SpaceX preps a secondary sale, Tiger Global sells positions at a loss, and a landmark California ruling is struck down

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California’s landmark requirement that corporate boards include women was ruled unconstitutional. The first-in-the-nation mandate, signed into law in 2018, was struck down by a Los Angeles state court judge Friday following a trial. The ruling was posted on the court’s website today. Bloomberg has more here.

Elon Musk today stoked speculation that he could seek to renegotiate his takeover of Twitter, saying at a Miami tech conference that a viable deal at a lower price wouldn’t be “out of the question," after publicly doubting Twitter’s data on the percentage of spam and fake accounts on its platform. At the event, Musk reportedly estimated that fake users make up at least 20% of all Twitter accounts and suggested even that guess could be low. “Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots,” Musk said at the conference. “It’s, like, as unknowable as the human soul.” Bloomberg has the story here.

Crypto markets are crashing— here’s where the money’s going. Decimated. Ravaged. Wiped out. Whatever the adjective, one thing’s clear—the cryptocurrency markets are in turmoil. Over $1 trillion has been wiped from the crypto market in the last 6 months. So where is the money flowing? New data shows that investors are pouring capital into real assets like art. After all, smart investors know masterpieces by legends like Picasso probably won’t dip 27% in a day. This explains why everyone and their wealth manager want to learn more about art investing.* See important Reg A Disclosures disclosures.

Sam Rosenblum never imagined he would work at a crypto-focused investment firm. A Southern California native who spent a “large portion of my life outdoors in the sun, playing sports and hanging out with friends,” crypto was not technically a thing until he was in college at UCLA. Stints at the DOJ and as an analyst for a business consulting firm followed, but it was a subsequent year spent with Visa that opened his eyes to the burgeoning world of digital assets — so much so that when Coinbase began a recruiting push to pull in Rosenblum and some of his colleagues in 2014, two years after Coinbase was founded, he jumped at the opportunity.

It was a good move. Coinbase, then a 30-person company, grew fast in the five years that Rosenblum stayed until he decided to join some other Coinbase alums at the crypto fund Polychain Capital. Indeed, armed with a network of contacts from Coinbase and Polychain, Rosenblum was preparing to raise his own fund last year when former Andreessen Horowitz VC Katie Haun reached out to see if he might join her new firm instead.

Now Rosenblum, along with Chris Ahn, who previously spent four years with Index Ventures, are helping Haun invest the $1.5 billion in capital commitments that her firm — recently named Haun Ventures — garnered earlier this year. To get a better sense of how the young firm works, and how it is thinking about investing into a market right now where both stocks and crypto are being dumped, we jumped on a Zoom with Rosenblum, who lives in Sun Valley, Idaho, late last week. Excerpts of that chat follow, edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start by backing up a bit. Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Polychain Capital, whose founder was the first employee of Coinbase. Katie is on the board of Coinbase. She also spent a decade as a federal prosecutor at the DOJ, where you spent your first year out of college. With all of these potential intersections, when did you two first cross paths?

Katie and I first met in 2017 when she joined the Coinbase board. We didn’t keep in particularly close touch after I left Coinbase, but in November of last year, I actually set out to start my own venture fund, and so I was working on that and, course, Katie and I have quite a few friends in common, and so some of these people I had been kind of just prepping and brainstorming with in terms of how to pitch to fund before going out to fundraise. And I think Katie caught wind that I was in process of that and then reached reached out to me, told me what she was thinking about, and I ended up flying out to Menlo Park for a couple days and we jammed together and walked a bunch of laps around the Stanford dish and decided it was a good time to team up. The rest is recent history.

You were the first deal lead hired by Katie. How many employees are there at this point?

We’re now 12 people total — the deal team is currently three people — and I think we’ll probably keep the whole firm pretty lean and nimble. We’ll add a couple of more folks to the deal team over the course of this year but really not much more than that. I think you can imagine Haun Ventures as a 15- to 20-person firm at steady state.

More here.

