

They weren’t acquired and got paid just to build tooling as before and now completely ignoring monetization until the end of times.

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  • velcrovan 16 hours ago

    Maybe they were though. Maybe Anthropic just wanted to bring a key piece of the stack in-house.

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drakythe 17 hours ago

Given the worries about LLM focused companies reaching profitability I have concerns that Bun's runway will be hijacked... I'd hate for them to go down with the ship when the bubble pops.

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  • Karrot_Kream 15 hours ago

    This is my fear. It's one thing to lose a major sponsor. It's another to get cut due to a focus on profitability later down the line.

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ojosilva 12 hours ago

Yeah, now they are part of Anthropic, who haven't figured out monetization themselves. Shikes!

I'm a user of Bun and an Anthropic customer. Claude Code is great and it's definitely where their models shine. Outside of that Anthropic sucks,their apps and web are complete crap, borderline unusable and the models are just meh. I get it, CC's head got probably a powerplay here given his department is towing the company and his secret sauce, according to marketing from Oven, was Bun. In fact VSCode's claude backend is distributed in bun-compiled binary exe, and the guy is featured on the front page of the Bun website since at least a week or so. So they bought the kid the toy he asked for.

Anthropic needs urgently, instead, to acquire a good team behind a good chatbot and make something minimally decent. Then make their models work for everything else as well as they do with code.

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  • JimDabell 10 hours ago

    > Yeah, now they are part of Anthropic, who haven't figured out monetization themselves.

    Anthropic are on track to reach $9BN in annualised revenue by the end of the year, and the six-month-old Claude Code already accounts for $1BN of that.

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    • Attrecomet 4 hours ago

      Not sure if that counts as "figured out monetization" when no AI company is even close to being profitable -- being able to get some money for running far more expensive setups is not nothing, but also not success.

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      • JimDabell 2 hours ago

        Monetisation is not profitability, it’s just the existence of a revenue stream. If a startup says they are pre-monetisation it doesn’t mean they are bringing in money but in the red, it means they haven’t created any revenue streams yet.

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nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11 hours ago

"We were maybe gonna fuck ya, buy now we promise we wont"

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  • gjvc 19 minutes ago

    apart from the unfortunate typo, this is accurate.

    like when a political leader says they have full faith in one of their ministers, you know said minister will be gone by next week.

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