Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of November 27, 2023. LucidLink Raised $75M Series C

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving week off and were able to spend some quality time with friends and family =)

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

• 🏝️ California Forever - $800 million, 52,000 acres of land and 7 Bay Area billionaires. Can you promise a better life? 
• 😮 Sam Altman’s polarizing past - In 2019, Paul Graham flew from the UK to San Francisco to fire his protégé Sam Altman from YC, worried that Altman put his interests ahead of YC Read on Washington Post
• 💰 Binance pleaded guilty - Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to federal charges as part of a $4.3B settlement with the US DOJ; charges include violating sanctions and anti-money laundering laws. CZ was personally fined $50M. Watch on Bloomberg
• 🧠 01.ai - Kai-Fu Lee's Yi-34B, an open-source large language model trained on 34 billion parameters from scratch. Read on Bloomberg, but not without controversy 
• 🛍️  China’s Singles Day vs US's Black Friday - Black Friday generated $9.8 billion in U.S. online sales, according to Adobe Analytics, up 7.5% from a year ago. Meanwhile, China’s Singles Day festival (November 11, 2023) wrapped up with $156B in estimated sales. That's almost 16X of the sales volume!

This week a total of 4 startups raised $165M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $75M goes to 1 Enterprise startups
• $5M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startups
• $40M goes to 1 Healthcare startups
• $45M goes to 1 BioTech startups