Dock, a four-year-old startup based in São Paulo, Brazil, that offers Latin American financial entities the ability to offer a suite of consumer banking services, raised a growth round of $110 million that values the company in excess of $1.5 billion. The leads were Lightrock and Silver Lake Waterman; Riverwood Capital, Viking Global Investors, and Sunley House Capital also participated. The company has raised a total of $280 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Elwood Technologies, a two-year-old London startup that is building a digital asset platform for institutional crypto trading, raised a $70 million Series A at a $500 million valuation. Goldman Sachs and Dawn Capital co-led the round, with additional participation from Barclays, BlockFi Ventures, Chimera Ventures, CommerzVentures, Digital Currency Group, Flow Traders, and Galaxy Digital Ventures. The Trade has more here.

Kriya Therapeutics, a three-year-old Palo Alto, Ca., startup that aims to develop and manufacture gene therapies, raised a $270 million Series C round led by Patient Square Capital, with additional participation from Bluebird Ventures, CAM Capital, Dexcel Pharma, Foresite Capital, JDRF T1D Fund, Lightswitch Capital, Narya Capital, QVT, and Transhuman Capital. The company has raised a total of $450 million. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News has more here.

Optibus, an eight-year-old Tel Aviv startup that uses AI to help public transportation agencies plan and operate their networks, raised a $100 million Series D that values the company at $1.3 billion. Round participants included Insight Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Pitango, Tencent, and SOMV Momentum. The company has raised a total of $260 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Akuity, a four-year-old startup based in Sunnyvale, Ca., that develops software apps built for Kubernetes, an open source software for deploying and managing shipping containers, raised a $20 million Series A funding. Lead Edge Capital and Decibel Partners were the co-leads. The company has raised a total of $25 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Dusty Robotics, a four-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based maker of robot-powered tools for construction workers, has raised $45 million in Series B. The round, led by Scale Venture Partners, is a quick follow-up to last June’s $16.5 million Series A, bringing its total funding up to around $69 million, and valuing it at $250 million.

Good Good, an eight-year-old Reykjavik startup that markets a line of jams, spreads, nutrition bars, syrups and sweeteners formulated with no added sugar, raised a $20 millionSeries B led by SÍA, an Icelandic private ewuity group. The company has raised a total of $62.1 million. Food Business News has more here.

Keelvar, a ten-year-old supply chain analytics platform based in Cork, Ireland, that helps customers explore different sourcing scenarios, raised a $24 million Series B led by 83North; previous investors Elephant, Mosaic, and Paua also participated. The company has raised a total of $43 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Metatheory, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that will focus on games and virtual worlds that leverage blockchain technologies like NFTs (notably, the company was founded by Twitch cofounder Kevin Lin), has raised $24 million in funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, joined by Pantera Capital and FTX Ventures. VentureBeat has more here.

Rain, a five-year-old startup based in New York that partners with brands like Nike, Amazon, Starbucks, Dreamworks, and Unilever to build “voice experiences” for car and smart speakers, raised an $11 million Series B; participants included Valor Capital, McLarty Diversified Holdings, and Burch Creative Capital. The company has raised a total of $15 million. VentureBeat has more here.

Sustain.Life, a one-year-old New York startup whose mission is to make it easier and more affordable for small- to medium-sized businesses to measure, manage, and report carbon emissions and environmental impact, has closed on seed funds of $16 million. The round was co-led by Tapestry VC and Sustain.Life co-founder Mike Hanrahan; other investors included Active Impact Investments, Kompas, Agya Ventures, and Seyen Capital. More here.

US Mobile, an eight-year-old New York startup that is building a "next-generation" 5G wireless network, raised an A2 round of $19.5 million; the lead was Volition Capital. The company has raised a total of $31 million. More here.

Blinq, a five-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based startup that creates a live profile that replaces business cards and can be shared with anyone via a QR code, NFC card, web link, email signature or even video call background, has raised roughly $3.5 million ($5 million AUD) in funding from Blackbird and Square Capital. Australia's Financial Review has more here.

Flexxbotics, a five-year-old, Boston-based startup that describes itself as a robotic process improvement company, just raised $2.9 million in Series A funding led by eCoast Angels. TechCrunch has more here.

Haloo, a 2.5-year-old, Toronto-based platform for helps its users conduct trademark searches and file their own trademark applications, has raised $2.3 million in seed funding from Prosus, Inovia, Hashed VC, 2 Punks Capital, the W Fund, The51, and Frank and Oak cofounder Ethan Song. More here.

