Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of January 8, 2024. Perplexity AI Raised $73.6M Series B

Happy New Year from the beautiful San Francisco!  

Here are a few great things to read/watch this week:

• 💰💰💰 2024 Predictions: State of Venture Capital and Startups - Alfred and I hosted the very first FoundersHK live talk on Jan 3. 2023 was not a great year for venture capital with 42% decline YoY. Will 2024 be better than 2023? ​Watch us on Linkedin
• 📚📚📚 The Worlds I see - I love really enjoyed Dr. Fei-Fei Li's new book "The Worlds I see".  It's very inspiring to learn that the creator of ImageNet faced such a difficult transition from China’s middle class to American poverty. This is not only an amazing book to study the history of modern AI. It is also a classic Asian American immigrant story. Check our her book 
• ⚔️🥊💥 More Carta drama - Carta reached out to Linear (a software project management platform)'s angel investors about selling company shares without permission. The fight started on X, reported on X and Techcrunch and now Carta CEO published this article "How We Handle Captable Information". 
• 👋👋👋 Countdown is Shutting down & Coatue Shuts Europe Office - Building a hardware startup is hard. Investing in hardware startups is even harder. Countdown’s launched their second $15 million fund in 2022. 15 months later, the GP decided to return capital, cancel all uncalled commitments and permanently cease operation. Meanwhile, Coatue is closing its European office in London two years after it opened, part of a strategy overhaul to adjust to a downturn in the technology market. Running a venture fund is similar to running a startup. You have to call it quits when things don't work out. Read on TC
• 🗣️🗣️🗣️ How ChatGPT is changing how software developers work - GenAI chatbots are helping software developers write better code, faster and easier. “I do a lot less Googling,” said Amin Ahmad, CTO of Vectara and a former researcher at Google. Read on Quartz

• $73.6M goes to 1 Enterprise startup
• $10M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $152M goes to 2 BioTech startups