Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of June 26, 2023. KoBold Metals Raised $195M Series B

Hello Toronto 🇨🇦 🇨🇦 🇨🇦!  I'm speaking at Collision Toronto, and we, Race Capital, are co-hosting an invite-only Founders and Investors cocktail hour with Panache Ventures 👉 👉 👉 Apply here to attend

Here are a few great reads for the week:

• ⛓️ What is LangChain? - I interviewed with Harrison Chase - founder of LangChain at UC Berkeley! LangChain is a framework designed to simplify the creation of applications using large language models (LLMs). We talked about the concept of Langchain, the idea of chaining and more!  Watch here
• 😲 Reid Hoffman Defends OpenAI - I'm liking Emily Chang's new show, The Circuit on Bloomberg Originals, Emily interviewed both Mira Murati, CTO at OpenAI and Reid Hoffman - seed investor in OpenAI and a Microsoft board member. Tune in to her question about Elon vs OpenAI. At min 18:14, Reid said Elon is wrong on many levels. I am also shocked that he completely twisted the definition of what open source is all about.  OpenAI is a closed source company.  Just because it opens its API for Dall-E does not make it open source!  Watch here
• 💰 BlackRock Bitcoin ETF - The world's largest asset manager, has filed for a Bitcoin ETF which will allow BlackRock to purchase or sell bitcoins at the end of each trading day to ensure that it accurately represents the true price of the token. With an impressive record of 575-1 in favor of approval, and a history of meeting market demand for its products, BlackRock has demonstrated a remarkable ability to navigate the regulatory landscape. Read more
• 🇮🇳 The Big boys love Modi - Politics and tech are moving closer and closer. With President Modi of India visit this week, Google committed to invest $10 billion in India's digitization fund, Amazon committed to invest another $15 billion by 2030, Apple will launch a credit card in India, and Micron is investing $825 million in an India chip facility. 
• 🇭🇰 Hong Kong as a Crypto Hub - With the recent regulatory news on Crypto coming out of Washington, investors and entrepreneurs have been looking outside of the US for a more favorable crypto jurisdiction, and Hong Kong as been emerging and coming on strong! Read Pantera's post

This week a total of 9 startups raised $398.5M in funding, 3 M&As:

• $87.5M goes to 4 Enterprise startups
• $15M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $6M goes to 1 Climate Tech startup
• $195M goes to 1 Mining Tech startup
• $95M goes to 2 BioTech startups