Roko's Basilisk
Posts
Your Startup Just Got Acquihired

Your Startup Just Got Acquihired

Plus: Viral AI trends, luxury keyboards, and tools for the next big thing.

Roko's Basilisk
June 17, 2025

Here’s what’s on our plate today:

🤝 How Big Tech is snatching up entire AI teams (and why it’s only getting wilder).
🧠 Are you smarter than the average bot about AI hiring hacks?
🚀 Art-restoring AI, TikTok’s ChatGPT spirals, and luxury keyboards for your next startup exit.
💡 Turn research into pages, parse PDFs like a pro, and clone your voice in 30 seconds.

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

Root for the underdog taking on MedTech titans.

Future Cardia, a Stanford StartX company backed by Johnson & Johnson's JLABS, has raised $14M to bring smarter cardiac monitoring to market. Their implantable device is already in human use, collecting 60,000+ hours of data.

Now, they’re closing out their raise, and you’ve still got time to get in on the innovation investors are betting on to shake up MedTech.

^{*This is sponsored content}

The Laboratory

How “acquihiring” is powering Big Tech’s AI talent race

Every new technological breakthrough compels business owners to rethink their strategies. Few innovations since the advent of the internet have had as profound an impact on business as artificial intelligence (AI). As Big Tech is working on developing AI products that can be monetized, small businesses are working on either incorporating AI in their processes or enabling the development of AI products that can help them make a meaningful impact on their markets.

In such a scenario, a relatively little-known strategy is fast becoming the go-to method for Big Tech to continue working on improving their tech at a rapid pace without having to resort to relying on the often difficult path of hiring new talent. The strategy, “aquihire”, though not new, is fast becoming a Big Tech trend to gain access to smaller companies’ talent pool, securing an edge over their competitors while simultaneously avoiding regulatory scrutiny.

The strategy recently made headlines when Facebook’s parent, Meta, announced it is investing 14.8 billion in Scale AI and hiring the data-labeling startup's CEO.

So what exactly is aquihire, how do such deals work, and why are tech companies relying more and more on it? Let us take a closer look.

What is acquihire, and why does it matter?

Acquihiring is a strategy in which a company is acquired primarily to onboard its key employees and team members, rather than to obtain its products or intellectual property.

The strategy is mostly used by larger, more mature companies, often supported by venture capital firms. These larger businesses are primarily interested in gaining access to a company’s talent pool to secure access to the team’s specialized knowledge and skill set. Larger corporations usually take this route to rapidly scale up their own in-house capabilities for specialized workflows.

Acquihiring deals are more common for highly in-demand skill sets and professions. Major tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple are some of the biggest players in the acquihire space. Google alone bought 30 artificial intelligence startups between 2009 and 2020.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, however, Big Tech’s acquihire deals have often resulted in the shutdown of the acquired company’s original business or intellectual property.

How Big Tech is leaning on startups to fuel growth

Several high-profile big‑tech talent acquisitions, sometimes called “reverse acquisitions”, have occurred since November 2022. Some of the notable deals include the $650 million cash deal between Microsoft and Inflection AI. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would get to use Inflection's models and hire most of the startup's staff, including its co-founders. At the time, Microsoft reportedly hired Inflection’s 70-person team to form a newly created consumer AI unit called Microsoft AI.

In a similar move, Google signed a deal with Startup Character.AI , granting the search giant a non-exclusive license to the chatbot maker's large language model technology. The deal also entailed former employees and Character.AI co-founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, rejoining Google.

Amazon, too, has relied on the strategy to bolster its AI efforts. In 2024, Amazon hired away artificial intelligence startup Adept's co-founders and some of its team. And while Adept, at the time, said it would continue to operate independently and would be paid a licensing fee for use of some of its technology, which helps automate business functions, Amazon declined to disclose the terms of the non-exclusive deal.

Meta and OpenAI have also relied on acquihiring to further their business interests. Meta, recently, invested in ScaleAI in a deal that valued the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and would bring in its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to play a prominent role in the tech giant's artificial intelligence strategy. OpenAI, in an acquihire deal, purchased Multi (previously Remotion), a startup developing an enterprise-focused, video-first collaboration platform.

Why is Big Tech using this strategy now?

Big Tech companies are increasingly turning to acquihire deals as a strategic response to the unprecedented surge in demand for generative AI talent and infrastructure. This shift is being driven by a number of factors, which include a global AI talent crunch, the accelerating pace of AI product development, regulatory scrutiny of traditional acquisitions, and the cost-efficiency of acquihire models.

Since the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the generative AI race has intensified, pushing companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to pursue not just technological advantages but also the elite teams capable of developing and scaling these systems.

Hiring top AI researchers or engineers individually is no longer sufficient or fast enough. By absorbing entire startup teams through acquisitions, these companies can onboard pre-assembled, high-functioning groups of talent, many of whom have already worked together on complex AI systems, and can immediately begin contributing to new initiatives without the ramp-up time associated with conventional hiring.

Another driving factor is the need to rapidly expand and customize foundational AI models and infrastructure. Building and maintaining large language models (LLMs), AI agents, robotics platforms, or multi-modal systems requires not only top-tier technical talent but also domain-specific expertise and deeply integrated systems.

Many emerging startups have pushed the boundaries of AI applications in areas like synthetic data, real-time inference, multi-agent frameworks, and reinforcement learning. Big Tech, rather than reinventing the wheel, is finding it easier to hire the teams that have already built successful prototypes or production-ready versions of these technologies.

Regulatory constraints are also nudging Big Tech towards acquihires rather than traditional mergers and acquisitions. Full acquisitions of promising startups have increasingly attracted the attention of antitrust regulators in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, especially when they involve companies already dominant in cloud computing, search, or digital advertising.

Structuring a deal as a combination of talent hire and technology licensing, rather than a full buyout, often allows firms to avoid filing thresholds that would trigger reviews by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or the European Commission.

Acquihiring is here to stay

The surge in acquihire deals marks a strategic shift in how Big Tech is responding to the high-stakes race for AI dominance. As the technology evolves at breakneck speed, traditional recruitment methods and outright acquisitions are proving too slow, costly, or legally fraught to keep pace.

Acquihiring offers a faster, leaner alternative, allows Big Tech to sidestep regulatory red tape, and gives companies a tactical edge by absorbing valuable talent and cutting-edge know-how before their competitors can.

For the startups being acquired, these arrangements often represent an exit strategy that guarantees team continuity, resources, and the opportunity to work on projects at a global scale.

However, this trend also raises questions about market consolidation and the long-term implications for innovation. As smaller firms are absorbed into the folds of tech giants, the risk of homogenization increases, potentially stifling diversity in AI development.

Nonetheless, in the current climate, acquihires are emerging as a pragmatic and powerful tool. They reflect not just a talent strategy but a broader shift in how the next generation of AI tools and platforms will be built: not in isolation, but by assembling the best minds, wherever they may be.

AI IQ Check

🤖 Which statement about modern large language models is FALSE?

Prompt of the Day

Prompt: “Summarize the key risks and best practices for securing non-human identities (API keys, service accounts, bot tokens, etc.) in a SaaS environment. Make the advice clear, actionable, and easy for a busy IT manager to implement.”

Treats to Try

Perplexity’s new “Pages” tool enables you to transform AI-powered research into visually appealing, shareable web pages or reports, all ready in minutes.
ElevenLabs clones your voice and generates lifelike speech in dozens of languages—ideal for podcasters, marketers, and creators going global.
LlamaParse quickly extracts, queries, and analyzes data from PDFs or unstructured documents using advanced AI parsing—no code required.

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 1,000,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.