Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of January 23, 2023. Vannevar Labs Raised $75M Series B

Happy Chinese New Year 2023 and San Francisco finally stopped raining!  Check out my Chinese New Year feast.  I made my very own radish cake. 

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

• 👨‍💻👨‍💻👨‍💻 23000 active crypto developers - There are over 23,000 active developers in crypto and open-source crypto projects is far higher than it has ever been. Electric Capital has released its annual developer report, which looks at open-source commits across multiple ecosystems to assess the health of the crypto industry. Developers tend to be ahead of consumers in terms of what's going to be important in the future. When enough of them gather in one industry, they have a way of making things that people didn't realize they wanted. The busiest month ever was June 2022, in which 23,323 developers committed code to blockchain projects. The prior all-time high, after the December 2017 peak, was 10,893 developers in August 2019.
• 🤯 🤯 🤯 Microsoft Azure now offers ChatGPT - Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service for businesses to access GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2. This is probably one of the most strategic move that Microsoft has done since Satya become CEO.  OpenAI already power GitHub Copilot. Can you imagine ChatGPT for Linkedin, DALL•E for Minecraft. Xbox Copilot powered by OpenAI.  Many many more possibilities. =) 
• 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ Facebook shut down their ChatGPT after 3 days - Meta released two AI tools in 2022 but no one really care. One is called Blenderbot3 in August 2022. The other one called Galactica in November 2022.  Unfortunately Meta pulled the plug after three days of experts and random social media users dunking on the scientific paper-trained Large Language Model (LLM) over its penchant to spit out made up nonsense. Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who kept angrily posting about people taking their Galactica "shitposting" too far before and after the demo's removal. It's sad to see that Facebook's reputation is so bad that. No one really want to use their product. They probably have the MOST user generated data compared to all other platforms.
• 🇭🇰🇭🇰🇭🇰 Unlocking the Potential of Hong Kong's Startup Ecosystem - Join me, Jacko Tsang, Director, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office and Asia Society Northern California on Thursday, February 16, 2023 at 5 pm PST, for a virtual discussion on 'Unlocking the Potential of Hong Kong's Startup Ecosystem: A Comprehensive Analysis of Funding, Trends, and Challenges'. I will release my annual Hong Kong Internet Report 2023.  Join us!
• 🍎🍎🍎 Lean hiring at Apple - Layoffs have hit the tech industry hard—except at Apple.  The world’s largest company has so far avoided the job cuts rippling through Amazon, Facebook and Google. Here is the top 10 largest tech companies in the world by number of employee according to Companiesmarketcap:
  • Amazon - 1,544,000
  • Foxconn - 826,608 
  • JD.com - 385,357
  • IBM - 282,100
  • Alibaba - 243,903
  • Panasonic - 241,423
  • Microsoft - 221,000
  • Google - 186,779
  • Canon -  184,034
  • Apple - 164,000

• $86M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $15M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
• $24M goes to 2 InsurTech startups
• $11M goes to 2 Gaming startups
• $21.5M goes to 2 Transportation startups
• $21M goes to 1 Climate Tech startup
• $75M goes to 1 GovTech startup
• $7.4M goes to 1 Other startup