Hello from beautiful sunny San Francisco! 🌉

Our Race Capital Summit is a wrap! I really felt I was planning 3 weddings at the same time. We visited Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab hosted by Ion Stoica in the morning, then hosted over 100 investors and founders in the afternoon and discussed AI, Web3, IPO, M&As and everything else in between.

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

• 🗣️ How to Pitch Your Startup 101 in Boston - I am heading to Boston to speak at Techcrunch Early Stage and also hosting a side-event called “How to Pitch Your Startup 101” on April 24 (Wed) 10:30 am - 12:00 pm EST at Morrison Foerster and Murray A. Indick’s team. Tell your awesome founders to join me.

• 🔥 Google Fires 28 Workers for Protesting $1.2 billion Project Nimbus and 9 People Were Arrested. During the 10 hour-sit in, the protestors gave this speech outside of Thomas Kurian (Google Cloud CEO)’s office.

• 🎨 Midjourney + ChatGPT Functionality Launched in WhatsApp Empowered by Llama3 - I am totally sold! Ten years after the Facebook/WhatsApp acquisition, Meta was still not able to launch payments within the app, but they did manage to launch Llama in less than 18 months, and I am impressed. I asked Meta AI (within my WhatsApp) to tell me a joke and draw me a picture:

• 🎨 Synapse is Bankrupt. Lessons Learned? - After 10 years since it’s founding, Synapse filed for bankruptcy. Synapse is a banking API platform that I have been tracking for a while. It empowers fintechs to offer banking services without having a bank charter. In 2022, they handled over $76 billion in annual transaction across 18M end users. So what happened? In August 2023, Evolve Bank, its primary banking partner, notified Synapse that it planned to end their relationship and want to create direct fintech relationships, rather than through a third-party. It is so difficult when your primary supplier basically want to cut you off and yet you have zero bargaining power. Perhaps Synapse should have setup their own bank charter? A lot to think about.

This week a total of 14 startups raised $607.3M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $135.2M goes to 7 Enterprise startups

• $3.6M goes to 1 HR startup

• $2M goes to 1 Web3/Crypto startup

• $128.5M goes to 2 Healthcare startups

• $55M goes to 1 BioTech startup

• $33M goes to 1 Climate startup

• $250M goes to 1 Hardware startup

If you love this newsletter, forward it to your best friend to subscribe.

Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Anvilogic (multi-data platform SIEM) raised $45M Series C led by Evolution Equity Partners

• Loft Labs (virtual Kubernetes clusters) raised $24M Series A led by Khosla Ventures

• NeuBird (AI ITOps platform) raised $22M Seed led by Mayfield Fund

• XFactor (AI-powered revenue platform) raised $16M Series A led by Accel

• Vorlon (third-party API security) raised $15.7M Series A led by Accel

• Clazar (cloud GTM co-pilot) raised $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures & Ensemble VC

• Clientell (RevOps business intelligence platform) raised $2.5M Seed led by Blume Ventures

HR

• Paraform (recruitment marketplace) raised $3.6M Seed led by A* Capital

Web3/Crypto

• GEODNET (Web3 real-time kinematic (RTK) network) raised $2M Seed

Healthcare

• Two Chairs (behavioral health therapy network) raised $72M Series C led by Amplo, Fifth Down Capital

• Avive Solutions (automated external defibrillator) raised $56.5M Series B led by Catalyst Health Ventures, Laerdal Million Lives Fund, Questa Capital Management

BioTech

• Asher Bio (cancer immunotherapies) raised $55M Series C led by RA Capital Management

Climate

• Quilt (smart home climate solution) raised $33M Series A led by Energy Impact Partners, Galvanize Climate Solutions

Hardware

• Rivos (RISC-V AI server chips) raised $250M Series A led by Matrix Capital Management

IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)  

• N/A

Share Edith Yeung Weekly