Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of January 16, 2023. Carbon Health Raised $100M Series D led by CVS Health Ventures

I am back to the rainy San Francisco!  It rained so much these past few weeks that there were people surfing in the streets!  

Here are a few great reads and statistics for this week:

• 🤯🤯 Microsoft's VALL-E - This new language modeling approach for text to speech synthesis (TTS) by Microsoft can generate speech in any voice after only hearing a 3 second sample of that voice. It's remarkable for just how small a scrap of audio it needs in order to extrapolate an entire human voice. During the pre-training stage, the team (all Chinese) scaled up the TTS training data to 60K hours of English speech. Listen to the sample speeches.
• ʕ•́ᴥ•̀ʔっ♡ Character.ai Another fun one. Character.ai is a neural language model chatbot web application that is able to generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversation. Constructed by previous developers of Google's LaMDA, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas.  You can chat with Elon, Joe Biden and Kanye West. Although I think it would be more fun to combine VALL-E voice capability so you can actually talk to all of them. Check it out.
• 🇦🇪🇦🇪  2023 Prediction - One of my prediction for 2023 made it to Fortune 👉 Dubai will become the crypto capital of the world.  Dubai and UAE in general attracted many exchanges, crypto funds in the past 12-18 months with the government stating more transparent policies for crypto licenses. From Binance to the 3AC, many crypto founders are flocking there from Singapore and China.  With UAE licenses, exchanges would operate in the GCC countries which include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman. Saudi, Qatar and UAE (some richest countries in the world). These countries want to diversify beyond the oil focused economies. Very interesting to learn and watch.
• 👤👤 Shadow banning - Shadow banning when a platform deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster. Last month, Elon Musk released a few Twitter files with internal evidence of a number of conservative voices being deliberately silenced coming to light, it only builds further distrust of big tech’s unfair reach into censoring while hiding behind their algorithm's mysterious ways of prioritizing content. Previous Twitter employee lied about this in 2018.  Meanwhile, Elon is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal. Who can we really trust?
• 📺📺 Alfred on TV - My partner Alfred was on Bloomberg commenting on Hong Kong tech ecosystem. Hong Kong does not need to be Silicon Valley. Hong Kong just needs to be Hong Kong again. He is bullish on 5 areas AI, FinTech, Web3 (digital economy) healthcare and manufacturing.  Watch him live. 

This week a total of 8 startups raised $186.9M in funding, 4 M&As:

• $22M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $14.2M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3
• $5.6M goes to 1 EdTech startup
• $1.1M goes to 1 Social Media startup
• $106M goes to 2 Healthcare startups
• $8M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $30M goes to 1 Hardware startup