- Horizon AI
- Posts
- OpenAI Becomes World’s Most Valuable Startup 💸
OpenAI Becomes World’s Most Valuable Startup 💸
How to use Claude to create Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files
Gina Acosta
October 03, 2025
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
OpenAI has gone ahead of Elon Musk's SpaceX to become the world's most valuable startup, reaching a total valuation of $500 billion, the highest ever for a privately held company.
Let’s get started!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
OpenAI Becomes World’s Most Valuable Startup at $500B
Where Startups Spend on AI
AI Tutorial: How to use Claude to create Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
OPENAI
OpenAI Becomes World’s Most Valuable Startup at $500B
OpenAI has reportedly finalized a secondary share sale, aimed at retaining employees at the ChatGPT maker, that values the company at $500 billion.
Details:
Current and former OpenAI employees sold about $6.6 billion in shares to a consortium of investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price.
This marks a significant jump, as OpenAI was valued at $300 billion just a couple months ago.
The company’s capital needs remain massive, given its ambitious infrastructure plans and the increasingly competitive market for AI talent.
OpenAI generated about $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, up 16 percent from all of last year, but is projected to spend another $80 billion by 2029.
The new valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology but also amplifies concerns about a potential AI bubble, especially since the San Francisco-based company has yet to turn a profit.
TOGETHER WITH INTERCOM
Startups who switch to Intercom can save up to $12,000/year
Startups who read beehiiv can receive a 90% discount on Intercom's AI-first customer service platform, plus Fin—the #1 AI agent for customer service—free for a full year.
That's like having a full-time human support agent at no cost.
What’s included?
6 Advanced Seats
Fin Copilot for free
300 Fin Resolutions per month
Who’s eligible?
Intercom’s program is for high-growth, high-potential companies that are:
Up to series A (including A)
Currently not an Intercom customer
Up to 15 employees
ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ
Where Startups Spend on AI
Andreessen Horowitz, in partnership with Mercury, has released its first AI Spending Report, tracking where startups actually allocate money across 50 AI-native app-layer vendors.
Details:
Spending is spread across many tools instead of one winner per category, and new apps are rising and falling very quickly.
OpenAI leads overall, Anthropic is No. 2, while coding tools like Replit (No. 3), Cursor (No. 6), Lovable (No. 18), and Emergent (No. 48) show that “vibe coding” has demand but unclear consolidation paths.
Copilots are outperforming end-to-end agents, as startups favor “human augmentors” that boost productivity rather than fully replacing roles.
About 60% of the list consists of horizontal tools, with creative platforms such as Canva, Photoroom, Kling, Midjourney, Descript, Opus Clip, CapCut, and ElevenLabs standing out in this category.
Note-taking tools like Otter AI, Read AI, and HappyScribe are also prominent on the list, though no single leader has emerged.
The most popular vertical tools fell into three buckets: sales, recruiting, and customer service.
a16z expects a tilt toward end-to-end agents and away from copilots as the technology becomes more reliable. The list is likely to look very different a year from now.
AI Tutorial
How to use Claude to create Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files
Claude can now generate ready-to-use Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoints, and PDFs with formulas, formatting, and professional designs.
Note: The feature is available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users for now.
Go to Claude.ai and sign in
Enable file creation in settings: Go to Settings → Account → Experimental and turn on “Code execution and file creation.”
Upload your files or describe exactly what you need.
Include details like purpose, audience, features, or specific analysis if starting from scratch.
For data-driven projects, upload CSVs or reports and explain what analysis or presentation format you want.
As Claude works on your file, you can provide further instructions. You can request specific changes, ask for additional analysis, or have Claude modify the format, etc., until the file matches your requirements.
When the file is ready, download it or save it to Google Drive. Files work with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, with formulas, designs, and formatting preserved.
AI Tools to check out
📹 Descript: AI video editing for every kind of video.
📈 Jasper: AI platform that unifies the brand experience, accelerates content velocity, and automates marketing processes—at scale.
👥 Otter AI: Get live transcripts, automated summaries, action items, advanced AI templates, and use AI Chat to get answers from your meetings.
⚡ SketchBubble: Create stunning presentations in seconds.
✨ Shortcut: A superhuman AI Excel agent.
AI Findings/Resources
🔍 Google AI Overviews impact on publishers & how to adapt into 2026
✅ 4-step ChatGPT framework to spot flaws in your business
👉 "I used an AI chatbot built to disagree with me. It showed me how sycophantic ChatGPT is."
The latest in AI and Tech
The company announced that its Nano Banana model is ready for production environments and comes with new features, such as support for new aspect ratios.
The model is accessible through the Gemini API on Google AI Studio and on Vertex AI for enterprise use.
The startup has signed agreements with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to supply DRAM wafers and build data centers in South Korea for the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure project.
The companies plan to manufacture up to 900,000 high-bandwidth DRAM chips per month, more than doubling current industry capacity.
The models range in size from 3B to 32B and use a hybrid Mamba/Transformer design that reduces inference memory needs by up to 70% while maintaining performance.
Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, and inference as the company faces growing competition in AI infrastructure from OpenAI and Meta. Co-founder and outgoing CTO Sam McCandlish will now serve as chief architect.
The invite-only Sora video app has surged to the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store, hitting No. 1 on October 3 after 164,000 installs in its first two days.
Its launch outpaced Claude and Copilot, tied with Grok, but trailed ChatGPT and Gemini.
That’s a wrap!
We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's email!Your feedback helps us improve our content |
Not subscribed yet? Sign up here and send it to a colleague or friend!
See you in our next edition!
Gina 👩🏻💻