Good morning from San Francisco! Sending love and support to all who are affected by the Los Angeles fires this past week, and a huge 🫡 to the work of the firefighters.

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

🤯 Is Jensen the biggest Quantum KOL? — During Jensen’s CES 2025 keynote, he said “very useful” quantum computers are likely decades away 😬 . IonQ and Quantum Computing Inc immediately fell more than 16% while D-Wave Quantum and Rigetti Computing dropped more than 14%. Despite Google having unveiled Willow - a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete. Keep and eye on the quantum stock excitement these next few weeks. Thanks Jensen 😮‍💨

💰 Anthropic in talks to raise $2B at a $60 Billion post valuation — With its $875 million in annualized revenue, that’s 66X multiple revenue to valuation compared to OpenAI that raised $6.6B at $156B valuation at $3.6B revenue as of August 2024. Estimated $12B in revenue in 2025 (13X forward looking revenue multiple)

While OpenAI is 5x larger than Anthropic, OpenAI is much more dominant on the consumer side, even though the two are much closer on the API side. Read more on TanayJ’s blog here.

P.S. Databricks Raised $10B at $62B at $3 billion in annualized revenue. (20X revenue multiple)

⚡ Buckle up Washington DC, Silicon Valley is coming for you — As Chris Neumann mentioned, quite a few former VCs are slotting into roles within the new Trump administration. Here are just some of them:

• JD Vance, Mithril Capital - Vice-President Elect

• David Sacks, Craft Ventures - AI and Cryptocurrency “Czar”, Chair of Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)

• Jim O’Neil, Mithril Capital and Clarium Capital - Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services

• Michael Kratsios, Clarium Capital - Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)

• Ken Howery, Founders Fund - U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark

• Scott Kupor, a16z - Director of the Office of Personnel Management

• Sriram Krishnan, a16z - Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence

Read more here.

👓 What is Spatial Intelligence? — I really enjoyed re-watching this a16z interview with Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson and Martin Casado, particularly on the potential use cases for spatial intelligence:

• Interactive World generation - Text to 3D World for Gaming, Education and Virtual Photography

• Augmented Reality Infrastructure will be powered by Spatial Intelligence - Think Apple Vision Pro.

• Robotic interaction will be powered by Spatial Intelligence

🖼 Getty Images, Shutterstock Gearing up for AI Challenge with $3.7B Merger — Two of the largest players in the licensed visual content industry, are betting that the combination will help them cut costs and grow their business by unlocking more revenue opportunities at a time when the growing use of Generative AI tools such as Midjourney pose a threat to the industry. The combined company will have annual revenues of nearly $2 billion. The merger is only 1.85X revenue multiple. Perhaps the license data business is not worth as much or the Gen AI threat is more substantial than we think? Read more on Reuters.

🤖 Robots are walking around in Shenzhen — See my tweet on “Terminator 7: The Red Alert.” Cool video on X.

Last week a total of 11 startups raised $676.1M in funding, 1 M&As:

• $4M goes to 1 FinTech startup

• $100M goes to 1 Crypto/Blockchain startup

• $206.9M goes to 4 Healthcare startups

• $328.8M goes to 3 BioTech startups

• $10M goes to 1 Robotics startup

• $26.4M goes to 1 Energy startup

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

FinTech

• Fazeshift (AR automation platform) raised $4M Seed led by Gradient

Crypto/Blockchain

• Movement Labs (layer-2 Ethereum blockchain) raised $100M Series B led by BH Digital, CoinFund

Healthcare

• Hippocratic AI (LLM for healthcare) raised $141M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins

• Zeto (EEG brain monitoring and diagnostics) raised $31M Series B led by Mindworks Global

• Qualified Health (generative AI solutions for healthcare) raised $30M Seed led by Frist Cressey Ventures, Healthier Capital, SignalFIre, Town Hall Ventures

• Grove (clinical trial participant relationship management platform) raised $4.9M Seed led by A* Capital

BioTech

• Tenvie Therapeutics (small molecule therapies) raised $200M Series A led by ARCH Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital, Mubadala Capital

• Ouro Medicines (immune reset therapeutics) raised $120M Series A led by New Enterprise Associates, Norwest Venture Partners, TPG

• Biosphere (UV-sterilized bioreactors) raised $8.8M Seed led by Lowercarbon Capital, VXI Capital

Robotics

• RoboForce (robotic workforce system) raised $10M Seed

Energy

• Gridware (real-time power grid monitoring) raised $26.4M Series A led by Sequoia Capital

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

• GCM Global acquired Precision Swiss Products (medical equipment manufacturing)