Musk sues Altman, Gates and Zuckerberg attend a pre-wedding bash, and loads of coverage from last night

Wow, it's . . .really late suddenly, but we wanted to share with you some of the conversations from last night's stellar StrictlyVC event in L.A. You'll find these sprinkled throughout and on TechCrunch.

Much thanks again to Lightspeed and Harmonic for supporting the event and its associated party. Very fun meeting many of you for the first time. (Photos here; I look like Big Bird in my dress, I'm aware.) More coverage to come; in the meantime, hope you have a stellar weekend.:) 🌈

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for violating OpenAI's mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. TechCrunch has more here. 

Hold on tight and watch your six! Waymo has received approval to operate its autonomous taxis in Los Angeles and on the San Francisco Peninsula and San Francisco freeways.

The lawyers for a Tesla shareholder who successfully sued to stop Elon Musk from a receiving a $55.8 billion pay package are asking for $5.6 billion in legal fees.

How will venture capital change in 2024? Join Affinity to find out in a panel discussion featuring Foxe Capital, SaaS Ventures, Intel Ignite. We'll discuss what our survey of 700+ investors reveals about sentiment for the year ahead and how VCs are adapting their strategies to a changing market. Watch the webinar now.

Last night, during an evening hosted by StrictlyVC, this editor sat down with Trae Stephens, a former government intelligence analyst turned early Palantir employee turned investor at Founders Fund, where Stephens has cofounded two companies of his own. 

One of these is Anduril, the buzzy defense tech company that is now valued at $8.4 billion by its investors. The other is Sol, which makes a single-purpose, $350 headset that weighs about the same as a pair of sunglasses and that is focused squarely on reading, a bit like a wearable Kindle. (Having put on the pair that Stephens brought to the event, I immediately wanted one of my own, though there’s a 15,000-person waitlist right now, says Stephens.)

We spent the first half of our chat talking primarily about Founders Fund, kicking off the conversation by talking about how Founders Fund differentiates itself from other firms (board seats are rare, it doesn’t reserve money for follow-on investments, consensus is largely a no-no).

We also talked about a former colleague who manages to get a lot of press (Stephens rightly ribbed me for talking about him during our own conversation), whether Founders Fund has concerns about that Elon Musk is stretching himself too thin (it has stakes in numerous Musk companies), and what happens to another portfolio company, OpenAI, if it loses too much talent, now that it has let its employees sell some percentage of their shares at an $86 billion valuation.

The second half of our conversation centered on Anduril, and here’s where Stephens really lit up. It’s not surprising. Stephens lives in Costa Mesa, Ca., and spends much of each day overseeing large swaths of the outfit’s operations. Anduril is also very much on the rise right now for obvious reasons.

We hope you enjoy the conversation; we did. Much of it follows here, edited lightly for length.

Keith Rabois, who recently re-joined Khosla Ventures, was reported to have been “pushed out” of Founders Fund after a falling out with colleagues. Can you talk a bit about what happened?

More here.

Argá Medtech, a four-year-old Swiss startup that develops cardiac technology to treat conditions such as heart arrhythmia in a minimally invasive manner, raised a $58.6 million Series B round co-led by previous investors Advent Life Sciences and Earlybird, with additional participation from new investor Gilde Healthcare. More here.

FogPharma, a nine-year-old startup based in Cambridge, Ma., that specializes in creating cancer drugs by merging small molecules and biologics to target previously untreatable proteins, raised a $145 million Series E round led by Nextech Invest, with RA Capital Management, Rock Springs Capital, General Catalyst, Marshall Wace, Samsara Biocapital, Foresite Capital, Symbiosis, Catalio Capital Management, and Sixty Degree Capital chipping in, as well as previous investors. BioPharma Dive has more here.

Geopura, a five-year-old UK startup that sells green hydrogen fuel cells and services to the events, industry, and transport sectors, raised a $70.9 million round. Investors included the UK Infrastructure Bank, Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital, GM Ventures, Swen Capital Partners, and Siemens Energy Ventures. ESG Today has more here.

Backpack, a Dubai-based crypto startup founded by FTX and Alameda Research alums that is building a digital platform aimed at offering secure cryptocurrency trading services, raised a $17 million Series A round at a $120 million valuation. The deal was led by Placeholder VC, with Hashed, Robot Ventures, Amber Group, Wintermute, and Selini also taking part. Bloomberg has more here.

