On a Saturday in late January, investment banker Alan Bressers received a call from a long-time friend and venture capitalist who had invested in Moltbook, a social network for AI agents that had launched just three days prior. Moltbook had gone viral overnight with more than one million visitors to its site in less than a week, mostly tech enthusiasts looking for a glimpse of the future, where machines message other machines in deep discussions without human interference.

Even prominent AI architects like Elon Musk and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy were observers. “What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People's [bots] are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately,” Karpathy wrote on January 30 in an X post.

It is no surprise that a flurry of companies wasted no time in approaching its founders with handsome offers. By the end of the weekend, Bressers and his business partner Brandon Hightower, cofounders of San Francisco investment bank Axom Partners, had negotiated and finalized a deal with Meta to buy Moltbook for an amount some estimate to be as much as $200 million.

“The thing that made Alan and Brandon so effective was their repeat player context with Meta and several other players at the table,” venture capitalist and Moltbook investor Eric Wiesen says. “They really understood the motivations of the acquirers, what to ask for, what not to ask for, when to push, when to just take terms.”

Axom Partners, an AI-focused boutique investment bank, was founded in 2023 by Bressers, 43, and Hightower, 40, after decade-long stints at investment bank Qatalyst, a technology mergers and acquisitions firm founded by Frank Quattrone that’s advised on $870 billion in deals since its inception in 2008. After working on high-profile transactions like........

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