Mahmee, an eight-year-old startup based in Los Angeles that allows parents to build a care team of different obstetric, pediatric and support providers, including doulas, lactation consultants, midwives, nurses and doctors, raised a $9.2 million Series A round led by Goldman Sachs; Revolution Rise of the Rest, Muse Capital, Backstage Capital, The Helm, and Pipeline Angels also chipped in. The company has raised a total of $12.2 million. MobiHealthNews has more here.

Reverence, a startup based in New York that aims to provide products and services enabling the scheduling and delivery of in-home care, has announced a $9.5 million round. The lead was Target Global. Founder and CEO Hudson Teslik previously spent five years as the head of strategy and operations for ad platforms and display media at Google. Home Health Care News has more here.

Switchboard, a six-month-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based startup that says it's building an infrastructure layer for no-code software tools, just raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures. Other participants in the round included Caffeinated, SNR Ventures, Overline Ventures, Forum Ventures, Soma Capital, TnT Ventures, New Normal Ventures, Polymath Capital, and numerous founders. More here.

Topship, a two-year-old startup based in Lagos, Nigeria that wants to create the easiest way for African businesses to export and import parcels and cargo to their customers, suppliers, and distributors worldwide, raised a seed round of $2.5 million led by Flexport, with additional participation from Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Starling Ventures, Olive Tree Capital, Capital X, and True Capital. The company has raised a total of $3 million. TechCrunch has more here.

SeedInvest takes the pain out of fundraising, allowing founders to spend less time pitching investors and more time building. SeedInvest has a community of more than 600,000 individual investors, who combined have played a role in successful raises for more than 250 startups. Whether you’re raising Seed to Series B, SeedInvest is ready to help you get there. Learn more and apply to raise.

A trio of PayPal Ventures alumni has raised $158 million for Infinity Ventures, a new early-stage venture firm dedicated to investing in fintech startups globally. Jeremy Jonker, Jay Ganatra and Mario Ruiz left PayPal Ventures in May 2021 and had their first close last June and final close by October 2021. They left PayPal because they wanted to expand beyond just investing in payments-focused startups and “zero in and focus solely on infrastructure and commerce enablement.” TechCrunch has more here.

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and cofounder of popular digital asset exchange FTX, took aim at Bitcoin in a new interview with the Financial Times, saying it has no future as a payments network. “The bitcoin network is not a payments network and it is not a scaling network,” Bankman-Fried said, arguing that the underlying proof-of-work system the Bitcoin network uses to verify transactions is incapable of scaling efficiently enough to keep pace with demand. More here.

The White House today hit back at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos after he took a swipe at President Joe Biden in a series of tweets over the weekend for his comments on inflation. CNBC has more here.

Kyle Harrison has joined Contrary Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm, as a general partner. Harrison previously spent two years each at Index Ventures, Coatue Management and TCV. More here.

More from that Elon Musk appearance in Miami today, where he also said he would vote Republican in "this election," after saying he has "voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, historically. Like, I'm not sure. I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear." More here.

The fintech team of Point72 Ventures is looking for a new associate as part of a two-year associate program. The role can be in the firm's Menlo Park or New York office. Apply here.

The total value of Tiger Global’s public stock positions fell from $46 billion at the end of last year to just over $26 billion at the end of the first quarter, according to regulatory filings released today. The Financial Times has the story here.

On average, a person in the U.S. has his or her online activity and location exposed a stunning 747 times every day by the real-time bidding industry, of which Google is the biggest player. TechCrunch has more here.

Electric-vehicle startup Rivian is suing a key supplier of seats, warning that a pricing dispute could impact production of an electric van ordered by Amazon. Rivian in March sued the supplier, Ohio-based Commercial Vehicle Group, accusing it of violating the supply contracts for seats by nearly doubling an initially agreed-upon price per unit The WSJ has the story here.

SpaceX employees are offering to sell shares via a private placement that would value Elon Musk’s launch and satellite company at around $125 billion, according to Bloomberg. The shares are being offered in an employee tender at $70 each, say the outlet's sources. The New York Post says there is speculation that Musk is himself a seller. as he looks to finance his bid for Twitter.

A map of wildfire risks to homes across the lower 48 states. 

Poseidon has "the talk" with son Percy Jackson.

"Wild Babies." 

Lake Como’s latest hotel is an 18th-century gem.

CELINE is launching a collection of dog accessories. (You don't want your dog dressed like some bum, do you?)

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