Happy Monday!

First up, congrats to Noam Ben-Zvi and the Placer.ai team for raising $75M at $1.5 Billion. It’s been an honor to get a chance to invest and support this team since 2017! Placer has built a portfolio of over 4,000 customers for their location based analytics product. From Techcrunch: “The startup provides a wide range of location-based analytics to companies in verticals like retail, events and entertainment, CPG, real estate, financial services and healthcare by combining AI with anonymized data that it sources from third-party apps.” They are truly impressive!

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

😢 RIP Susan Wojcicki - When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in 1998, they rented out Susan's Palo Alto garage to use as their “worldwide headquarters”. She later on joined Google as its 16th employee. Silicon Valley lost Susan to non-small cell lung cancer. I re-watched her Johns Hopkins University 2014 Commencement Speech: Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO.

Always love this quote from her:

“Opportunities, the good ones, they're messy and confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.”

🚫 Google’s Default Search Deal is Now Illegal - A federal judge ruled that Google's search business constitutes an illegal monopoly. As someone who used to work on default search deal (Yahoo, Yandex, Bing) on a mobile browser (my old company was Dolphin Browser), I think this ruling is HUGE and scary one for Google. Google pays Apple $20 billion annually, or about 36% of what it earns from search advertising made through the Safari browser. If this deal is undone, the iPhone maker could take a 4-6% hit to its profit. Google may lose market share. The question is would you still use Google if it’s not the default search on your browser? Or another layer of monopoly, should device makers preload their default browsers?  Read more on WSJ.

💱 Understanding Yen Carry Trade - On July 31, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) hiked its policy rate from 0.1% to 0.25%, with the goal to curb the yen's slide against the U.S. dollar. Investors who had been borrowing cheap funds in yen to spend in dollars scrambled to exit their positions. On Monday, August 5, the Japanese Nikkei stock market index dropped 12.4%, marking the worst day since the worldwide “Black Monday” crash of October 1987. Watch this Carry Trade 101 video 👉🏻

💰 Good Luck Selling Your AI Startup - Instead of buying your company, big tech companies are dodging the FTC Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR)’s bullet and going after the technology licensing route and luring your top talents to leave their startups. This maneuver — not an acquisition, is more like an acqui-hire with some partnerships included — is something we’ve seen a few times in recent months. Not a good sign for investors... Read more on Wired.

💵 $25 Billion to Zero: Bill Ackman's Bungled IPO - What happened?

This week a total of 13 startups raised $1.98B in funding, 3 M&As:

• $1.84B goes to 8 Enterprise startups

• $5.7M goes to 1 Gaming startup

• $12M goes to 1 Food Tech startup

• $8M goes to 1 Wellness startup

• $60M goes to 1 BioTech startup

• $56.7M goes to 1 Aerospace startup

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Groq (AI inference technology) raised $640M Series D led by BlackRock

• Abnormal Security (human behavior security platform) raised $250M Series D led by Wellington Management

• DevRev (AI customer support platform) raised $100.8M Series A led by Khosla Ventures

• Placer.ai (location-based analytics) raised $75M round led by insiders

• Mechanical Orchard (legacy software modernization) raised $50M Series B led by Google Ventures

• Anjuna (confidential computing platform) raised $25M Series B led by M Ventures, SineWave Ventures, AI Capital Partners

• Aurascape (cybersecurity for AI) raised $12.8M Seed

• Napkin AI (visual AI for business storytelling) raised $10M Seed led by Accel, CRV

Food Tech

• Plonts (plant-based cheese) raised $12M Seed led by Lowercarbon Capital

Wellness

• Feeling Great (emotional well-being app) raised $8M Seed led by Learn Capital, Titletown Tech

Gaming

• Curio Research (game development studio) raised $5.7M Seed led by Bain Capital Crypto, SevenX Ventures

BioTech

• Shinobi Therapeutics (cell therapies) raised $60M Series A led by Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Yosemite

Aerospace

• Muon Space (space systems provider for low-earth orbit satellite) raised $56.7M Series B led by Activate Capital Partners

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

• CloudBees acquired Launchable (AI-based software testing)

• GrubMarket acquired Good Eggs (online food and grocery delivery)

• Five9 acquired Acqueon (revenue execution platform)