Technology · Satire
SAN FRANCISCO — Corvid.ai, a startup whose actual function has eluded journalists, investors, and at least two of its own co-founders, announced a $200 million Series B on Tuesday, valuing the company at $2.4 billion and its explanation of itself at approximately zero words.
The funding round was led by Meridian Growth Partners, whose managing director described Corvid as 'a category-defining company,' a phrase venture capitalists use when they cannot identify the category. 'What Corvid does is bigger than any one sentence,' he said. 'Or, apparently, any three sentences. We've tried. The deck is 90 slides and every slide is a different company.'
Corvid's own materials describe it as 'an AI-native orchestration layer for the post-supply-chain economy,' which sources confirm was generated by feeding the phrase 'make us sound inevitable' into their own product, assuming their product does that, which nobody can confirm.
The confusion extends to the company's 340 employees. 'I run growth,' said one employee who asked not to be named because she was not sure what she would be named as. 'Growth of what? Great question. Revenue is one candidate. My manager says we're pre-revenue but post-product, which I've been thinking about for months. What did the product happen to? Where did it go?'
CEO and co-founder Dax Reeves, 29, dismissed the criticism in an interview conducted over three separate video calls, each of which he joined from a different moving vehicle. 'Amazon was a bookstore. Netflix mailed DVDs. The companies that win are the ones that evolve,' Reeves said. 'We've simply skipped the part where we start as something. We are pure evolution. We are what a pivot pivots into.'
Pressed to describe a single concrete thing a customer receives in exchange for money, Reeves spoke for four uninterrupted minutes. A transcript of his answer, analyzed by three linguists, was found to contain 611 words, 14 uses of 'fundamentally,' nine uses of 'flywheel,' and zero nouns that exist in physical space.
Notably, Corvid does have customers — 40 of them, all enterprise, all under NDAs so strict that one CIO would only confirm his company 'uses Corvid for the Corvid stuff.' He added, unprompted, that renewal season was 'coming up fast' and asked if we knew what the product did, 'even roughly.'
The Series B funds will reportedly go toward tripling headcount, opening a European office, and hiring a Chief Narrative Officer whose sole responsibility is producing the one sentence. Industry observers note this is the third-largest round ever raised specifically to figure out what the company that raised it does, behind only Corvid's Series A and, in a development that surprised no one, Corvid's seed round.
At press time, Corvid had announced its acquisition of a smaller startup that also cannot be described, in a deal analysts called 'accretive to the confusion.'