June 12, 2025

To the moon

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Salesforce's AI agent acquisition spree

Last week's acqui-hire of Moonhub — an AI recruiting agent startup with talent from Meta and Stanford — marks Salesforce’s second acquisition of a horizontal-focused AI agent in the past month, following its May purchase of Convergence.

Unlike vertical agents built for specific sectors, horizontal agents work across different industries and use cases — making them valuable building blocks for Salesforce's Agentforce platform.

Both acquisitions feed directly into Agentforce's momentum, with Agentforce hitting $100M+ in ARR faster than any other product in the company’s history.

As enterprise AI agent adoption accelerates, Salesforce is positioning itself as the go-to platform for AI-powered automation across business functions — not just CRM.

We highlighted both Moonhub and Convergence prior to their acquisitions in our AI agent market map. See 200+ other AI agent companies in the full map.

CB Insights customers can see other horizontal AI agents, ranked by M&A probability, here.

Not: Traffic to news sites

AI search is decimating publishers’ web traffic.

Traffic from organic search to HuffPost fell by just over half in the past 3 years, according to the Wall Street Journal, while Business Insider saw a 55% decline between April 2022 and April 2025. The Washington Post experienced nearly the same drop as HuffPost.

Google's AI Overviews, which summarize search results at the top of pages, have already put a dent in traffic, while its new AI Mode — designed to compete directly with ChatGPT — could deliver an even bigger blow.

The crisis is driving publishers toward direct reader relationships through subscriptions, newsletters, and events. But it's also creating opportunities for the companies building generative engine optimization (GEO) tools.

As we highlighted last week, equity deals to the GEO market are on pace to more than double this year, with startups capitalizing on publishers' need to stay visible in AI-powered search results.

The continued collapse in organic web traffic will make GEO solutions more critical than ever. See how 43 GEO companies are positioning for the shift here.

Hot: Fintech IPOs

Fintech companies are finally breaking through the IPO freeze.

Chime debuted today, pricing its IPO above the expected range and raising $864M. Its IPO valuation clocks in at $11.6B. The digital banking platform's IPO follows eToro's 29% surge on its Nasdaq debut last month and Circle's gain of more than 3x in price since its NYSE listing last week.

While Chime's $11.6B valuation marks a steep decline from its $25B peak in 2021, the company's fundamentals justify investor confidence: revenue jumped over 30% year-over-year to $1.68B in 2024, while its active user base grew 23% YoY to reach 8.6M in Q1'25.

Chime's debut could be a bellwether for other IPO candidates in the fintech industry.

So who’s next?

Out of the 23,000+ fintech companies we track, more than a dozen have an IPO probability of over 50% within the next 2 years. CB Insights customers can unlock the list right here.

Not: OpenAI x Microsoft exclusivity

OpenAI reportedly finalized a deal with Google Cloud in May to diversify its computing power away from Microsoft Azure, marking its first major shift since becoming Azure-exclusive in 2019. 

The partnership underscores how massive AI computing demands are reshaping competitive dynamics in the cloud wars. Even the closest AI alliances aren't immune to vendor lock-in concerns.

For Google, landing OpenAI represents a major win in its battle against Microsoft and Amazon for AI workloads.

See how Google, Microsoft, and Amazon stack up in the AI race in our Battle of the Cloud Titans report.

The +1

Source: u/HEMA1813 via Reddit

This chart is Bach-wards. Finally, the height comparison we've all been waiting 300 years for.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. For more on Chime’s public-market debut — including the company’s key threats and opportunities — CB Insights customers can generate an on-demand scouting report here.

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