Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of August 28, 2023. Cellares Raised $255M Series C

Silicon Valley is going to be super quiet this week with most people off to Burning Man. =)

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

• 💪 ARM wrestles with an IPO - ARM is planning to list on Wall Street next month in what's expected to be the largest IPO of 2023, with a projected valuation of $60 to $70 billion. If this ARM IPO goes well, this will be a great sign for Silicon Valley. This will reignite the IPO wave again.  If on the other hand this ARM IPO does not go well, I would consider this as an one-off case. After all, this is a hardware licensing company (very different from companies like Databricks).   Watch Alfred’s comments on the BBC
• 🏎️ Race Capital’s Request for AI Startups - At Race Capital, we are excited about GenAI and have invested so far in companies like Databricks, Opaque, Vectara, Semantic, Zeet. Here is a list of the areas that excite us: Disruption of Horizontal SaaS with Agents and LLMs Data Processing and Connecting Legacy Data with LLMs Vertical Specific Fine-tuned models Zapier for LLM Development Emergence of a new LLMOps stack Model Supervision and Evaluation AI Security, Compliance, and Safety Access to distributed & underutilized GPUs.  Any many more
• 🎧 The Complete History & Strategy of Costco - Not only is Costco Charlie Munger’s favorite all time company (plus he’s on the board, natch), this is an absolutely fascinating study of how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value. Must listen on the acquired
• 💰 U.S. Tackles Crypto Tax Mess  - The Treasury Department proposed new rules on Crypto last Friday.  Under the new proposed ruling, Crypto brokers such as Coinbase and Kraken would be required to file reports starting in early 2026 on the gross proceeds of Crypto transactions. And the following year, they would be required to start reporting cost basis, but only for assets purchased beginning in 2023. The rules won’t change what is taxable, only how it is reported. Read more
• 💰 Top Mistakes First-time Fund Managers Make - Knowing what not to do can be critical when starting something new. Here are the biggest mistakes to avoid as a new fund manager. Good read

This week a total of 12 startups raised $658.6M in funding, 1 M&As: 

• $147M goes to 4 Enterprise startups
• $9M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $2.2M goes to 1 Recruiting startup
• $4M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $459M goes to 3 BioTech startups
• $25M goes to 1 Energy Management startup
• $12.4M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup