Oura, World Labs Show Divergence in VC Exits

It’s turning out to be a great year for venture exits—as long as you’re talking about M&A. 

Take Monday’s news that Advanced Micro Devices would purchase Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. The $8.2 billion all-stock purchase of the two-year-old AI startup adds to the growing list of such deals this year, which include SpaceX’s purchase of Cursor, Nvidia’s purchase of Hugging Face and Stripe’s acquisition of OpenRouter. The sale is also another win for Martin Casado’s infrastructure team at Andreessen Horowitz, which was World Labs’ largest shareholder and owns nearly 14% of the company, I reported.

An expected IPO gusher, on the other hand, is at serious risk of turning into a drought. On Tuesday, health-tracking wearable company Oura said it was delaying its IPO, previously expected to take place later this week, blaming “market uncertainty.”