Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of August 14, 2023. Neuralink Raised $280M Series D led by Founders Fund

This past week, President Biden issued an executive order banning Americans from investing in specific Chinese companies. I think this is a major blow not only to the Chinese startup ecosystem, but really a major blow to the US venture industry. Watch me on Yahoo News.

Here are a few great reads, watch, etc for this week:

• 📈  Hopin Valued at $7.75 billion Sold for $15 Million After Raising $1 Billion - SEC filings confirm that Hopin sold its core assets to RingCentral last week for just $15 million. Hopin was heralded as the outright leader of the events industry. Its peak valuation of $7.75 billion exceeded Cvent’s valuation of $5 billion in July 2021. Hopin raised over $1 billion from Northzone, Seedcamp, Salesforce, a16z, Coatue and Accel during the pandemic-induced hype.  At it's peak, Hopin had a staff of 1,200. We will likely see more of these after-COVID unicorn fire sale. It's tough to sustain revenue when everyone wants to meet in real life again. 
• 🇨🇳 US investment in Chinese startups Dropped to $200M  - US venture capital investment in China has plummeted about 80% over the past year, according to PitchBook data. In the second quarter, Chinese deals involving a US venture capital investor totaled about $200 million, compared with $2.4 billion the previous year and $3.8 billion in 2019, before the pandemic hit.  Read more on CNN
• 💻 Will LK-99 a New Superconductor Change the World? - Chances are, it’s nothing. But if it is something, it’s a big something. LK-99 (from the Lee-Kim 1999 research) is a gray–black, polycrystalline compound, made by doping lead‒apatite with copper. A team from Korea University led by Lee Sukbae (이석배) and Kim Ji-Hoon (김지훈) began evaluating this material as a potential superconductor starting in 1999. Read more at Bloomberg
• 🇮🇳 IIT - The exclusive network behind India’s global tech success - IIT Bombay, in Mumbai, is one of India’s most prestigious higher education institutes. It’s one of the five original IIT engineering schools established in the '50s and '60s as the Indian government attempted to emulate the success of the United States’ MIT.  Of the country’s 108 unicorns, 68 were founded by at least one IIT graduate. The original five schools — Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, and Delhi — are still considered both the best and the hardest to get into. Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley today, such as Alphabet's Sundar Pichai and IBM’s Arvind Krishna both went to IIT.  Read more at Rest of World
• ✏️ Meet the World's First Generative AI Handwritten Note Taking App - Goodnotes - Starting with Spellcheck and will very soon launch Word Complete, which will rewrite or finish words in your own handwriting style. This is a true co-pilot of note-taking. Watch the super cool video

This week a total of 21 startups raised $677M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $220.5M goes to 10 Enterprise startups
• $15M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $12M goes to 1 Mobile startup
• $8.8M goes to 1 Marketplace startup
• $25M goes to 1 Social Media startup
• $8.2M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
• $52.4M goes to 3 Healthcare startups
• $280M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $8.6M goes to 1 AR/VR startup
• $5M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup