After Sam Altman and Jony Ive revealed on Wednesday that OpenAI would be buying Ive’s io company in a $6.5 billion all-stock deal, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski sent a surprise message to X. He said that
Siemiatkowski’s family investment office Flat Capital had purchased shares in io six month earlier. These io shares, since this is a stock deal, will be converted to shares in OpenAI’s for-profit arm.
Siemiatkowski tweeted: “Excited to learn that @FlatCapital (19459025) was an investor in the io company and that we will receive even more OpenAI shares at a hefty profit for an investment we made some 6 months ago.”
The tweet generated so much interest, that his investment firm released a public statement to confirm that io is the mystery unnamed company that it backed when it announced its four investments in an “mini-portfolio of U.S. AI firms. Flat Capital revealed that it spent approximately $3.6 million on io. This is equivalent to 34 million SEK.
Luke Wroblewski sent another surprise tweet, this time from his position as a managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures in Silicon Valley. He is a former Googler who was also formerly a designer.
Wroblewski, in a now-deleted LinkedIn post and tweet, wrote: “Congratulations to io for the $6.5B purchase by OpenAI today.” Happy to have been investors in the one.”
Some who saw other now-deleted Tweets about Sutter’s investment believe that the firm was the second largest investor in the io. TechCrunch could not confirm this, however. Sutter did not respond to our request for a comment, and Wroblewski removed his posts after we contacted him. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI, the largest investor in io, had a 23% stake. This stake was valued around $1.5 billion. OpenAI paid $5 billion in stock to acquire the remaining shares. Bloomberg reported that Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, Thrive capital, Maverick Ventures and SV Angel were also io supporters. We reported previously that the fund is not backed by the AI model maker, but rather by outside investors. Bloomberg confirmed that Sutter Hill Ventures is an investor despite the deleted tweets.
