Your DNA can now be pulled from thin air. Privacy experts are worried.

Maybe happening after all? Microsoft’s $69 billion bid to buy the video game company Activision Blizzard received a boost today when European Union regulators approved what would be the largest consumer tech deal in two decades. The New York Times has more here.

Amazon plans to bring ChatGPT-style product search to its web store, rivaling efforts by Microsoft and Google to weave generative AI into their search engines. Bloomberg has the story here.

Tiger Global is exploring options to cash in some of its more than $40 billion portfolio of privately held companies, according to the Financial Times. The New York-based outfit is working with an adviser to tap the secondary market to help return money to some of its investors, per the FT's sources; the outlet describes talks as "at an early stage" and says "potential buyers have said that any deal would probably be complicated by difficulties valuing Tiger’s private holdings, which include stakes in companies such as payments business Stripe, U.S. software group Databricks and China’s ByteDance." More here.

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Elad Gil, a successful founder and prolific investor, has already been called Silicon Valley's biggest solo venture capitalist given the massive amounts of capital he has been investing in recent years, including on behalf of institutions that reportedly include Harvard's endowment.

His track record goes a long way in explaining his quiet rise. For example, Gil invested in the Series A round of the highly valued payment software company Stripe 11 years ago and has invested in many of its subsequent rounds. He also snapped up stakes in the note-taking app Notion, the cloud collaboration platform Airtable, the military tech contractor Anduril, and the design tool Figma, which agreed to sell to Adobe for a whopping $20 billion last September -- though Adobe is still working to sell Justice Department authorities on the deal's merits.

In conversation late last week, Gil -- who occasionally blogs but maintains a bare-bones site -- declined to answer specific questions about how much he's managing or some of the amounts he has invested in companies. But the quant VC outfit TRAC calls him a "superforecaster" who has funded at least 155 companies, and whose "batting average" is .671, meaning 67% of his early-stage investments have raised at least follow-on rounds, per TRAC data. (It says at least 30 startups in Gil's portfolio have become "unicorn" companies, though as Gil himself notes, many valuations are poised to change over the next 18 months or so. “The really hard times are coming,” he says.)

When we spoke with Gil, we asked about what founders should do if things go from bad to worse. We also talked about his ongoing fascination with AI and some of the early checks he wrote to startups that are now raising serious venture dollars, including Character. AI, backed this year by Andreessen Horowitz, Perplexity.AI, backed by NEA, and Harvey, backed by Sequoia Capital.

Not last, Gil shared how he's using AI to scale up his own work. You can listen to our full interview; in the meantime, excerpts of that chat follow, edited for length.

More here.

Avenue One, a three-year-old, New York-based startup that helps single-family landlords buy and sell rental homes, just raised $100 million in fresh funding led by early investor WestCap, with participation from MetLife Investment Management and other backers. Other earlier investors in Avenue One include credit funds managed by KKR and Global Atlantic, a leading insurance company. Bloomberg has more here.

Ethernovia, a five-year-old startup based in San Jose, Ca., that creates hardware and software to support higher data rates for advanced vehicle applications, raised a $64 million Series A round from Porsche, Qualcomm Ventures, VentureTech Alliance, AMD Ventures, Western Digital Capital, Fall Line Capital, Taiwania Capital, and ENEA Capital. Reuters has more here.

M-KOPA, a 12-year-old Nairobi outfit that provides credit options to underbanked African consumers, raised a $55 million round led by Sumitomo, along with $200 million in debt. The company has raised over $245 million in equity. TechCrunch has more here.

Smart, a nine-year-old London startup that helps employers and their employees manage and monitor their pensions, raised a $95 million Series E round led by Aquiline Capital Partners, with Barclays, Chrysalis Investments, Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, DWS, and Natixis Investment Managers also piling on. The company has raised a total of $300.8 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Zip, a three-year-old San Francisco startup whose platform helps companies manage employee spending, raised a $100 million Series C round at a $1.5 billion valuation. The funding round was led by Y Combinator, with additional capital provided by CRV and Tiger Global, all previous investors. Forbes has more here.

Worldcoin, a nearly four-year-old startup cofounded by Sam Altman whose iris-scanning technology aims to give rise to a secure global cryptocurrency, is reportedly on the cusp of securing $100 million in fresh funding. According to the FT, the group includes new and existing investors. Some of those earlier backers are also investors in OpenAI, which Altman also cofounded and now runs as CEO, including Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Reid Hoffman. (FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is also reportedly a previous investor in WorldCoin, though when we asked Altman about this back in early January, he said he was not aware of this and that he had only met "SBF" once "very briefly.")

