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[return to "Anthropic acquires Bun"]
1. mritch+f6[view] [source] 2025-12-02 18:33:37
>>ryanvo+(OP)
> 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.

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2. Karrot+6E[view] [source] 2025-12-02 20:55:54
>>mritch+f6
> 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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3. robert+gH[view] [source] 2025-12-02 21:13:38
>>Karrot+6E
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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4. Karrot+QX[view] [source] 2025-12-02 22:44:09
>>robert+gH
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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