Happy Memorial Day!

I will be heading to Consensus 2024 later this week speaking on Doing Blockchain Business in Hong Kong with my friends Casey Lau and Yat Siu on Thursday and Hong Kong Web3 Report 2024 on Friday! Join us.

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

📺 NPU versus GPU - My partner Alfred Chuang did a great job on CNBC analyzing that the AI battle is really NPU versus GPU. Inferences chip set will hope a much more important role in the world of chipset.  The future will not be just about training. The future will be heavily driven by inferences - once you do most of the training, the most important thing will be to empower applications to respond in Inferences (what is inferred by the AI model is just like a human). Watch Alfred on CNBC Meanwhile, Jensen Huang’s net worth swelled from $3 billion to $90 billion in five years with Nvidia shares up roughly 28X in the past five years. Good for him!

🏀 How OpenAI Played Hardball with Their Employees and Scarlet Johansson - When an employee leaves OpenAI, they are asked to sign a separation and nondisclosure agreement within 7 days or their vested equity may vanish at the sole and absolute discretion of the company. For a company to threaten to claw back already-vested equity is very egregious and unusual… Read the full story and documents on Vox. Meanwhile, the company is trying to blow past ethical concerns and operating with impunity with Scarlet Johansson. Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her” on May 13, then issued an apology on May 20. Read more in the Atlantic.

(Credits: Made by DALL-E & Edith)

📝 Beyond Benchmarks Report by Emergence - I enjoyed reading this report. Here are a few highlights / reminders that stood out for me:

1. Duration between early stage rounds are getting longer - 22 months between Seed to Series A & 25 months between Series A to Series B (P.22)

2. Public market investors value growth at 2-3X profitability and this mindset trickles down to the private market. No more “Growth at All Cost”. (P.17)

3. If you revenue is less than $1M and your ARR is not growing 400%.  You will NOT be considered as top quartile by your investor. (P.25-26)

4. Top companies retain ~90% of their ARR

💹 SEC Approves 8 Ethereum ETFs including BlackRock and Fidelity - The SEC on Thursday approved applications from the Nasdaq, CBOE and NYSE to list ETFs tied to the price of Ethereum (up 110.28% in past 12 months). The 8 SEC approved 19b-4 forms are from BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, Bitwise, VanEck, Ark, Invesco Galaxy and Franklin Templeton. Read more on The Block

This week a total of 16 startups raised $513.3M in funding, 2 M&As:

• $148.9M goes to 9 Enterprise startups

• $35.5M goes to 1 EdTech startup

• $50M goes to 2 Healthcare startups

• $238.4M goes to 2 BioTech startups

• $40.5M goes to 2 Renewable Energy startups

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

Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Lumos (app and identity management platform) raised $35M Series B led by Scale Venture Partners

• Coactive AI (visual content metadata generation) raised $30M Series B led by Cherryrock Capital, Emerson Collective

• Witness AI (enablement platform for safe AI use) raised $27.5M Series A led by Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures

• Simr (simulation operations automation) raised $20M Series A led by Uncorrelated Ventures

• Bolster AI (multi-channel phishing protection) raised $14M Series B led by M12

• UnifyApps (unified app integration platform) raised $11M Seed led by Elevation Capital

• Userfront (auth and identity platform for SaaS businesses) raised $5.3M Seed led by Heavybit

• HoundDog AI (code scanner) raised $3.1M Seed led by Ex/Ante, Mozilla Ventures, The E14 Fund

• Intently (AI-powered networking tool for startup founders) raised $3M Seed

EdTech

• Praktika (AI language learning app) raised $35.5M Series A led by Blossom Capital

Healthcare

• Atropos Health (clinical data analytics platform) raised $33M Series B led by Valtruis

• Samacare (specialty drug prior authorization platform) raised $17M Series B led by Questa Capital

BioTech

• AltruBio (novel therapeutics for immunological diseases) raised $225M Series B led by BVF Partners

• Radar Therapeutics (programmable precision therapeutics) raised $13.4M Seed led by NFX Bio

Renewable Energy

• Verse (clean energy planning and management platform) raised $20.5M Series A led by Google Ventures

• XGS Energy (next-gen geothermal energy technology) raised $20M Series A led by Valo Ventures, VoLo Earth Ventures

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

• Snowflake acquired TruEra (AI observability platform)