Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of April 3, 2023. Graphiant Raised $62M Series B

I am back to cloudy and chilly San Francisco!

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

• 🧞‍♂️ Elon Musk wants to stop OpenAI - More than 2400 people have signed and published an open letter urging companies to take a six-month pause before AI systems get more powerful than OpenAI’s newly-released GPT-4. Signatories included Elon Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and was its biggest initial donor.  Elon stepped down from OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 and had a big fallout with the founders. Read more
• ⬆️ 10% AI valuation bump  - Many say if you put as part of your pitch, you will automatically get a 10% bump in your startup valuation.  Per PitchBook data, the median pre-money valuation for generative AI firms hit $90 million so far this year, up from $42.5 million in 2022. Every SaaS company is “developing a strategy around AI. Going forward, it’s going to be very difficult to raise any cash as at least a B2B or enterprise SaaS company if you don’t have an A.I. strategy. Read more
• 📈 Google's 12% AI bump - The company’s market value has increased more than $130B amid a 12% jump in shares this month, putting the stock on course for its largest monthly increase in nearly 2 years. This follows a February slump driven in part by mounting concerns over the ability of its Bard chatbot to compete with rival ChatGPT. However, analyst reports following Bard’s recent launch have helped mitigate this concern to some degree. 
• 🪟 Discount window - a safety net for the banks.  In the first half of March, three banks - Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Silvergate - all had relatively classic bank runs and collapsed.  As a result, the Federal Reserve got a lot of requests to use one of its oldest and most important tools for soothing such troubles: the discount window. Listen to this
• 👮 The New GateKeepers - check out the 104 page macro presentation by Benedict Evans on the state of tech. Click here

This week a total of 10 startups raised $189.6M in funding, 2 M&As:

• $152.6M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $7M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $7M goes to 1 Web3/Crypto startup
• $8M goes to 1 EdTech startup
• $15M goes to 1 Robotic startup