Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of May 8, 2023. Simpplr Raised $70M Series D

Hello from Hong Kong!  I will be speaking this Tuesday at the Bloomberg Wealth Summit and hosting FoundersHK online talk on How to Attract, Hire and Onboard the Best Hires. Come join us!

Here are a few great reads for the week:

• 🔥🍗 - Apply to Demo at AI vs 🔥🍗 Pitch Night - Race Capital is hosting an AI Pitch Night during SF Tech Week, in collaboration with A16Z and Web Summit's Collision, on June 1. Apply to pitch your AI startup in front of hundreds of founders, operators and investors. Apply here
• 🖥️ - Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" - While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop. Read more
• 📊 - Employee option pool benchmark - Option pools are defined as the percentage of fully diluted company equity reserved for compensating employees. Yet, many companies do not utilize the full option pool before raising their next funding round.  Great report on how much equity to give your first 10 employees for your startup. Read more by Carta

• ⚖️ - US Crypto Regulatory Environment - Crypto advocates say recent written and unwritten policies by US financial regulators make it unfeasible for crypto firms to operate in the US. New York Attorney General Letitia James is proposing new legislation that would give her office more authority to regulate the increasingly tumultuous cryptocurrency industry.  The bill, called the Crypto Regulation, Protection, Transparency and Oversight Act, or CRPTO. Read more
• 💬 GPT everywhere all at once - So many new GPTs were launched this week.  Check out:
  • Salesforce announces SlackGPT
  • Box.com embedded BoxAI
  • Finder.com uses ChatGPT to pick stock
  • OpenAPI launches Code interpreter

This week a total of 10 startups raised $137M in funding, 3 M&As:

• $18.6M goes to 4 Enterprise startups
• $29M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $70M goes to 1 HR startup
• $3M goes to 1 eCommerce startup
• $10M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup
• $6.4M goes to 1 Public Safety startup