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On Wednesday, September 3, Figma released its first earnings report since going public in July, bringing with it a significant change in tide. The collaborative design software platform had an incredible initial public offering (IPO), which saw its stock price rise 250%. In contrast, Figmas shares (NYSE: FIG) have now plunged about 15% in after-hours and premarket trading on Thursday. So, what brought Figmas stock down? Revenue-wise, the company grew 41% year-over-year (YOY), reaching $249.6 million. The figure beat Wall Streets predicted $248.8 million, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. Figma further said it expects 2025 revenue between $1.02 billion and $1.03 billion, beating an estimate of $1.01 billion cited by Reuters. Finally, the company also announced a series of new products, including Figma Make, an AI-powered design tool, and Figma Sites, which lets users publish websites from the platform. While its earnings numbers are positive, the company’s explosive IPO stock growth may have meant that some investors had unrealistically high expectations, Reuters notes. ‘Significant investments in our AI efforts’ In an earnings call, Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field noted how AI growth might negatively impact profits. You should expect to see significant investments in our AI efforts because we believe AI will be critical to how software development workflows evolve moving forward,” Field said. “This means that we expect margins to come down in the near term as we invest in the long term. Another consideration for the drop in share price might stem from their availability. When the stock market closes on Thursday, September 4, the lockup period will end for 25% of shares owned by employees. This change means that a significant number of shares will enter the public market, potentially diluting the existing shares’ worth. This story is developing…
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E-Commerce
If youre sick of tech companies hogging the IPO spotlight, youre in for a refreshing change of pace. Black Rock Coffee Bar Inc. is expected to list on the Nasdaq as soon as next week. Heres what you need to know about Black Rock Coffee Bar and its initial public offering. What is Black Rock Coffee Bar? Black Rock Coffee Bar is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, but was originally founded in Beaverton, Oregon, in 2008. The companys first store was a humble 160-square-foot drive-thru location. Since then, Black Rock Coffee Bar has expanded to more than 150 stores across seven states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. Black Rock Coffee Bars menu consists of coffees, teas, and energy drinks, as well as a selection of all-day breakfast menu items. Its major competitors are the much larger coffee chains Starbucks and Dutch Bros. One of Black Rock Coffee Bars current weaknesses also leaves room for growth opportunities. In a recent Form S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company notes that its current brand awareness within its existing markets stands at just 47%. Thats compared to the 83% brand awareness that Dutch Bros enjoys and the sky-high 97% brand awareness that Starbucks enjoys. [Photo: Black Rock Coffee Bar] Black Rock Coffee Bar says it is leveraging several types of marketing to increase its brand awareness, including via online advertising on platforms owned by Meta and Google, and through organically driven influencer marketing campaigns. The company also has plans to greatly expand its store footprint into new markets. It says it expects to grow its store count to 1,000 stores by 2035. For comparison, Dutch Bros hit that milestone earlier this year. Black Rock Coffee Bar by the numbers According to the companys SEC filing, Black Rock Coffee Bars most salient metrics include: 158 locations across 7 states. Store revenue of $179 million for the 12 months ending June 30, 2025. 1.8 million loyalty members. 10.1% same-store sales growth for the six-month period ending June 30, 2025. Average unit volume of $1.2 million for the three months ending June 30, 2025. Annual store growth rate of 20%. For the three months ending June 30, Black Rock Coffee Bar had a net loss of $1.1 million, its SEC filing reveals. That is double the net loss of $522,000 from the same period a year earlier. When is Black Rock Coffee Bars IPO? Black Rock Coffee Bar has not officially announced a date for its initial public offering. However, Nasdaqs IPO calendar listing date says the offering is expected to take place on Friday, September 12. Fast Company has reached out to Black Rock Coffee Bar for more details on the timeline. What is Black Rock Coffee Bars stock ticker? Black Rock Coffee Bars stock will trade under the ticker BRCB. What exchange will Black Rock Coffee Bars shares trade on? Black Rock Coffee Bar shares will trade on the Nasdaq Global Market. What is the IPO share price