"I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it."

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes can’t stay out of prison pending her appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said today that Holmes’s appeal doesn’t raise a substantial question of law and that even if it did, it is unlikely that it would be enough to overturn her fraud conviction. The WSJ has more here.

Tesla held its annual shareholder meeting in Austin today, where Elon Musk addressed a proposal that he be replaced as CEO, owing to his growing number of other distractions. Making it clear he has no intention of stepping down, he said: “I think Tesla’s going to play an important role in AI and AGI and I think I need to oversee that to make sure it’s good." Musk separately told CNBC in a long interview: "I'll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman today testified before members of a Senate subcommittee and largely agreed with them on the need to regulate AI technology, as well as offered a three-point plan toward that end. Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana was so charmed with Altman that he asked if Altman himself might be qualified to oversee a federal regulatory body overseeing AI. Altman answered that he loves his current job but offered to have his company send a list of suitable candidates.

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NewLimit, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based, 17-person company that aims to increase the number of healthy years each person lives by epigenetically reprogramming cells, is today announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series A funding from Dimension, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and other investors.

We talked with two of the companies’ four cofounders yesterday, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and VC Blake Byers, who has a Stanford PhD in bioengineering. During that chat, we garnered more insight into the round, which also counts Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam, Y Combinator President Garry Tan, and founder-investor Elad GIl as backers. We talked with the pair about how NewLimit can differ itself from rival companies. We also asked Armstrong about the inevitable jokes centered on billionaires trying to escape death by throwing money at it. More below.

Brian you have a job as Coinbase CEO. Blake, you have a job running Byers Capital. Who is running NewLimit?

BA: There are four cofounders of the company. I’m really just an investor and a board member. There two other cofounders, Greg [Johnson] and Jacob [Kimmel] are really operating the business day to day.

Are they co-CEOs or is the company bringing on a full-time CEO?

BB: The company doesn’t have a technical full time CEO right now.

Why is that?

BA: It’s early stage and the current founding team is working really well, so we haven’t defined that yet.

But you’ve now raised $150 million to date, is that right, and are you talking about the valuation of the company at this point?

BB: The $110 million from Brian and myself is a commitment over the lifetime of the company so it’s not fully funded yet, then this $40 million is another commitment from VCs. So we have access to that capital over time, but it’s not necessarily the amount that’s in the bank. We’re not [talking about the valuation].

More here.

Ray Therapeutics, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that is developing gene therapies to restore visual function in people with blinding diseases, raised a $100 million Series A round led by Novo Holdings, with additional participation from Deerfield Management, Norwest Venture Partners, Platanus, MRL Ventures Fund (Merck & Co.'s fund), and previous investor 4BIO Capital. The company has raised a total of $110 million. BioPharma Dive has more here.

Zip, a three-year-old San Francisco startup whose procurement software helps employees obtain approval for purchases by routing the order to finance, legal, IT, and security, raised a $100 million Series C round at a $1.5 billion valuation. The lead investor was Y Combinator, while CRV and Tiger Global also took part. The company has raised a total of $181.3 million. TechCrunch has more here.

ANYbotics, a seven-year-old Zürich startup that is developing robots for complex industrial environments, raised a $50 million Series B round co-led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Aramco Ventures, Swisscom Ventures, and Swisscanto Private Equity also chipping in. The company has raised a total of $75.1 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Hippocratic AI, a startup that is developing large language models for healthcare use cases, raised a $50 million seed round. General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz were the co-leads. Reuters has more here.

Huntress, an Ellicott City, Md.-based managed security platform for small and mid-sized businesses, ha raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from earlier backers Forgepoint Capital and JMI Equity. The outfit has now raised $118 million in total. More here.

River, a startup whose bitcoin-related financial service offerings include a brokerage that offers zero-fee dollar-cost averaging, mining, full-reserve custody, and a wallet that supports both on-chain transactions and transactions on the Lightning Network, has raised $35 million in Series B funding led by Kingsway Capital. Other investors included Peter Thiel, Goldcrest, Cygni, M13, Valor Equity Partners, Esas Ventures, and Alarko Ventures. The company has raised a total of $52 million. CoinDesk has more here.

Spiff, a six-year-old Salt Lake City startup whose software helps companies calculate sales commissions so that sales professionals can manage their own commission programs without relying on developers, raised a $50 million Series C round led by Salesforce Ventures, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Kickstart Fund, and Album also pitching in. The company has raised a total of $112 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Together, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that is developing open source generative AI models and services to “help organizations incorporate AI into their production applications,” raised a $20 million seed round led by Lux Capital, with Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, A Capital, Robot Ventures, Common Metal, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and SCB 10x also piling on. TechCrunch has more here.

AnotherBlock, a two-year-old Stockholm startup that has built a blockchain-based marketplace for music, raised a $4.3 million round. Stride VC was the lead investor. The company has raised a total of $5.5 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Jenfi, a four-year-old Singapore startup that claims it can provide online businesses with revenue-based financing in as little as a day, raised a $6.6 million round led by Headline Asia, with ICU Ventures, Granite Oak, Korea Investment Partners, Golden Equator Capital, Atlas Ventures, and previous investor Monk's HIll Ventures also taking part. The company has raised a total of $41.2 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Odsy Foundation, a non-profit crypto project that aims to provide a secure and programmable access control layer for Web3 apps through dynamic decentralized wallets, raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Blockchange Ventures, with Rubik Ventures, No Limit Holdings, Node Capital, Insignius Capital, FalconX, SolrDAO, and TPC also anteing up. Decrypt has more here.

