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Welcome back! Nvidia’s Christmas Eve deal for Groq made for a happy holiday for the AI chip startup’s investors and employees, who were paid out at a very festive $20 billion valuation. That hasn’t always been the case for license-and-hire deals, where a buyer takes a startup’s technology and most of its staff, and leaves a stub of the company, and some of its employees, behind. Nvidia licensed Groq’s technology and will take 90% of its staff, but nearly everyone involved will get a payout valued at three times the company’s most recent $6.9 billion valuation, according to Axios. VC investors are talking to their lawyers about ways to protect themselves when they are treated less generously. Samir Bakhru, partner at law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said investors have recently been proposing updates to the charters of companies they finance to address the risk of these acqui-hire transactions. “It’s a way to protect investors’ economic interests so that all of the leverage doesn't necessarily sit with the founders or the core technical team in high-profile acqui-hire transactions,” said Bakhru. There’s growing risk as big tech companies poach key people with eye-popping compensation packages. Most investors have good reasons to be worried after pouring money into the new, research-focused AI startups, which are led by researchers who have left the leading labs. To avoid poaching, companies need to “include nonsolicitation provisions in your agreements with employees and founders and consider including noncompete provisions in states where they are permitted,” said Bakhru. Then there is the company left behind after the deal. Investors who continue to hold a stake in the remaining part of Groq, which includes its inference platform GroqCloud, may soon be bailed out. Some potential buyers are interested in bidding for GroqCloud, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. (The Wall Street Journal earlier reported on a possible bidding war on Groq’s remaining assets.) Others left behind continue to operate or seek to reinvent themselves. Inflection has said it is fashioning itself to help other businesses train and fine-tune their AI models, after Microsoft hired most of its staff and paid for its intellectual property. After Google hired its co-founders and licensed its technology, Character.AI has been looking for potential buyers, though it’s still operating its AI chatbots, according to two people familiar with the matter. However, Adept AI and Covariant, whose founders and top talent left for Amazon in 2024, have published few business updates to their sites since their deals were announced. Another group that’s been disadvantaged by the unusual AI dealmaking of the world’s largest companies is bankers, who again find themselves out of the loop. Only two boutique banks managed to get involved in these deals this year: Centerview Partners with Scale AI and Qatalyst Partners with Groq. | 
