Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of March 20, 2023. Stripe Raised $6.5B Series I

Everything AI and the banking crisis everywhere happened at once last week. I am extremely excited about the potential promise of GenAI but am also very uneasy about the ability of our banking system to support startups long term.

What happened?

Monday

• Silicon Valley Bank reopened after the FDIC's announcement protecting all depositors
• Stanford releases Alpaca 7B - instruction-following language model
• Google announces Med-PaLM 2 - a new medical LLM

Tuesday

• OpenAI releases GPT4
• Anthropic releases Claude
• Google announces the PaLM API & MakerSuite
• Adept raises $350M
• Google adds GenerativeAI to workspaces

• Credit Suisse borrowed more than $50 billion from the Swiss Central Bank
• PyTorch releases 2.0
• Stripe added GPT4

• Microsoft releases an AI Copilot for the 365 suite
• First Republic’s rescue as the biggest US banks deposited $30 billion as a stopgap. 
• Credit Suisse received a lifesaving $54 billion credit line from the Swiss National Bank
• Our AI @ Berkeley event with Race Capital and Learn2Launch program was a success! Check out our photo

Friday

• Midjourney releases V5 (for all paid users)
• SVB filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

Saturday

• Flew back to Hong Kong for our SOLD OUT FoundersHK event with KK Wong (co-founder of Xiaomi)

Sunday

• UBS acquired Credit Suisse for around $3 billion

This week a total of 10 startups raised $7B in funding, 1 M&As:

• $362.5M goes to 2 Enterprise startups
• $6.5B goes to 1 Fintech startup
• $4M goes to 1 HR Tech startup
• $3.5M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $65M goes to 2 BioTech startups
• $30M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup
• $65M goes to 1 Robotics startup
• $15M goes to 1 AgTech startup