Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of March 6, 2023. CARGO Therapeutics Raised $200M Series A

March is going to be a super busy and exciting month!  In addition to our office warming party this coming, I will be hosting AI @ Berkeley and FoundersHK meetup with KK Wong, cofounder of Xiaomi in Hong Kong. Join me!

Here are a few great reads and lists for the week: 

• AI @ Berkeley - ​Race Capital and UC Berkeley's Learn2Launch program is proud to present AI @ Berkeley. A half-day program that'll focus on all things Generative AI. ​Harrison Chase - CEO and co-founder of LangChain, Amr Awadallah - Founder and CEO of Vectara, Founder/ex-CTO Cloudera, ​Mark Coopersmith - Faculty Director at UC Berkeley and ​Alfred Chuang - General Partner at Race Capital, Founder and CEO of BEA Systems will be speaking.  Join us on March 17. 
• KK Wong and Xiaomi - I am super excited to host KK Wong - cofounder of Xiaomi. KK cofounded Xiaomi and 6 other co-founders in 2010.  Today, Xiaomi is world third largest smartphone brand ins the world with over 150 million units sold in 2022. I met KK when I was 17 years old at Purdue. He joined Microsoft right after graduation and worked there for over 14 years. in 2010, he decided to leave his comfortable job to start a hardware company (which is notoriously difficult). We will chat about his founder journey. Join us on March 22 in Hong Kong
• The AI Goldrush - SNAP is launching My AI- their new chatbot running on OpenAI's GPT. My AI is available as an experimental feature for Snapchat+ subscribers. Meanwhile, Zoom is also jumping on AI bandwagon. Eric Yuan, founder and CEO mentioned that The age of AI and large language models has arrived during their latest earning call and AI can "truly help" Zoom, his company. Read more 
• A Generation of Women Tech Leaders is Over - When Susan Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube in 2014, she was in relatively good company. Marissa Mayer was running Yahoo. Sheryl Sandberg was the influential second-in-command at Facebook. Meg Whitman was at the helm of HP, and Ginni Rometty was the first woman in charge of IBM. Wojcicki’s announcement to step down from her leadership role at YouTube marks the end of an era. The tech industry has now lost an entire generation of trailblazing women leaders and replaced them mostly with men. Read more
• TikTok Earned $205M More Than Facebook, Twitter, Snap And Instagram Combined - TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter combined have grown quarterly IAP revenue 91% since Apple introduced ATT. TikTok primarily focuses on creator rewards, and it’s doing better than all the other social networks combined. In Q4 of 2022, TikTok generated over $350 million in in-app revenue. Read more

This week a total of 12 startups raised $460.7M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $76M goes to 2 Enterprise startups
• $5.3M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
• $12M goes to 1 HR startup
• $5.7M goes to 1 Social Media startup
• $60M goes to 1 eCommerce startup
• $1.6M goes to 1 Edtech startup
• $66.5M goes to 1 Marketplace startup
• $10M goes to 1 Food and Beverage startup
• $223.6M goes to 3 BioTech startups