Happy Monday!

I hope you had a wonderful break surrounded by family, friends, and loved ones. As we reflect on the season of gratitude, I’m deeply thankful for the privilege of living in a world brimming with inspiring stories to share each week in this newsletter.

Every Monday, there are at least five stories that remind us how fortunate we are to be part of this vibrant community. I’m especially grateful for the incredible founders, investors, entrepreneurs, engineers and leaders in Silicon Valley who make all the amazing startup ideas possible. Your vision and drive are something we can all celebrate.

And of course to you, my faithful, weekly reader! Some of you have been reading this newsletters since it started nearly 10 years ago.

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

💰 $188 Billion AUM with 52 people at UC Investments — Jagdeep Singh Bachher, CIO of the University of California investments portfolio has shared with us how he:

• Consistently delivered double and triple digit returns since taking the helm a decade ago

• Where he’s finding the best in class,

• And when divestments make sense and when they do not.

It’s interesting how Jagdeep decided to invest $4.5 billion in Blackstone after watching Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman on CNBC.

💀 How Libra Was Killed - Diem (formerly known as Libra) was a permissioned blockchain-based stablecoin payment system proposed by Facebook. It shut down in January 2022 and was sold to Silvergate Bank. Silvergate wrote off their Diem investment in January 2023. David Marcus was the co-creator of Diem, he was also the former President of PayPal and Vice President of Messaging at Facebook. In this tweet, he talks about how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Jay Powell pushing this initiative could be “political suicide”. Read more on X.

🔎 52 Emerging Tech Startups that Will have Big, Successful Exits — Great report by CBInsights. Our portfolio company - Vectara - is included (see P.7)! Read more on CBInsights.

🤖 Erbai, an AI-powered Robot Managed to "Kidnap" 12 Larger Robots in China — In a strange and unsettling incident that has both fascinated and alarmed the Internet, a small, AI-powered robot from Hangzhou managed to "kidnap" 12 larger robots from a showroom of a Shanghai robotics company. The event, captured on CCTV footage, has sparked widespread debate and concern over the potential risks of advanced artificial intelligence (AI). Read more on The Daily Mail.

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💰 What Trump's Treasury Secretary has planned for the economy — Scott Scott Bessent's economic agenda is centered around what he calls a "3/3/3" approach. This includes achieving annual 3% GDP growth. Bessent also wants to cut the federal budget deficit to 3% of GDP and increase domestic oil production by 3 million barrels per day. Read more on Axios.

Last week a total of 6 startups raised $145.7M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $103.7M goes to 5 Enterprise startups

• $42M goes to 1 Healthcare startup

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• /dev/agents (AI agent) raised $56M Seed led by Index Ventures, CapitalG

• Wherobots (spatial intelligence cloud platform) raised $21M Series A led by Felicis

• PlayAI (voice AI platform) raised $21M Seed led by Race Capital, 500 Global, Kindred Ventures

• Tempest DX (internal developer platform and portal) raised $3.2M Seed led by Abstract Ventures

• Circleback (AI-powered app for meeting notes and automations) raised $2.5M Seed

Healthcare

• Sirona Medical (cloud-native radiology workflow software) raised $42M Series C led by Avidity Partners

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

• N/A