alt Hacker News> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.
I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
> Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetization" – thanks to Anthropic, we can skip that chapter entirely and focus on building the best JavaScript tooling.
I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.
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> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
I don't really know any details about this acquisition, and I assume it's the former, but acquihires are also done for other reasons than "it was the only way".
> I believe this a bit less.
They weren’t acquired and got paid just to build tooling as before and now completely ignoring monetization until the end of times.
Given the worries about LLM focused companies reaching profitability I have concerns that Bun's runway will be hijacked... I'd hate for them to go down with the ship when the bubble pops.
> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.
Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?