Latest on OpenAI’s Capital Raise Could Play Into This Holding's Earnings Report

It looks like, in addition to Axon AXON, Palantir PLTR, Eaton ETN and Dutch Bros BROS reporting this week, we can add SuRo Capital SSSS to the docket.

That business development company will report after the market close on Wednesday (August 6) with its earnings conference call to follow. With SuRo sharing its preliminary June quarter portfolio finding and declaring its recently paid dividend in early July, the items we’ll focusing on will be greater details for its Plaid investment, the degree of conservatism when taking stock of its net asset value per share, and how the company is re-arming its portfolio as in monetized its investment in Service Titan (TTAN) and CoreWeave CRWV.

Part of that conversation around net asset value per share will be about OpenAI and AI storage platform Vast Data. Late last week, we saw OpenAI raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation, months ahead of schedule, as part of its plan to secure $40 billion in funding this year. Back in March, OpenAI announced its ambitious funding plans, with SoftBank committing to provide $30 billion by year-end. As part of the new raise, OpenAI also saw a new wave of investors that included private equity firms Blackstone BX and TPG TPG as well as mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price.

On Friday, TechCrunch reported Vast Data is in talks with Alphabet’s GOOGL venture arm CapitalG and existing backer Nvidia NVDA to raise a fresh round that could value the startup at up to $30 billion. At the end of 2023, Vast was valued at $9.1 billion.

At the end of March, SuRo’s $27.8 million investment in OpenAI accounted for 13.0% of its investment portfolio, while its investment in Vast Data totaled $12.2 million, roughly 7.8% of its portfolio. With SuRo marking its portfolio to market, we should see some nice moves higher in those positions as well as a few others compared to the March quarter close.

As we collect those comments and NAV insights, we’ll revisit our SSSS price target as needed. We will, of course, be interested in what SuRo management has to say about future dividends, but we suspect CEO Mark Klein will reiterate what he told us during our recent "Stocks & Markets" podcast. As such, we’ll continue to follow the IPO market, which received its latest shot in the arm from last week’s Figma FIG pricing.

And, building on that podcast note, a quick reminder that this week, Jay Woods from Freedom Capital Markets will be back with us from the floor of the NYSE. If you have a question you’d like to be asked, leave it in the comments section below, and we’ll get to as many as we can.

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long AXON, PLTR, ETN, BROS, SSSS, GOOGL and NVDA.