Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of July 24, 2023. Hammerspace Raised $56.7M Series A

Happy Monday!

Here are a few great reads for this week:

• 📈 Palantir is the new Gamestop Move over GameStop and Tesla fanboys—there’s a new memestock in town. Over 50,000 Palantir fans have gathered in the subreddit r/PLTR, devoted to hyping up and goosing its stock. The company reached profitability this year and the Reddit mob idolizes CEO Alex Karp calling him “Daddy Karp.”  Their enthusiasm is reflected in the stock price: in recent weeks, shares rose from $7 to $17. Read more on FastCompany
• 🇨🇳 No China for you It seems almost every week Washington looks for another element of economic activity in China it can target. The latest is outbound investments, especially those going to sensitive industries such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence. GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Walden International and Qualcomm Ventures are now probed by the House select committee. Read more on SCMP
• 🦙 Zuckerberg Picked Microsoft - Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI). is Meta's artificial intelligence system that rivals the likes of ChatGPT and Google's Bard. Partnering with Microsoft, Meta released Llama 2 for free for research and commercial use this week. companies with 700 million or more monthly active users (MAU) are required to obtain a license from Meta. This means that Meta's new AI technology is off-limits to some of its social media competitors. Read more
• 👎 Lina Khan Is Taking on the World’s Biggest Tech Companies—and Losing - When Lina Khan took over as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, she vowed to stiffen antitrust enforcement. Two years in, her attempts to rein in big mergers through the court system have been mostly unsuccessful. Why the FTC is concerned about ChatGPT? Take a listen and read more on WSJ
• 💪 FoundersHK Founders & Investors Summer Social - I'm super excited to co-host FoundersHK Founders & Investors Summer Social 2023 in San Francisco, and partnering with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) on July 27. Come meet with Hong Kong and AAPI founders and Investors for a night of networking over drinks at the HKETO office. Click here to sign up

This week a total of 8 startups raised $145.1M in funding, 3 M&As:

• $64.2M goes to 3 Enterprise startups
• $43.1M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $23M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $5.8M goes to 1 Environment startup
• $9M goes to 1 Robotics startup