🕶️ Raised $200M. Sold for up to $5.3B

Happy Friday, builders. 🕶️
May your weekend budget be bigger than your AI budget.

Echodyne raised about $200 million over 12 years, stayed profitable and just agreed to sell for up to $5.3 billion. Apple brought in $114.5 billion in one quarter, then started trimming how much AI some engineers can use each day. One is a 400-person radar maker and the other is Apple, but they share a habit: they know what everything costs. Neither waited for a bad month to start counting. So while the AI money is flowing, who at your company is reading the bill?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Planning your next trade show? Start with the companies you want to meet. Lensmor helps B2B founders find relevant events, research exhibitors, and shortlist accounts that fit their ideal customer profile.

Reveal available business contacts and export selected records for outreach. Build your target list before you book the trip, so your team arrives with a plan for who to contact and why.

Twelve years after Bill Gates co-led its initial round, Echodyne has a buyer. San Diego defense tech company Shield AI, maker of the V-BAT drone, agreed this week to acquire the Kirkland, Washington, radar maker in a deal worth up to $5.3 billion.

Eye in the sky: Echodyne makes compact radar that spots and tracks drones. It's built into counter-drone systems in more than 40 countries and into gear that stadiums and airports use to catch stray drones.

The slow road, per GeekWire:

$4.8 billion up front: Shield pays that at closing, plus up to $500 million more if Echodyne hits performance targets. The guaranteed part alone is roughly 10x the 2022 valuation. To pay for it, Shield is raising $2.5 billion, including $1 billion at a $28.8 billion valuation (more than double its March price). If the deal dies, so does the financing.

Niche work if you can get it: Echodyne never raised a giant round. It picked one hard problem, built the hardware and made money, so when a buyer wanted drone radar, Echodyne was the obvious call. The lesson: owning a niche and staying profitable can still end at about 10 times your last private price.

Closing time: the deal should close in early 2027, pending regulatory approvals. CEO Eben Frankenberg stays, and no layoffs are planned. His old college roommate, Smartsheet co-founder Brent Frei, has a line for it: "Our running joke is that we keep building 10-to-12-year overnight successes."

In this episode, Caya breaks down how to actually measure CLTV (and CAC) like a pro; using real templates, realistic churn, and actual payback periods.
We’ll cover the most common mistakes in LTV math, how to adapt it for SaaS, e-commerce, and marketplaces, and what your numbers really mean for growth.

Apple is shrinking the daily AI budget for some of its engineers, Bloomberg reported. The news came days after Apple posted a record $114.5 billion September quarter, up 12% from a year ago.

Allowance day: AI tools bill in tokens, the small chunks of text or data a model reads and writes. Apple caps how many dollars' worth of them each employee can use per day. Per Bloomberg, via Fast Company:

Employees read the cuts two ways. Some thought the $300 limit was more than most people needed. Others saw a cost cut, and maybe layoffs. New CEO John Ternus is also reportedly pushing to remove layers of management.

Tokenmaxxing is out: Apple is still pressing everyone to use more AI. But many tech employers are finding, per Fast Company, that their big AI bills haven't bought the productivity jump they expected. So the new goal is making each dollar show up as work. (Goldman Sachs is rationing too, by job title. See Bullet 5.)

The meter runs per head: here's some illustrative math, not Apple's. A $200 daily cap, fully used across about 250 workdays, comes to roughly $50,000 per engineer per year. A 20-person team maxing out would spend about $1 million. Unlike a server bill, that cost grows every time you hire.

Cap and trade: if your team runs on AI tools, set a default budget per seat now, plus an easy way for people who need more to ask. Pick the number yourself, before your invoice picks it for you.

Looking ahead… the $25 cap is only under consideration so far. But if Apple is metering AI after its best fiscal year ever, expect your investors to ask what yours costs per seat.

Scale your growth: Join names like HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Deel. Put your product in front of 85,000+ startup founders. Let's talk.