Silicon Valley Funding News - 2023 is the Year of ☁️ and 🐇

Welcome to 2023 - The Year of the Rabbit 🐰!

2022 was a memory, today is your gift. Tomorrow is your hope. And I want to start the year with some positive news and trends on cloud computing and venture capital ☁️☁️☁️.   

P.S. On January 11, I am hosting an in-person event in Hong Kong with my partner Alfred Chuang, founder of Race Capital and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee - Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and former president of Google China.  We will chat about our 2023 Outlook for Venture Capital, Technology and Startups.  Join us and sign up here. 

Here are a few great companies to watch for 2023:

• ☁️ Cloud computing to reach $1 Trillion by 2028 -  In spite of economic headwinds in 2022, the global cloud computing market stayed surprisingly strong. It is predicted to grow from $429.5 billion in 2021 to $1.02 trillion by 2028, according to Facts and Factors estimates.  While companies may be looking for places to cut costs, most startups (Facebook and Netflix) who are born in the cloud are not going to reduce cloud spending as they cannot suddenly build a data center, and many traditional companies will continue to shift to the cloud to become more agile. Some key KPIs from Q3 2022:
  • AWS revenue reached $20.5 billion with 34% market share
  • Microsoft Azure revenue reached $12 billion with 21% market share
  • Google Cloud revenue reached $6 billion with 11% market share
• 💰 Github generates $1B ARR - GitHub now has an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $1 billion with over 90 million active users on the platform. Up from a reported $200-300M in 2018 at the time of the Microsoft acquisition. GitHub monetizes by offering premium subscription plans for teams as well as a fee when users purchase third-party apps on their platform. I am particularly excited about GitHub Copilot which uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time. Super strategic for Microsoft (an OpenAI investor). 
• 🛍️ Adobe's $20 Billion Offer Is 'Too Good to Refuse' for Figma- On September 15, Adobe announced its acquisition of Figma for $20B.  Figma generated $190M in revenue in 2022 with about 50K customers. If Adobe and Figma are blocked legally from doing the deal over antitrust concerns,  Adobe will have to pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee in cash. Regardless, this is one of the biggest M&A in the history of tech and a huge win for the startup and venture industry (assuming the deal does go through).
• 💰 Docker generates $140M ARR - In the past 11 months, Docker’s ARR has nearly tripled to more than $140M, according to TheInformation. It has more than 70,000 commercial customers, including 70% of the Fortune 100. Considering they laid off 85% of its staff in 2015. This is a major and exciting turnaround. Definitely a company we should watch in 2023.
• 👦🏻 ChatGPT's 1M user growth in five days  - Considering the amount of time I have been spending on ChatGPT, we should definitely follow what OpenAI is doing this year.  Over a million users have registered to use ChatGPT within the first five days since it was opened to the public. As Greg Brockman predicts, 2023 will make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI advancement & adoption.

This week a total of 1 startup raised $38.9M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $38.9M goes to 1 Robotics startup