Cascade Health, a Seattle startup that helps companies and consumers access publicly available pricing information supplied by hospitals and insurance companies, raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by AlleyCorp. GeekWire has more here.

Cork, a Boston startup that offers cyber warranties to SMBs, raised a $6 million seed round led by DVx Ventures, with Outsiders Fund and Vestigo Ventures also chipping in. More here.

FemTherapeutics, a four-year-old Montréal startup that says it is building the world’s first customizable gynecological prosthetic to address pelvic health conditions, raised a $1.85 million round led by 2048 Ventures, with participation from Investissement Quebec, The51 Ventures, and Sheboot. The company has raised a total of $2.3 million. Forbes has more here.

Figorr, a startup that enables businesses to keep track of key data about highly perishable products such as such as location, humidity, and temperature, raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Atlantica Ventures, with VestedWorld, Jaza Rift Ventures, and Katapult VC also contributing. TechCrunch has more here.

Get access to the newly released Dynamo Frontline Insight Report: Trends, Challenges, & Insights from Leading Emerging Managers. 100+ Global Emerging Managers share bold moves for the future, predictions, and strategic plans for next the 12 months. The primary research covers firm priorities, fundraising, ESG and FinTech spend. Download the Emerging Manager Report here from Dynamo Software.

Atomic, the six-year-old venture studio and fund based in Miami and co-founded by serial entrepreneur Jack Abraham, has closed its fourth fund with $320 million in capital commitments. Abraham spoke at a StrictlyVC event in 2021. Fortune has more here.

Vice Media filed for bankruptcy today, punctuating a yearslong descent from a new-media darling that was valued at $5.7 billion just six years ago to a cautionary tale of the problems facing the digital publishing industry. The bankruptcy will not interrupt daily operations for Vice’s businesses, which in addition to its flagship website include the ad agency Virtue, the Pulse Films division and Refinery29, a women-focused site acquired by Vice in 2019.The company’s lenders — Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital — have agreed to purchase the company for $225 million. That’s only about 4% of the company’s 2017 valuation. Vice also has the right to sell to a higher bidder. More here and here.

ZestMoney's three founders – CEO Lizzie Chapman, COO and CFO Priya Sharma, and CTO Ashish Anantharaman -- have stepped down, leaving the future uncertain for the digital lending platform, following the collapse one week ago of a major acquisition deal with Walmart's PhonePe. TechCrunch has more here.

A federal appeals court rejected Elon Musk’s challenge to his 2018 agreement with the SEC that required him to have his Twitter posts related to Tesla screened. The court in Manhattan today ruled against Musk’s free speech claims, saying: “We see no evidence to support Musk’s contention that the SEC has used the consent decree to conduct bad-faith, harassing investigations of his protected speech." Autoblog has more here.

As part of Atomic's new fund (see "New Funds")  former Postmates CFO Kristin Schaefer has joined the outfit as a general partner. Before joining Postmates, Schaefer was an associate at Clarium Capital, an investment firm headed by Peter Thiel, who is among Atomic's LPs. More here.

San Francisco City & County Employees' Retirement System disclosed private equity commitments totaling $350 million in a report from CEO/CIO Alison Romano in materials for its upcoming May 18 board meeting, reports Pensions & Investments. Of its venture-related investments, it reportedly committed $25 million to Pelion Ventures VIII, a venture capital fund managed by Pelion Venture Partners; $21 million to Mayfield XVII and $14 million to Mayfield Select III, both venture capital funds managed by Mayfield Fund; and $10 million to KVC Secondaries Fund III, a venture capital fund managed by Knightsbridge Advisers.

"Information, Greg, is like a bottle of fine wine. You store it, you hoard it, you save it for a special occasion, and then you smash someone's f*ckin' face in with it."

Your DNA can now be pulled from thin air. Privacy experts are worried.

The race is on to bring the technology behind ChatGPT to the smartphone in your pocket. Running generative AI on mobile handsets, rather than through the cloud on servers operated by Big Tech groups, could answer one of the biggest economic questions raised by the latest tech fad, notes the FT. More here.

Why you can't trust Twitter's encrypted DMs.

The disappearing white-collar job.

The 81-year-old on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Is rich-mom energy the new quiet luxury?

How urgently your mom needs to talk to you, based on her voicemail.

Coming to auction: two unknown Rembrandt portraits found in a private collection in the U.K.

"The quality of deal flow is the single most important indicator of a fund's performance and our process to build our top of funnel remains remarkably consistent." – Samantha Santaniello, Head of Business Development & Partnerships, MassMutual Ventures. In this recent webinar, she spoke to Affinity about how the team builds deal flow. Watch now for tips and insights.