Happy Monday!

If you are in San Francisco, join us for this developer event on Wednesday 👉👉 How to Build and Scale an Open Source Company: JSEE, WebRTC, Agora.io, BEA Systems and more.

💰 Sequoia Capital Offers to Buy $861M of Stripe Shares from Investors at $70B Valuation. This represents only around 10% of Sequoia's total FMV of Stripe shares (~$8.6B). Read more on Axios Meanwhile, their Wiz’ $21M investment returned 153X (~$3.2B)!

💪 a16z Now Supports Trump - Marc and Ben hopped on the Trump train, pledging to funnel substantial funds into PACs supporting his candidacy. Meanwhile, Elon Musk said Donald Trump has to win. On another note, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance is gaining traction among tech investors, thanks to his deep ties to Peter Thiel. Read how PayPal founder boosted Vance’s political career.

🔨 Why FTC Needs to Rethink Tech Regulation - The current regulatory system isn’t set up to consider regulations in a long-term fashion in our technology-driven world. Regulators need to start rethinking what constitutes a monopoly. In Microsoft’s case, regulators incorrectly decided that “desktop” was the monopoly. It was “developers” where Microsoft enjoyed a real edge. Regulators should have been pushing for change around that advantage. Read this opinion by Om

⛓️‍💥 Faulty CrowdStrike Software Update Caused Global IT Outage - Microsoft is advising clients to try a classic method to get things working - turning it off and on again - in some cases up to 15 times. At least 674,000 enterprise customers are at risk of disruption globally. Questions we should as ourselves as Bill Gurley suggested:

• Why weren’t staged rollouts performed?

• It says Linux and Macs were not affected. How did that fix the bug?

• Is the patch process initiated by a reboot? Can you patch without rebooting?

This week a total of 14 startups raised $592.4M in funding, 4 M&As:

• $37M goes to 3 Enterprise startups

• $142M goes to 1 FinTech startup

• $8.5M goes to 1 InsurTech startup

• $2.3M goes to 1 Crypto startup

• $54.7M goes to 3 Healthcare startups

• $122M goes to 1 BioTech startup

• $65M goes to 1 Food Tech startup

• $80M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup

• $75M goes to 1 Hardware startup

• $5.9M goes to 1 Energy startup

If you love this newsletter, forward it to someone who would also enjoy it and have them subscribe.

Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Vectara (RAG / Mockingbird LLM) raised $25M Series A led by FPV Ventures and Race Capital

• aiXplain (AI agent development) raised $6.5M Series A led by Wa’ed Ventures

• EdgeRunner AI (generative AI for Edge) raised $5.5M Seed led by Four Rivers Group

FinTech

• Aven (home equity-backed credit card) raised $142M Series D led by General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures

InsurTech

• Juno (child disability insurance) raised $8.5M Series A led by Spero Ventures

Crypto

• Bima Labs (bitcoin-backed stablecoins) raised $2.3M Seed led by Portal Ventures

Healthcare

• Freshpaint (healthcare privacy platform) raised $30.7M Series B led by Threshold

• NeuSpera Medical (implantable medical device) raised $23M Series D led by Treo Ventures, Vertex Ventures

• REMspace (lucid dreaming and REM sleep technologies) raised $1M Seed

BioTech

• NGM Biopharcaceuticals (drug discovery) raised $122M Series A led by The Column Group

Food Tech

• Botrista (automated beverage platform) raised $65M Series C led by Jollibee Food

Manufacturing

• Halo (laser manufacturing technology platform) raised $80M Series B led by US Innovative Technology Fund

Hardware

• DreamBig Semiconductor (chiplet platform) raised $75M Series B led by Samsung Catalyst Fund, Sehat Sutardja

Energy

• Marathon Fusion (fuel processing technology for fusion energy) raised $5.9M Seed led by 1517 Fund, Anglo American

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

• Commure acquired Augmedix (AI medical documentation and data solutions) for $139M

• Aehr Test Systems acquired Incal Technology (semiconductor test and burn-in equipment) for $21M

• Panzura acquired Moonwalk (data assessment)

• Census acquired GetFulcrum (data collaboration and modeling)