Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of May 29, 2023. Anthropic Raised $450M Series C

While America is observing Memorial Day, a lot went on this past week both in Silicon Valley and even more worldwide!

Here are a few great reads for the week:

• 😋 Join me at AI vs 🔥🍗 Pitch Night - This Thursday, watch me devour a plate of chicken wings faster than you can say 'algorithm' with over 200 founders and investors. Extra crispy with a side of machine learning! Apply to attend here.
• 🇭🇰 Hong Kong and Launch of Web3 Harbour Congrats to the launch of Web3 Harbour, a Hong Kong based nonprofit industry association representing Web3 builders, investors, users, and leaders!  I will be joining Gary Liu, Yat Siu, Lawrence Chu and many other amazing builders, investors and regulatory experts as a founding board member to to support Web3 ecosystem in Asia.  The timing is perfect for Hong Kong’s friendly move on Web3. The tightening of regulation in the U.S. is sending chills to Web3 founders worldwide. In the past, several American banks played a key role of linking the traditional and crypto worlds, but that link is now broken, which presents a great opportunity for Hong Kong to step up.
• 💰 Amazon Web Services Revenue Share with Hugging Face and Stability AI - AWS in the two past years struck revenue-sharing deals with Hugging Face and Stability AI.  AWS compensates Hugging Face for directing customers to spend money with AWS, and Stability AI gets a piece of the revenue AWS generates from selling access to Stable Diffusion. Amazon appears to have changed its stance on revenue sharing in part because it has been playing from behind in attracting customers of AI software. Read more on TheInformation
• 😮 Paradigm is no longer a crypto fund - Paradigm raised at $2.5B fund in 2021 and is taking its crypto-only focus to include “frontier” technologies such as AI two years in. It appears to have removed crypto/web3 mentions from the front page of its website earlier this month.  Everyone wants a piece of AI =) Read more on The Block
• 🤖 Web3 wants a piece of AI - Solana just launches ChatGPT plug-in to help users interact with its network. Solana is plugging ChatGPT into an RPC node that will read data from multiple sources on-chain and disseminate that information to questioning users. Read more on Techcrunch

This week a total of 13 startups raised $627.7M in funding, 3 M&As: 

• $503.5M goes to 5 Enterprise startups
• $11M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $3.5M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
• $11M goes to 1 Marketplace startup
• $5M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $50.7M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $11M goes to 1 Environment startup
• $25M goes to 1 Hardware startup
• $7M goes to 1 Music startup