Something Weird Is Going on With the Investors in Jony Ive's Startup That Was Just Bought by OpenAI

Back in December, Swedish tech entrepreneur Sebastian Siemiatkowski — the guy behind Klarna, the infamous burrito financing app — directed his family investment company to dump $5 billion into AI startups.

The investment made up a "mini portfolio" of four "prominent US-based AI companies," a press release said at the time. Those were software engineer startup Anysphere, generative AI language outfit Speak, bioresearch venture Chai Discovery — and a fourth, anonymous company.

On its face, there's nothing out of the ordinary about that. AI startups nabbed almost half of all venture capitalist funds raised last year, according to Reuters, amounting to about $96 billion.

Anonymous startups are likewise pretty common, a tactic known as "stealth mode" made by founders who want to protect intellectual property or avoid media scrutiny until they're ready to announce their business.

However, this "mini portfolio" earmarked a whopping 70 percent of its investment funds to the anonymous firm, or about $3.6 billion. All anyone knew was that this was a "seed investment" toward the launch of a "new AI hardware product."

Six months later, a post by Siemiatkowski is clearing some things up: the anonymous company was "io," another secret startup founded in 2024 by Jony Ive.

Ive is the superstar British-American designer behind iconic Apple products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple Watch, and even some not-so-renowned ones, like that weird hockey puck mouse, and a 90s chic toilet.

But Ive isn't why it's weird.

A day before Siemiatkowski's post, tech billionaire Sam Altman announced that OpenAI had acquired io in a bizarre dispatch that reads more like a wedding website than a corporate press release. OpenAI paid $6.4 billion for io — meaning the Klarna King's secret investment in a little anonymous startup was now a public partnership with the biggest AI startup on the planet.

Even stranger are some now-deleted posts by former Google designer Luke Wroblewski, who now spends his days as a director at Sutter Hill Ventures, a close-lipped titan in the tech funding space.

"Congrats to io on the $6.5B acquisition by OpenAI today," Wroblewski wrote, according to TechCrunch. "Happy to have been investors in this one."

TC managed to nab a comment from Wroblewski's now-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, which suggests that Sutter Hill "was the second largest investor in 'io,'" an idea that Bloomberg seems to support.

The question is, why delete? Is there some reason that Sutter Hill isn't actually happy to be have been investors? Is someone else involved in the deal trying to keep a lid on where the money's coming from? And most strikingly, why the silence? Sutter had nothing to tell TC after it reached out to ask, giving an unmistakably weird aura to the rollout.

The drama comes as netizens and news media alike are abuzz with speculation about Sam Altman's secretive "AI companion" device, which he began teasing back in 2023.

So far, Altman has told us the device will be "unobtrusive," "pocket sized," and "fully aware" of everything in its users' lives. It's probably not smart glasses, according to the Verge.

Whatever it is, Sam Altman has an ambitious plan to roll out 100 million of them by 2026. Time will tell if it's worth all the secrecy and bluster — or if it turns out to be another Humane AI pin.

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