Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of May 15, 2023. Triumph Raised $10.2M Series A

Back to Sunny San Francisco!  

Here are a few great reads for the week:

• 🔥🍗 - Apply to Demo at AI vs 🔥🍗 Pitch Night - Race Capital is hosting on June 1 an AI Pitch Night during SF Tech Week, in collaboration with a16z. Apply to pitch your AI startup in front of hundreds of founders, operators and investors. Apply here
• 🧑‍🏫 - How AI could save (not destroy) education - AI could spark the greatest positive transformation of education that ever seen. Students and educators could collaborate with AI tools such as AI tutor for every student and an AI teaching assistant for every teacher.  His Khanmigo AI tool is pretty cool.  Watch on TED
• 🤖 Generative AI is coming to Google Search - and it will appear at the top of the page as an “AI-powered snapshot" per one of the 100 Google I/O announcements this week. It’s officially called the Search Generative Experience. Google is also launching Imagen to power image generation, Codey for code generation and Chirp for speech-to-text. You can sign up to test and get early access. 
• 📺 Edith on Bloomberg - In the year 2023, the impact of AI on enterprises is comparable to what mobile technology did for consumers in 2018. Every trillion-dollar tech platform is developing its own GenAI tool or chatbot, with names like Google's Bard, Amazon's Bedrock, Baidu's Ernie, and Salesforce's SlackGPT. Watch my interview with Bloomberg's David Ingles
• 🐦 Why Elon Musk chose Linda Yaccarino to lead Twitter as CEO - Yaccarino, an advertising executive who served as NBCUniversal’s chairperson of global advertising and partnerships, brings vast experience generating revenue and partnerships with key brands, and she will also need to balance the need to implement Musk’s policies aimed at maximizing his vision of “free speech.” Read more on The Washington Post
• 🤪 AI Startup Rewind Gets 170 Offers at $350 Million Valuation in Unusual Fundraising - On April 14, the CEO of Rewind shared a link to an online form and asked investors to state “the highest amount you’re comfortable” paying between $200 million and $1 billion. It was a risky experiment, particularly during a period of declining valuations, but it worked. Read more on The Information

This week a total of 11 startups raised $55.1M in funding, 1 M&As:

• $9.2M goes to 2 Enterprise startups
• $10M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $1.2M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
• $1.6M goes to 1 HR startup
• $4M goes to 1 Recycling startup
• $5.5M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $2.7M goes to 1 Media startup
• $10.2M goes to 1 Gaming startup
• $8M goes to 1 Supply Chain startup
• $2.7M goes to 1 Other startup