Yuri Milner renounces Russia, Elon Musk get sued (by someone new), and a late-night chat with a fake heiress

We haven't hosted a StrictlyVC event in too long -- like a lot of you, we were a little (very?) manic about catching up on travel this year -- but we're getting back into the swing of things beginning on Thursday, January 12, with an overdue cocktail party/INSIDER evening in San Francisco thanks to CBRE, the commercial real estate services giant. (Thank you, CBRE!) 

We're excited; January is typiclally kind of miserable; now it doesn't need to be.:)

If you'd also like to partner with us on this one, let us know; we'd love to talk as we get things underway.

We'll have many more details as we sail toward the new year. Seating will be limited; in the meantime, mark your calendars and reserve your spot here. 👈

U.S. restrictions on exports of chips and chip-making equipment to China are likely to deal a setback to some of China's fast-emerging semiconductor companies, reports the WSJ. Rules unveiled Friday by the Commerce Department require a license for U.S. companies to export advanced chips and chip-making equipment key to China’s technological goals, vastly expanding on existing rules restricting the export of advanced technologies to China. More here.

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Antonio Rodriguez, who joined Matrix Partners in 2010 after a Matrix-backed company he cofounded was sold to Hewlett-Packard, told us last week that Matrix just raised its biggest fund in roughly 20 years. It's an $800 million vehicle that the firm closed in June and is announcing for the first time now.

Eight hundred million dollars is a lot of capital for the firm, which, like Benchmark, has been consistent over the years about maintaining comparatively smaller funds, even while many other venture firms have doubled, tripled -- even quintupled -- their assets under management. (Like Benchmark, Matrix raised a $1 billion fund once during the dot-com era; it wound up returning half of it to its investors when the market imploded.)

We talked with Rodriguez about the new fund. We also talked with him about how Matrix works with Matrix Partners China and Matrix Partners India, founded in 2008 and 2006, respectively. (They mostly operate independently.) Given that software infrastructure is a major focus area for the firm -- it was an early investor in Hubspot, Zendesk and Canva, for example -- we also asked Rodriguez about web3, or the promise of a decentralized internet. As it turns out, Matrix doesn't put much stock in it, not yet anyway. Excerpts from our chat follow, edited for length.

You recently closed a fund that's almost twice as big as your last three funds, which were each $450 million. You were really disciplined about size, then changed your minds. Why?

With our current fund that we just finished investing, every single deal we did was either at concept or seed or pre-seed or post-seed or Series A, so for us, it really wasn't about stage drift. Due to new entrants and due to existing players moving backward into the A, [in recent years] you went from having to write a $10 million check to, in some cases, $15 million or $20 million, and we wanted to make sure we could keep doing those entry checks if the market had grown. That's still very much [the case], especially for our categories.

So you're really not seeing these Series A stage deals getting any smaller.

Not yet. For the best entrepreneurs, a Series A round size can still be $20 million plus. We also tend to like more technical projects, whether that's software or hardware, or ideally, [a company at the] intersection of both, and those companies just need more money.

Some of these later-stage outfits appear to be shrinking. Is it easier now to maintain your pro rata without throwing elbows?

It is easier, and it will continue to get slightly easier. But also, if you look at our best exits across the last three funds, you'll find that in these B and the C rounds, they don't lend themselves well to what I would call the spreadsheet jockeys. [For these companies], you really need more conviction, and in a lot of cases, that meant you had to step up, as opposed to expecting that a Tiger or Coatue would come in and, in 72 hours, fund that company. That's part of why maintaining our pro rata in this new environment may be easier, but it will be equally necessary.

More here.

Airwallex, a seven-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based global payments and banking infrastructure company, has raised $100 million in added Series E funding at the $5.5 billion company valuation it was assigned when the round first closed in two parts roughly a year ago. (Airwallex has now raised $400 million in Series E funding and $900 million altogether.) Australian industry superannuation fund HostPlus and an unnamed North American pension fund participated in the extension, along with existing investors, including Tencent Holdings, Square Peg, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital China, and Lone Pine Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Electra, a three-year-old startup based in Boulder, Co., that is working on a process to produce iron from commercial and low-grade ores using zero-carbon intermittent electricity, raised an $85 million round. Investors included Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon, BHP Ventures, Temasek, S2G Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, Lowercarbon Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Baruch Future Ventures. The company has raised a total of $113.5 million. Daily Camera has more here.