of BRCB? According to the companys most recent Form S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), dated September 2, Black Rock Coffee Bar says it expects BRCB Class A shares to IPO for between $16.00 and $18.00. How many BRCB shares are available in its IPO? Black Rock Coffee Bar says it is making 14,705,882 shares of Class A common stock available in its IPO. How much will Black Rock Coffee Bar raise in its IPO? With Black Rock Coffee Bars offering of 14.7 million shares at $16 to $18 apiece, the company is seeking to raise up to $265 million in its IPO, Reuters notes. How much is Black Rock Coffee Bar worth? Black Rock Coffee Bar is on target to be worth about $860.7 million based on its current IPO numbers, reports Reuters. A change of flavor from the tech-heavy IPO scene One interesting thing about about Black Rock Coffee Bars IPO is the industry in which the company operates. Most of the major initial public offerings in 2025 have been in the tech sector. Black Rock Coffee Bars IPO represents a decided change in flavor compared to 2025s other headline-grabbing IPOs. So far, those have included listings from Chime, Circle, Figma, eToro, and Bullish. It will be interesting to see how investors react to such a low-tech initial public offering, as their appetite for Black Rock Coffee Bar could play a significant factor in other consumer-oriented, non-tech companies choosing to go public in the remainder of the year. The last major coffee chain to go public was Dutch Bros (NYSE:BROS) in September 2021. The company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for $23 per share. As of yesterdays market close, BROS shares were trading at above $71 eacha rise of more than 120% since its IPO date.
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E-Commerce
This time its different.Those four words, the official slogan of every economic bubble, have been weaponized in the age of AI. Theyre the rallying cry of utopians and evangelists insisting the technology will reshape every corner of life, and that the financial gains surrounding it are therefore excusable. At the same time, those same boosters, along with their critics, wield the phrase as a cudgel in their endless sparring.The AI conversation now feels as fracturedand as split-screenas debates over politics or the economy. Every new headline becomes ammunition, seized on to reinforce whatever larger argument someone wants to make. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman captured it rather well in August: Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes,” he said at the time. “Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.Of course, only the first part of the quote got aggregated into countless even Sam Altman says AI is a bubble stories.Predicting whether we are or arent in a bubble is a fools game, and I wont play it. But what Altman effectively elides is that the financial frenzy part risks the most important thing to happen part.The greed is endangering the good.You dont need to talk to a chatbot until it induces psychosis; you just need to follow the money in AI.In this Premium piece, youll learn: How the insatiable appetite for elite AI talent is breaking the social contract of startup creation What the race to build ever larger data centers to power AI use is really about Why you should closely watch the use of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to buy and sell shares in AI startups This time is different: Whatever happens in AI will not be exactly what happened to inflate and then pop the dotcom bubble in 2000 (though, naturally, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has costarring roles in each drama). So lets go through the events of just the last three months or so and you decide what the hell is going on. Sama-Jony-ding-dong Just before Memorial Day, OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s io AI hardware company, which has never released a product or even announced one. But the potential riches if you build what my colleague Mark Wilson dubbed the fourth great computing interface are such that the startup commanded $6.5 billion in OpenAI stock.The nine-minute video that accompanied the news reportedly cost $3 million.Weeks later, a startup named iyO, which is also making AI-powered hardware, sued OpenAI alleging trademark infringement and unfair competition, saying that iyO met with OpenAI and Ives LoveFrom as far back as 2022 and as recently as spring 2025 sharing its vision and tech for screenless natural language human-computer interaction.A judge ruled iyO made enough of a case to merit a hearing and ordered OpenAI not to discuss the io brand. OpenAI then took down the video. ARRrrrgh Cursor, the buzzy AI code editor (or vibe coding app), announced in June that it had raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation. The company also claimed its annualized recurring revenue (ARR) hit $500 millionup from the $100 million milestone it bragged