Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of March 18, 2024. Together AI Raised $106M

Happy Monday!

I am excited to be speaking at the Fortune Innovation Forum 2024 Hong Kong in two weeks on the topic of "Cryptocurrencies at a Crossroad." Emily Chui, Co-Founder, TBD (NYSE: SQ) and Alicia Kao, Managing Director, KuCoin and I will discuss what’s next for cryptocurrencies and how they’ll shape the future of how we buy, borrow, and invest. Join me.

P.S. Don't forget to tell your favorite early-stage enterprise founders to apply for Topline - my 8-week enterprise accelerator, focusing on revenue growth!

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

• 💰 High Growth Infrastructure Companies Public Market Multiple Reaches 60X ARR - Infrastructure companies continue to scale across the stack, crossing $100B in annual revenue despite the recessionary environment.  Public market multiple expansion imply 60x ARR for high growth Infra companies.  60x!  One key trend to note is that US government is now the biggest customers for infrastructure companies and spent $37.7B in 2023 and is expected to become a $100B market by 2030. Read more on Grayscale report

• 💰 Steve Mnuchin wants to buy Tiktok?  If the TikTok ban passes and is signed into law, it would give ByteDance 180 days to sell the platform to a buyer that satisfies the U.S. government. And that buyer could be Steve Mnuchin. This potential bill would also bar ByteDance from controlling TikTok’s algorithm, which feeds users videos based off their preferences.  Can a random investor group qualify to run TikTok with 170M US MAU which is as many as Facebook, more than Instagram, and far more than either Snapchat or X?  Read more on Axios.

• 🎥 Sora 101 - I enjoyed watching this WSJ interview with Mira Murati by Joanna Stern explaining how Sora AI video tool work. Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video AI model, can create realistic scenes.  Mira emphasizes that they only use public available videos and licensed data to train Sora, but ducked questions about how the model was trained and was not sure if they use YouTube videos or not. Watch here.

• 🎂 Happy Birthday!  Solana is now 4-year Old. - Solana's block 0 was launched on March 16, 2020!  Anatoly published the original whitepaper describing Proof of History in November 2017 (7 years ago).  They chose the name Solana, a small beach town North of San Diego called Solana Beach, where Anatoly, Greg and Stephen lived and surfed for three years when they worked for Qualcomm. Read the full history.

• 🇭🇰 March 27 - 28, 2024 - If you are in Hong Kong in next week, join me, Alfred Chuang, KK Wong, Huey Lin, Allen Lau, Emily Chui, Michael Tong and more at FoundersHK Week.

This week a total of 24 startups raised $494.7M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $220.2M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $25M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
• $65M goes to 3 Web3/Crypto startups
• $23.9M goes to 2 eCommerce startups
• $7.4M goes to 2 Community/Networking startups
• $6M goes to 1 Food Delivery startup
• $20M goes to 1 Food & Beverage startup
• $9.5M goes to 2 Healthcare startups
• $45.8M goes to 3 BioTech startups
• $60M goes to 1 Robotics startup
• $6.5M goes to 1 Environment startup
• $5.4M goes to 1 Electric Vehicle startup