Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of November 21, 2022. Astera Labs Raised $150M Series D

Hello from Hong Kong!  Finally landed and got to see my parents after almost 3 years. No more mandatory hotel quarantine requirement. Yay!  

Here are a few great reads for this week:

• 💰 Sematic Raised $3M Seed led by Race Capital - We are excited to lead a $3M seed round into Sematic - an Open Source Continuous Machine Learning Platform.  Emmanuel Turlay and his team spent years at Cruise and Instacart.  Other investors include Y Combinator, SOMA Capital, Leonis Capital, Pioneer Fund and more. Read our announcement. 
• 🔥 Grindr went IPO - the world’s largest social network for the LGBTQ community successful went IPO this past week with +213.84% first day pop! It generated $146M in revenue in 2021, up from $105M in 2020. I think the part that is interesting is that its users spent over 60 mins per day on the app (2X the time they spend on Facebook) but only 6% of Grindr’s users pay for subscription.  Versus 9% for Bumble and 18% for Tinder.  Read investor presentation
• 🐦 Twitter Downsize - Large numbers of Twitter staff quit after new owner Elon Musk called on them to sign up for "long hours at high intensity" or leave. Before Mr Musk took control of Twitter the company had about 7,500 staff. Some estimate it's probably going to be less than 2,000 people. Here are some of them working till 1am 
• 💸  FTX Ventures portfolio analysis -  Out of the 47 rounds FTX Ventures participated in, the firm led or co-led 19 including some of the largest round including $300 million Series B into Mysten Labs, $150 million Series A into Aptos Labs, and $135 million Series A into LayerZero Labs. Read more
• 🌲 Sequoia’s generative AI market map - Generative AI comprises artificial intelligence technologies and applications that generate entirely new content: code from natural language, 3D assets from 2D images, and human-like voices from scripts. Here is CBInsights 2022 AI Trends to watch

       

This week a total of 24 startups raised $802.6M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $363.8M goes to 13 Enterprise startups
• $20M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $8M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
• $27M goes to 1 Edtech startup
• $20M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup
• $12.5M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $150M goes to 1 Hardware startup
• $88.3M goes to 3 Healthcare startups
• $78M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $35M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup