Happy Monday!

I’m still amassing all the tea leaves to look into the future with, but there is so much coming in from every angle it’s confusing to see straight. I hope this newsletter tries to clear up a few things for you.

As we enter the third week of the new Trump administration, it seems every dinner conversation in Silicon Valley has been dominated by the whirlwind of changes sweeping through Washington. From the controversial plans to dismantle USAID, to a Federal judge blocking DOGE from accessing U.S. Treasury material, there's no shortage of topics to discuss over your evening meal.

There are so many heated debates about the future of the United States. It's only been three weeks, but the Trump administration has certainly given us plenty to chew on – both literally and figuratively.

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

💕 AI’s power couple: Altman & Son — Masayoshi Son has spent years looking for a vehicle to invest billions of dollars into AI. Sam Altman has been searching for a very deep-pocketed investor to fund his fast-expanding ambitions at OpenAI. Finally, they found each other. First, SoftBank has committed $18 billion to Stargate, an AI infrastructure joint venture that will provide cloud computing capacity for OpenAI. In addition, SoftBank is in talks to invest $15 billion to $25 billion into OpenAI as part of a $40 billion investment round, which would be the biggest in the history of the tech industry. The round would value OpenAI at up to $300 billion, nearly 2X its valuation just four months ago. Read more on WSJ.

💰 How Stablecoins could drive the dollar — Thank you Caroline Hyde and Jackie Davalos for having me on Bloomberg News Tech this morning! I am bullish on the Stablecoin trajectory for 2025. Open PayFi will drive adoption of the US dollar denominated Stablecoin (USDC, USDT) and create even more use cases for the US dollar. This is something aligned with the new administration's executive order on “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology”. Watch my interview on Bloomberg. I’ll be speaking about this and more at Consensus Hong Kong Feb 18-20.

💲 No one knows how to price AI tools — With businesses unwilling to drop top dollars on unproven AI tools, AI software vendors are getting creative on new strategies to convince them to buy. ‘It’s the wild wild west,’ said one CTO. Salesforce says it’s targeting more flexibility when it comes to their pricing options and rolled out a pricing plan that allowed enterprises to toggle their spend minimums between per-month licenses for human employees and consumption-based agents. Read more on WSJ.

🚚 USPS halts inbound packages from China and Hong Kong…for 12 Hours — On February 4, USPS said it will halt all international packages services from China and Hong Kong. This comes after President Trump’s 10% tariffs on all imported Chinese goods — which also closed the import-tax loophole “de minimis,” an exemption that allowed packages valued under US$800 to be processed without paying any customs duties or tariffs. This would have had a huge impact on Chinese companies like Temu and Shein, as Temu ships over 1.6 million packages daily. The next morning, the USPS international inbound packages service from China posted it’s back on again. This suspension lasted less than 12 hours. But as of February 6th, Hongkong Post has decided not to send any packages to the US until there is further clarification. Here’s an explainer from the South China Morning Post.

💰 Blackrock and G42 on financing AI infrastructure in the Middle East — BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink discussed his $30B equity fund (with Microsoft and MGX) and another $100B debt fund. And how G42' CEO Peng Xiao believes that AI training workload for their frontier models will remain on US soil, but inference infrastructure to serve the models can be done in the Middle East.

Last week a total of 15 startups raised $302.4M in funding, 1 M&A:

• $155.8M goes to 6 Enterprise startups

• $8.6M goes to 2 FinTech startups

• $16M goes to 1 Legal Tech startup

• $6.1M goes to 1 Marketplace startup

• $30M goes to 1 E-Commerce startup

• $50M goes to 1 Wellness startup

• $7M goes to 1 Healthcare startup

• $15M goes to 1 EV Tech startup

• $13.9M goes to 1 Renewable Energy startup

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Semgrep (application security platform) raised $100M Series D led by Menlo Ventures

• Monograph (project management software for architecture and engineers) raised $20M Series B led by Base10 Partners

• TrueFoundry (AI deployment and scaling platform) raised $19M Series A led by Intel Capital

• Warmly (autonomous revenue orchestration platform) raised $6M Series A led by RTP Global

• DevAI (agentic AI solutions for enterprise IT teams) raised $6M Seed led by Emergence Capital

• Exceeds (performance and productivity management platform for teams) raised $4.6M Seed led by Venrock

FinTech

• TaxGPT (co-pilot for accounting and tax firms) raised $4.6M Seed

• Response (spend management platform) raised $4.2M Seed from Y Combinator, Twenty Two Ventures

Legal Tech

• Ivo (contract review platform) raised $16M Series A led by Costanoa Ventures

Marketplace

• Tandem Space (marketplace for flexible office space) raised $6.1M Seed led by 1984 Ventures, Collide Capital, Y Combinator

eCommerce

• Archive (resale platform for brands) raised $30M Series B led by Energize Capital

Wellness

• Fay (digital nutritional therapy) raised $50M Series B led by Goldman Sachs

Healthcare

• MIIST Therapeutics (inhaled therapies) raised $7M Seed led by Refactor

EV Tech

• Presto (EV charging platform) raised $15M Seed from Union Square Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures, and Jetstream

Renewable Energy

• Tyba (energy storage optimization) raised $13.9M Series A led by Energize Capital

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

• ANAFLASH acquired Legato Logic (compute-in-memory technologies)