CrowdSec, a three-year-old Paris startup that has created a participative and open source intrusion prevention and detection system that assesses the reputation of an IP address based on its behavior, raised a $14 million Series A round led by Supernova Invest with additional funds provided by Breega. The company has raised a total of $22.6 million. SecurityWeek has more here.

Endor Labs, a 1.5-year-old, Palo Alto startup that uses graph analysis tech to learn how dependencies are being used within an organization and create indicators of risk, just emerged from stealth with $25 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Sierra Ventures and angel investors, including Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. TechCrunch has more here.

Meilisearch, the four-year-old creator behind the open source search engine project of the same name, today closed a $15 million Series A round led by Felicis, with participation from CRV, LocalGlobe, ESOP, Mango Capital, Seedcamp and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. TechCrunch has more here.

Ochre Bio, a three-year-old startup based in Oxford, UK, that is developing RNA medicines for liver disease, raised a $30 million Series A round from Khosla Ventures, Hermes-Epitek, Backed VC, LifeForce Capital, Selvedge, AixThera, and LifeLink. The company has raised a total of $39.8 million. The Financial Times has more here.

Trendsi, which connects sellers with suppliers while managing the back-end supply chain for its entire customer base, has raised $25 million in Series A funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the tranche, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, Footwork VC, Peterson Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and individual investors, including Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma. TechCrunch has more here.

​​Scale3 Labs, a startup based in San Jose, Ca., that is building open source tools for web3 developers, raised a $5.3 million seed round led by Redpoint Ventures, with additional participation from Mysten Labs and Howard University. More here.

Shimmer, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that claims to provide "bite sized" coaching to people with ADHD or executive function challenges, raised a $1.3 million seed round, according to Fortune. Investors in the deal included Y Combinator, Honeystone Ventures, Koa Labs, and Gaingels. More here.

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Grocery delivery app pioneer Getir is in talks to take over its heavily loss-making rival Gorillas, according to the Financial Times, which notes that investor sentiment in the overall sector is cooling. Reportedly Getir and Gorillas entered into exclusive negotiations in recent days and the start-ups intend to close the acquisition by the end of next month, according to the FT. More here.

Greg Bettinelli, who recently left Upfront Ventures after an eight-year run, announced today that he has joined the consumer-focused investment group TCG (The Chernin Group) as a partner in L.A. More here.

Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner announced today that he has officially renounced his Russian citizenship, completing the process in August. “My family and I left Russia for good in 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea,” tweeted Milner, who founded the investment firm DST Global in 2009 and famously funneled money into Facebook and Twitter ahead of their IPOs. The WSJ has more here.

Elon Musk was sued by a Twitter investor who says his on-again off-again purchase of the social-media platform and his public attacks on the company were designed to manipulate its stock price.

Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s ex-head of security, said he burned 10 handwritten notebooks and deleted 100 computer files at the behest of company managers as part of his separation agreement, according to Oct. 3 court filings that were unsealed today. Bloomberg has more here.

BeReal, the photo-sharing app aiming for more authenticity in social media, has now been downloaded 53 million times, but only 9% of its active Android users open the app daily, according to research firm Sensor Tower. (In fairness, TechCrunch adds, BeReal adoption on Android is not happening at the same pace as on iOS.) More here.

Yikes. A new tool now lets anyone see just how much money some users have lost after the troubled crypto lender filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July. Decrypt has more here.

Skepticism, confusion, frustration: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse struggles.

"It looks like you've been in a crash."

Neil deGrasse Tyson fact-checks "Top Gun: Maverick": Tom Cruise should be "very dead."

Helicopter parents are last year's model.

How Colleen Hoover rose to rule the best-seller list.

A late-night interview with newly freed Anna Sorokin.

A unique penthouse in Oakland.

Richard Branson’s Moskito Island unveils its newest party-ready estate. The party will cost you $19,000 a night, but it will be epic (one would hope).

Cytonics develops novel therapies to help those living with inflammatory diseases. The biopharma pioneer has raised over $18M to date. In its current round with SeedInvest, Cytonics pursues FDA approval on a leading therapeutic drug for osteoarthritis. This round closes soon. View important disclosures and risks associated with Equity Crowdfunding Investing by clicking here.