Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of January 30, 2023. Angle Health Raised $58M Series A

On February 16, join me and the Asia Society discussing the topic of Unlocking the Potential of Hong Kong's Startup Ecosystem. Join us!

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

• Github's Octoverse Report - In 2022, over 94M developers made 413M open source contributions on Github. It's interesting to see the fastest growing language on GitHub was the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) followed by Shell and Go communities. Today, some of the biggest open source projects are commercially backed. This means more talent, more code and even more money in the open. Read more
• Sequoia's Generative AI Application Landscape - I really like this landscape map put together by the Sequoia team.  We can think of Generative AI apps as a UI layer and “little brain” that sits on top of the “big brain” that is the large general-purpose models.  Read more

           

• DOJ Sues Google - The US government believes that Google has used anticompetitive and unlawful conduct to eliminate any threat to its dominance over digital advertising. Google now controls almost all major website publisher uses to sell ads on their websites (publisher ad server); it controls the dominant advertiser tool that helps millions of advertisers buy ad inventory (advertiser ad network); and it also controls the largest advertising exchange (ad exchange). This lawsuit could significantly change the future of the digital advertising industry and may create room for startups to compete. 
• The Smartphone Industry Suffers the Largest-Ever Decline - According to IDC, worldwide smartphone shipments declined 11.3% in 2022 with 1.21 billion units shipped, which represents the lowest annual shipment total since 2013.  This is due to macroeconomic headwinds, along with coronavirus-related disruptions which have weakened consumer demand. China's smartphone sales also dropped over 14% in 2022 and reached their lowest level in a decade. Apple, however, outperformed the market with just a 3% decrease.
• President Biden Stops ASML Selling to China - The Biden Administration secured an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of some advanced chip-making machinery to China. This means the Netherlands government will prevent ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) from selling to China at least some immersion lithography machines, the most advanced kind of gear in the company’s deep ultraviolet lithography line. ASML dominates the market for lithography systems, giant machines that use light beams to create the circuitry of computer chips. Customers include all major chipmakers, including TSMC, Samsung and Intel.

• $298M goes to 9 Enterprise startups
• $12M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $58M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
• $2.3M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup
• $10M goes to 1 Wellness startup