about in February, which at the time made it the fastest company ever to get there, in just 12 months. But ARR is a slippery metric. Its calculated by taking a single month of revenue (almost always the companys best) and multiplying it by 12. The result is a gaudy number that implies annual revenue without actually being annual revenue. Cursors record quickly became the AI industrys version of the four-minute mile. In July, rival AI coding startup Lovable crowed that it hit $100 million ARR in only eight months. Not to be overshadowed, Anthropic (OpenAIs nerdier LLM competitor) reportedly hit $3 billion ARR in May, $4 billion in June, and $5 billion in July. By years end, it says it will reach $9 billion ARR. Yet even if you take those claims at face value, the companys real revenue pencils out closer to $4.3 billion on a back-of-the-envelope calculation. That didnt stop Anthropic from raising at a $183 billion valuation, or roughly 42.5 times this guesstimate of its 2025 revenue. While ARR is soaring, so too are concerns that AI companies negative gross margins, meaning it costs more to do what it does than it makes from selling it, will not easily be reversed. But hey, number go up, right? Building the Avengers of AI In June, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI, a company which provides model makers with training data. Scale cofounder and CEO Alexandr Wang and some other Scale employees moved over to Meta to set up the social media giants new Superintelligence Labs (MSL).The move raised questions about whether Big Tech was yet again deploying a clever workaround to federal regulatory scrutiny for a large acquisition by spending a large sum for a stake in the company while its most valuable employees join the investor. Good questions! Even more so after Meta rivals, which had been Scale customers, backed away, and in July Scale laid off 14% of its staff, 200 people, and ended relationships with 500 contractors.Soon the tumult came for Meta itself, with Meta in August instituting an AI hiring freeze, doing a reorganization of the AI teams it had just organized (the fourth reorg in six months, but whos counting), and some of those high-profile hires changing their mind once they had to show up towork at Meta.At least all this took place over the leisurely cadence of about two and a half months. Choppy Surf The drama over the acquisition of the AI coding app Windsurf played out over just 72 hours, across a mid-July weekend.This too looked like a company being raided for its leadership and top talent (this time by Google). In the heat of a summer Friday news dump, it appeared those 40-plus Windsurf poachees were leaving their former colleagues high and dry while they reaped a share of $2.4 billion.AI, whether because of the opportunity, the resources required, or just the guaranteed money, was shattering the heretofore understood premise that founders, like sea captains, went down with the ship.But with Big Tech offering yachts, not lifeboats, startups became just another manifestation of I got mine, with founders now at the front of the line to get theirs.On the Monday after the Friday talent raid, Cognition, yet another AI software engineering tool (!), took the heros mantle, acquiring the rest of Windsurf and promising to make the employees whole.Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote that the deal includes Windsurfs world-class people, some of the best talent in our industry, whom were privileged to welcome to our team.Those good vibes lasted all of three weeks, when Wu confirmed that he had offered those world-class Windsurf people buyouts, citing Cognitions extreme performance culture that translates to many of us literally live where we work. The note implied that Windsurf perhaps didnt share that oh-so-healthy work culture and allowing that its employees hadnt signed up to grind themselves into dust.The only greater privilege than welcoming Windsurf to the team was showing them the door. Mines bigger Stargate: Its not just a sci-fi franchise but also a joint venture to fuel OpenAIs data center expansion, an AI infrastructure company. Stargate launched in January with help from SoftBank, Oracle, and others. According to OpenAI, Stargate intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years” and this infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. (Emphasis mine.)The first Stargate project in Texas, which started operating while still under construction, is promising 357 full-time jobs once construction has finished, according to Bloomberg, which added that thats a little more than the average Walmart Supercenter. If we interpret hundreds of thousands as, say, 200,000, we only need to build another 560 data centers to fulfill that goal.Gotta start somewhere, I guess, but in truth, OpenAI got to that jobs number through the usual economic impact sleight of hand, adding in short-term construction roles and indirect jobs like manufacturing and local service