Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of December 19, 2022. Ngrok Raised $50M Series A

As the holiday season approaches, Silicon Valley funding has slowed down quite a bit this past week with only $273M in funding. But things have not slowed down for Twitter and Binance... 

Here are a few great reads for this week:

• 🤦🏻‍♀️ What is Binance talking about?  Binance said on CNBC that big four accounting firms do not know how to audit crypto exchanges while Coinbase completes initial Prime Broker (Prime) SOC 1 and SOC 2, Type 2 reports audited by Deloitte. Binance was hit by roughly $6B in net withdrawals December 12 -14 while Mazars, the accounting firm that issued a proof of reserves report for Binance just dropped the exchange as a client.
• ⚖️ The great crypto crisis is upon us -  While the rest of the crypto industry is grappling with how to shake off the dark cloud over the industry and keep forging ahead amid the industry winter, perhaps a more promising approach (particular for CBDC) is through central bank digital currencies that operate within the broader digital monetary system. This is an approach that builds on the trust embedded in central bank money, and could serve public interest in a future monetary system. Read more. 
• 🐦 Twitter Suspensions Draw International Outrage - Elon Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, introduced a new red line this week after he claimed that a car carrying one of his children was accosted by a “crazy stalker.” The rule: Any Twitter user who publishes the live location or other personal information of someone else — known as “doxxing” — will be taken offline. Read more
• 🇨🇳 Chinese Stock Delisting Threat Eases as US Gets Access to Audit Data - About 200 companies in China and Hong Kong, including Alibaba and JD.com, no longer face the threat of a US delisting after US inspectors reviewed their audits. Read more
• 🦍 Generative AI Images - Midjourney is my favorite AI tool for the month.  It produces a proprietary artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E. It is super cool. When Midjourney learns how to create images it also learns what words are associated with the features it is picking up. This means that when it is fed a prompt with an artist’s name it will generate an image with a “style” it has taught itself to associate with that name; the same applies to words which describe types of artwork. Read more. Check our my "Solana bored ape by Takashi Murakami". 

           

This week a total of 15 startups raised $273.4M in funding, 1 M&As:

• $81.9M goes to 4 Enterprise startups
• $19.5M goes to 3 Crypto/Web3 startups
• $38M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $3.5M goes to 1 Industrial startup
• $10M goes to 1 Hardware startup
• $78.5M goes to 2 BioTech startups
• $28M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup
• $9M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup
• $5M goes to 1 Other startup