Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of October 30, 2023. Databricks Acquired Arcion for $100M

Happy Monday!

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

• 🌎 Silicon Valley - The Mecca of Artificial Intelligence - My team put together this AI map of Silicon Valley.  From Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic to Vectara, it's just amazing to see so many AI companies are all headquartered in Silicon Valley. 

         

• ☎️ Apple Cannot Make iPhones Without Luxshare, Not Foxconn - Grace Wang, founder of Luxshare, did not go to college, instead went to work in factories as a teenager.  Now a billionaire and the main supplier for Apple.  Read more
• 💰 Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere. Google is giving up about 16% of its search revenue and about 29% of its profit to those distribution deals Most of that money ($18 billion), of course, goes to Apple. Read more
• 🛍️ TikTok ends retail business in Indonesia after ban on social media shopping - TikTok Shop amassed 6 million sellers in Indonesia within a year of its launch in 2021.  In 2022, it captured about 5% of Indonesia’s booming $52 billion eCommerce market. TikTok had been on target to increase sales by about 350% this year – until the Indonesian government banned it on October 5. The government has justified the ban as necessary to protect the country’s 64 million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Read more
• 💰 Jeff Bezos sold 20% of Amazon for $1 million - Jeff took 60 meetings to raise the first $1M for Amazon at a $5M post-money valuation. Watch this old interview

• $58.8M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $8M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
• $25M goes to 2 Healthcare startups
• $245M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $61M goes to 2 Hardware startups
• $8M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup
• $3.3M goes to 1 Textile startup