roles.Good American jobs, AI supremacy over the world, whatever. Lets not lose sight of whats important here: Sam Altmans data center was larger than Elon Musks xAI Colossus data center, consuming 300MW of power to Colossuss 250MW. The tech site Toms Hardware proclaimed, Its the worlds largest single building.Fear not, though, Colossus 2 is underway in Memphis. Sure, both of these projects threaten the stability of the electric grid, and Colossus may or may not be poisoning the residents of Memphis while you read this, but no matter: Musk simply must prove his is bigger.You didnt think Meta CEO Mark Cage Fighter Zuckerberg was going to sit this out, right? In July, he announced Prometheus and Hyperion (nicknamed The Beast), his data center projects that promise multi-gigawatt power consumption. As Zuck bragged, Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.SoftBanks Masayoshi Son, although already involved with Stargate (with money he doesnt actually have), was not deterred by those realities from reportedly pitching a $1 trillion industrial campus in Arizona devoted to building AI and robotics, dubbed Project Crystal Land.Cant help but wonder if these guys are compensating for something here. Its the money, stupid Of course, the hot AI summer of 2025 hasnt just been about bragging rights. Its about money, which can be converted into bragging rights.To wit: In July, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati raised a record $2 billion seed round for her Thinking Machines Lab AI startup. As of mid-August, arguably a lifetime ago in AI time, the analyst firm CB Insights calculated that there were 498 AI unicorns, with an aggregate value of $2.7 trillion, leading CNBC to conclude, AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace. On paper, at least. Thankfully theres a way for the founders (and maybe even the unwashed AI rank and file actually doing the work) to cash in that doesnt involve abandoning their startups: secondary share sales to investors clamoring to get a piece of these companies. In August, OpenAI reportedly initiated a $6 billion offering (or maybe its $8 billion) to investors (including, naturally, SoftBank), which would value the company at $500 billion. OpenAI currently has a $13 billion ARR (see above!). So lets call this maybe 50 times revenue, with, again, accelerating losses. Elite AI researchers and 10x engineers spent the summer changing teams like college football stars in the transfer portal, with Zuckerberg reportedly offering $300 million, four-year deals to woo them to Meta. The coup de grace was hiring away Apples head of AI models with a compensation package that dwarfed that of Apple CEO Tim Cook. Meanwhile, investor demand has gotten so frenzied that 1) companies like Meta are using financial instruments known as special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to finance data center investments off its books, obscuring the risk from its stock investos 2) OpenAI warned investors that unauthorized sales of OpenAI equity; investments in SPVs that own OpenAI equity; tokenized interests in OpenAI equity (as Robinhood launched earlier in the summer, starting in Europe) and promised or an SPV holding OpenAI equity; and forward contracts and other forms of purported economic interests as violating its terms and could result in those shares being invalidated 3) OpenAIs investing arm launched its sixth SPV, mere weeks before warning investors about SPVs offering its own shares, to invest outside of its main fund, seeking another $69.5 million 4) VCs are buying into each others SPVs with high fee structures to get any kind of exposure to these those private AI high-fliers. As Javier Avalos, cofounder and CEO of Caplight, a secondary deal tracking platform, explained to TechCrunch, Buying units of the SPV means [VCs] wont own shares in the actual company; theyll technically be an investor in another investors fund. Of course they can then mark up those investments and sell them to a greater fool high-net-worth investor, so everythings fine. These are the kinds of things that happen when the smart money convinces itself that this time is different.The next crash will be different, and it may well not be caused by AI. (It could be private credit! Or crypto! So many possibilities.)Yes, every single one of these actions this summer has some kind of perfectly logical explanation. Why wouldnt you bet 1 or 2% of your company to have a shot at owning the next iPhone, being the dominant player in the fourth industrial revolution, or controlling data centers, the railroads of the 21st century?Then again, everything looks shiny if youre living inside a gossamer sphere floating into the atmosphere.Stay careful out there, folks. If anyone offers you a chance to buy into an SPV, maybe take all your money and put it in something tangible and safe, like Labubus.
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E-Commerce
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