Campfire, a San Francisco startup that specializes in providing accounting software designed to simplify financial management for SMBs, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Foundation Capital, with Y Combinator and Twenty Two Ventures also anteing up. More here.

Clasp, a one-year-old New York startup that is developing embeddable software aimed at simplifying health benefits for employers and employees, raised a $1.5 million round led by Base10 Partners. More here.

ContributionDAO, a Singapore startup that is focused on providing staking services specifically tailored for institutional investors in Southeast Asia, raised a $2.8 million seed round led by KASIKORN X Venture Capital and including the blockchain projects Axelar, Umi, and Connext. Decrypt has more here.

Karma3 Labs, a Palo Alto startup that has developed a decentralized reputation protocol called OpenRank evaluates and ranks the reliability and quality of projects and participants within the Web3 space, raised a $4.5 million co-led by Galaxy and IDEO CoLab Ventures, with Spartan, SevenX, HashKey, Flybridge, Delta Fund, Draper Dragon, and Compa Capital also contributing. TechCrunch has more here.

Particle, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that is developing an AI-powered news reader platform aimed at providing users with personalized news content, raised a $4.4 million seed round from Kindred Ventures, Adverb Ventures, and Ev Williams. TechCrunch has more here.

Raspberry AI, a New York startup that is creating a generative AI platform to assist fashion designers in generating innovative clothing designs, raised a $4.5 million seed round co-led by Greycroft and Khosla Ventures. More here.

Relish, a four-year-old startup based in Newbury, Oh., that uses AI to help businesses improve customer interactions by analyzing customer data, raised a $10 million Series A round. Volition Capital was the deal lead. More here.

Vitrue Health, a six-year-old London startup that develops digital tools to prevent and manage neck and back pain for employees in the workplace by using computer vision and AI to analyze movements and posture, raised a $4 million round co-led by MMC Ventures and Hambro Perks, with Simplyhealth Ventures, and Crista Galli Ventures also stepping up. The company has raised a total of $7 million. EU-Startups has more here.

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Five deep tech investors from four different firms are teaming up to form Venx, a collaborative group based in Boston that will evaluate investments together although write checks individually. “Why do VCs feel like they need to compete? Do we not have enough carbon to remove? Plastics to recycle or remove? Breast cancer to cure? Not enough challenges in AI?” one partner said. TechCrunch has more here. 

Entourage, a new fund based in Ghent, Belgium, has raised an inaugural $30 million fund to invest in seed to Series A B2B SaaS businesses. 

Reddit purportedly plans to price its shares in the $31 to $34 range, giving it a potential market cap of up to $6.5 billion. It will also allow some employees to sell shares, generally an IPO no-no. The Wall Street Journal has more here. 

In the face of a growing threat from AI, some prominent industry observers are calling for Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to resign.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are just two of the tech swells who are attending a "pre-wedding bash" for the son of Asia's richest man. Anant Ambani plans to marry his girlfriend in July, but that's not stopping his father, Reliance head Mukesh Ambani, from pulling out all the stops, with no less than Rihanna and magician David Blaine set to perform. CNN has more here. 

According to an account in journalist Kara Swisher's new book, in 2008, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his then-wife Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andme, threw a baby shower where their grown-up guests wore "a diaper with an oversized comical pin, a ruffled baby hat that came with a rattle, or adult-sized footy pajamas accessorized with a teddy bear and a sucker."

At StrictlyVC's event last night in Los Angeles, Jesse Lyu, the cofounder and CEO of Rabbit, the hot AI assistant that took CES by storm, claimed he isn't afraid of all of the 800-pound gorillas in his space. "Grow faster, or die faster," he said.

Eclipse Ventures has brought on another partner from Rivian. Jiten Behl, formerly Rivian’s chief growth officer and one of its first employees, joins Eclipse partner Charly Mwangi, a former manufacturing executive at Rivian and Tesla.

In a sign of how frothy the market for artificial intelligence startups has become, the founder of an AI startup called Rewind is charging investors $100 to book a meeting with him. 

AI worms.

Tesla could earn billions per year by opening up its charging network to its competitors.

Pay for junior VCs is flat, and job cuts may be next.

A real-life lightsaber.

A Greenland startup is shipping Arctic ice to partygoers in Dubai, and people are losing their minds. 

Why it's so hard to understand cats.

California wine country ranch.

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