Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of April 1, 2024. Observe Raised $115M Series B

Hello from Hong Kong!

Applications for Topline, Race Capital's 8-week enterprise accelerator is now closed.  Missed the deadline? Ping us direct at accelerator@race.capital if you really really want to apply. We are conducting our final round of interviews now!

P.P.S. Starting next week, I am going to send out this newsletter via Substack instead of Mailchimp. You may get a different look and feel of this newsletter. Stay tuned!

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

• 💪 DBRX - Databricks announced DBRX, a new generative AI model, claiming it outperforms open-source models on benchmarks and has spent $10 million training DBRX. However, running DBRX requires at least 4 Nvidia H100 GPUs (costing thousands each) or 320GB of GPU memory. Databricks touts its $10 million investment but critics argue DBRX lags behind GPT-4 while lacking true open-source credentials. Read and watch the official announcement.
   
• 💰 American VCs Caught in the Scrum Over TikTok - General Atlantic, SIG, and Sequoia Capital, three firms that have invested in TikTok owner ByteDance, are now under heightened scrutiny from regulators. Read more on the NY Times

• 💰 The Dao of Alibaba - My friend Brian Wong was the first American and the 52nd employee to join Alibaba Group. He is also the author of The Tao of Alibaba - the very first business book which articulates how Alibaba built its unique culture. Brian first met Jack Ma and Joe Tsai when they first went to Silicon Valley pitching for funding in 1999. They didn’t raise a single dollar after meeting 30 VCs, but somehow they got Brian to move to Hangzhou instead. It's a fun read. Check it out 😁
   
• 🎵 The Tomorrowland of Hong Kong Startup Events - FoundersHK Spring Social and Founder Forum last week was a huge success! Awesome photos and recap of what went down. 📸 
   
• 💪 Techcrunch Early Stage - I am excited to speak at Techcrunch Early Stage on April 25 in Boston. Join me there!

This week a total of 24 startups raised $657M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $234M goes to 10 Enterprise startups
• $11M goes to 1 Web3/Crypto startup
• $28.1M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $5M goes to 1 Legal Tech startup
• $43M goes to 2 Healthcare startups
• $50M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $6.2M goes to 1 Network Hardware startup
• $235M goes to 2 Hardware startups
• $5.3M goes to 1 Environment startup
• $13.9M goes to 2 Energy startups
• $25.5M goes to 1 Other startup