Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of February 12, 2024. ZEDEDA Raised $72M Series C

Happy New Year of the Dragon!  =)

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

• 💰 Sam Altman and G42- The October 2023 G42 and OpenAI UAE partnership announcement was just a prequel for Sam Alman's $7 trillion fundraising story. Led by Peng Xiao, the $10-billion 42XFund was set up in 2022 as a partnership between G42 and Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, which was established by ADQ, the Sheikh Tahnoon-chaired sovereign wealth fund. This development signals a pivotal shift in international alliances, hinting at the UAE's broader financial and geopolitical strategy and its potential implications on the global technology and venture investment stage. Meanwhile, G42 is also trying to cut ties with China.
• 💪 2024: The AI Explosion Hits Enterprise Software (and How to Prepare) - All businesses need a neural network embedded into its operations. It's one thing to add chat, image or video capabilities with AI, it is a whole different matter with AI assisting business processes. A new architecture and system software stack — Middleware — will be needed to enable the development of a whole new generation of packaged SaaS applications and internal business specific business applications.  Read more
• 🐉 The Imperfect Dragon Race by DALL-E - The image I generated for my Year of the Dragon greeting, "Dragon Race" was created using DALLE-3.  Unfortunately with DALLE-3, despite precise prompts, the spellings are often wrong in the generated images. Image text generation isn’t stable enough yet for production use. This quirk underscores a broader truth about the current state of image-to-text generation—it's a marvel in progress, but not yet refined for the rigors of production environments. This is a reminder that while these tools open new vistas of possibility, they do not, and cannot replace the ingenuity of creators, designers, and artists endowed with taste.
• 💰 What Will Cutting Off China to American Funding Lead to?  Since 2001, GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, HongShan (previously Sequoia Capital China) and Walden International invested more than $1 billion in China’s semiconductor industry. The congressional investigation report by the House committee focuses on investments made before the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions aimed at cutting off China’s access to American financing. Meanwhile, Chinese firm like Polar Bear Tech is betting big on chiplets by connecting several less-advanced chips into one, to circumvent the sanctions set by the US government.
• 🇭🇰 FoundersHK Week on March 27 -28 - Join me, Alfred, Philip, Tony, Bonnie and many FoundersHK mentors and past speakers from Silicon Valley, China and Canada at the 2024 FoundersHK Week. This is my biggest project for Q1 2024!  Many awesome Hong Kong founders from all over the world will come back.  Join us here =) 
  • KK Wong - Cofounder of Xiaomi 
  • Alfred Chuang - Founder and CEO of BEA Systems
  • Michael Tong - Chief Strategy Officer at FunPlus and Former Board Member at NetEase
  • Emily Chiu - Chief Operating Officer, TBD @ Block (square)
  • Huey Lin - former COO of Affirm, President of Flexport and Board Member of Hang Seng Bank
  • Ray Chan - Founder and CEO at 9GAG and Memeland 
  • Allen Law - Founder and CEO of Wattled (acquired by Naver) 
  • Any many more!

This week a total of 16 startups raised $435.5M in funding, 1 M&As: 

• $106.2M goes to 4 Enterprise startups
• $18M goes to 1 Enterprise startup
• $82.4M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $13.5M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
• $9M goes to 2 Web3/Crypto startups
• $3M goes to 1 Recruiting startup
• $196M goes to 4 Healthcare startups
• $2M goes to 1 Food Tech startup