Happy Monday! 🇭🇰🥢🏙️🥮

I’m sending this from a very hot Hong Kong! I was on CNBC this morning talking about the relationship between big tech and politics leading up to the U.S. elections. All venture capitalists will pay close attention to regulatory decisions and policies (immigration, AI, Crypto, M&A, IPO and tax) that will impact our startups long term. The next leader will need to rethink how to support innovation, protect startup and the venture capital industry.  

Here are a few great things to read this week:

👨‍💻 Race Capital is Hiring Engineers - We're looking for a technical associate to join our investment team at Race Capital, to help us source and invest in the next greatest infrastructure & enterprise startups that are similar to our portfolio companies Databricks, Vectara, Play, Scarf, and others. Help me spread the word.

🌲 Sequoia Capital Invested Early in Google, Nvidia, and Apple. Can Roelof Botha Keep the Legendary Venture Capital Firm ahead in the AI future? This article reads like a history book for the firm. Read on Fortune.

💰 The Risk of Underinvesting is Greater than the Risk of Over-investing: Wall Street began questioning the growing cost of buying high-end chips and building data centers, asking when these investments would start to show up in revenue and profit growth. With this kind of profitability, I guess big tech can afford paying their Nvidia bills.

• Alphabet reported $24 billion net profit on $85 billion revenue.

• Microsoft reported $22 billion net profit on $65 billion revenue.

• Meta reported $13.5 billion net profit on $39 billion revenue.

• Apple reported $21 billion net profit on $86 billion revenue.

• Amazon reported $13.5 billion net profit on $148 billion revenue.

🤓 Google Acqui-hired Founders from Character.AI, Signs Licensing Deal - Four years in, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas (founders of Character.AI) decided to rejoin Google after raising $150M from a16z in 2023. Read more on Reuters.

🇨🇳 The U.S. Wanted to Knock Down Huawei. It’s Only Getting Stronger - China’s government support for Huawei ramped up in recent years. Its profits have more than doubled last year, the largest jump in at least two decades. Roughly 2/3 of its revenue comes from domestic customers. In all, Huawei received nearly $3 billion in the past five years, accounting for 3% of its total R&D expenses. Read on WSJ.

This week a total of 13 startups raised $183.3M in funding, 3 M&As:

• $95.3M goes to 6 Enterprise startups

• $2M goes to 1 FinTech startup

• $9M goes to 1 HR startup

• $10M goes to 1 Media startup

• $7M goes to 1 Wearable startup

• $32M goes to 1 Textile startup

• $28M goes to 2 BioTech startups

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Ema (universal AI employee) raised $36M Series A led by Accel, Section 32

• Credo AI (AI governance and compliance platform) raised $21M Series B led by CrimsoNox Capital, Mozilla Ventures, FPV Ventures

• Lineaje (software supply chain security management) raised $20M Series A led by Hitachi Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Tenable Ventures

• Sybill AI (AI assistant for sales reps) raised $11M Series A led by Greycroft

• Endari (cybersecurity) raised $4M Seed

• Streamkap (real-time data streaming) raised $3.3M Seed led by InReach Ventures

FinTech

• Portfolio Pilot from Global Predictions (financial advisory platform) raised $2M Seed

HR

• Tezi (AI agent for hiring managers) raised $9M Seed led by 8VC, Audacious Ventures

Media

• Hedra (video creation platform) raised $10M Seed led by A16Z Speedrun, Abstract Ventures, Index Ventures

Wearable

• Bee (AI-powered wearable assistant) raised $7M Seed led by Exor

BioTech

• LTZ Therapeutics (immunotherapy) raised $20M Series A led by Lapam Capital

• Montara Therapeutics (therapeutics for neurological diseases) raised $8M Seed led by Dementia Discovery Fund, Two Bear Capital

Textile

• Unspun (3D weaving technology) raised $32M Series B led by DCVC

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

• Agilent acquired Sigsense (AI for lab operations)

• Deepnote acquired Hyperquery (AI-powered data workspace)

• ClickHouse acquired PeerDB (Postgres replication)