Quilt, a year-old, startup that was founded by three former Google employees and which says it's designing smaller, sleeker and smarter heat pump systems, has raised $9 million in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital and Gradient Ventures. Other backers in the round include Incite Ventures, MCJ Collective, Garage Capital, Climate Capital and Spacecadet. TechCrunch has more here.

Visual Layer, a one-year-old Tel Aviv startup that can analyze hundreds of millions of images in AI training sets and automatically find potential issues such as mislabeled, broken, or duplicated images, raised a $7 million seed round. Madrona and Insight Partners were the co-leads. TechCrunch has more here.

Wrangle, a three-year-old startup based in Durham, NC, that has built a conversational workflow engine to automate a company’s workflows, approvals, and tickets in Slack, raised a $2 million seed round led by Accomplice, with CorrelationVentures, Triangle Tweener Fund, and existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Eniac Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and TDF Ventures also joining in. More here.

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East Ventures, an Indonesian-based venture firm that Bloomberg describes as "Southeast Asia’s most active early-stage tech investment firm," has closed its 12th fund with $250 million in capital commitments. More here.

Elkstone, a 12-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based early-stage fund focused on Irish startups, has raised €100 million for its newest fund. Tech.eu has more here.

The San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm Genoa Ventures is preparing to raise $100 million this year for its third fund, it tells Axios. Genoa invests in biotech startups in agriculture, food, tools and diagnostics, and industrials like chemicals. It closed its second fund with $84 million in capital commitments last summer. More here.

Ivy Ventures, a new operator-based venture capital firm based in Indianapolis, says it has launched with a $20 million debut fund. IndyStar has more here.

Meta’s grand experiment in building an enterprise-ready customer service platform has come to a close, observes TechCrunch, which says Facebook's parent company has officially spun out Kustomer, the CRM startup it acquired last year for around $1 billion. The new entity is launching with $60 million from previous backers Battery, Redpoint and Boldstart, and, according to one report, a quarter of its old valuation, or $250 million. More here.

Elon Musk’s X Corp., the parent company of Twitter, has made its first acquisition: a tech talent recruiting service called Laskie, according to Bloomberg. The deal, which was reportedly part-equity and part-cash, recently closed, says the outlet. More here.

The WSJ has dives into the last months and days of Cash App founder Bob Lee.

WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani is stepping down three years after replacing Adam Neumann and will be replaced on an interim basis by telecom executive David Tolley, who joined the board early this year. WeWork has yet to turn a profit. As the market digested the news that Mathrani is off to the private equity firm Sycamore Partner, WeWork shares fell to a new low of 35 cents. The Real Deal has more here.

Austin Russell, the 28-year-old American CEO of electric vehicle tech company Luminar, plans to put in only $10 million of his own money as part of his bid to buy 82% of Forbes for $656 million, Axios is reporting. The rest is almost all coming from foreign investors. "While it's not unusual for foreign investors or companies to buy U.S. media brands, it is unusual to structure a deal to make it look like a U.S. citizen is buying an asset, when most of the money being used to fund the deal is originating from foreign investors," notes the outlet. It separately explains that Forbes was "ready to sell to the group of mostly foreign investors in March. But management feared regulatory pushback and pivoted."

Ring co-founder Jamie Siminoff is leaving Amazon and Ring altogether and becoming CEO of the enterprise smart home company Latch after it buys Honest Day’s Work, a little-known business Siminoff appears to have founded about four months ago.

Tesla’s co-founder and former CTO, JB Straubel, is joining the company’s board of directors as an independent director. Straubel, who currently runs the battery materials and recycling company he founded, Redwood Materials, will take over the spot vacated by the former CIO of Japan’s $1.5 trillion pension fund, Hiromichi Mizuno.

For the first time in more than a decade, returns for venture funds were negative for three consecutive quarters last year, according to research firm PitchBook Data published by the WSJ. More here.

Andreessen Horowitz is preparing to launch a fund of funds (FoF) to invest in other startup backers and improve its access to promising startups, says Business Insider. The partners have long served as LPs in a wide variety of funds, and they could simply be pooling their own capital, according to the outlet, which says it's “still unclear if A16z is raising new funds from limited partners — the pension fund and endowment managers who contribute to venture funds," or setting up this FoF separately. (A spokesperson for the firm reportedly wouldn't say.) In the meantime, we do sometimes wonder how a venture firm's LPs feel when said firm uses the capital it has raised to fund other venture funds. (Presumably, they'd at least want to pay less in management fees.) More here.

Writer Michael Lewis talks about his upcoming book on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, coming out in October and still being written. Says Lewis of Bankman-Fried, "He’s the ideal subject. He’s locked up in his house an hour from my house with an ankle monitor. He can’t go anywhere. It’s unbelievably convenient, as long as they keep him there."

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Touring Central Park Tower’s three-floor penthouse, which is the highest private residence in the world, with an asking price of $250,000,000.

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