Happy Monday!

I had a fun time in Hong Kong speaking at Consensus 2025. Here are some highlights from the conferences first year in Hong Kong. Everyone is very bullish with 75% of attendees coming from outside Asia.

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

🇺🇸 Debt has always been the ruin of Great Powers. Is the U.S. next? There is a critical historical link between debt service (interest payments plus principal repayment) and national security (defense spending, including R&D investments).

The key threshold occurs when debt service surpasses defense spending—a tipping point that has historically weakened great powers, making them more vulnerable to military challenges. For the first time in nearly a century, the U.S. crossed this threshold in 2024. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), annual defense spending was $1.107 trillion, while federal interest payments—without even considering principal repayment—reached $1.124 trillion. This violation of Ferguson’s Law marks a significant shift in the nation’s fiscal balance. Let’s hope policymakers can rein in the runaway deficit and put America back on track.

Great piece by Niall Ferguson in the Wall Street Journal.

🇨🇳 Is the China Tech crackdown over? - Last week, President Xi Jinping met with key tech leaders, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Meituan’s Wang Xing, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, Unitree’s Wang Xingxing, DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng, and Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei. The meeting signals Beijing’s renewed support for the long-marginalized tech sector.

China now relies on its tech giants more than ever to tackle rising youth unemployment, a stagnant property market, mounting local government debt, and deflation. Just as crucially, technology remains at the center of global geopolitics. Read more on Bloomberg.

💰 Andreessen Horowitz 2024 Fund Analysis - I found The Fund Codex: Andreessen Horowitz Ho very informative. As a founder, you want to make sure 3 things:

• The fund is actively investing.

• The fund focuses on your industry, sector and stage.

• You're speaking with the right decision-maker at the fund.

In 2024, Andreessen Horowitz led 78 investments, distributed across Seed (32), Series A (24), Series B (13) and Series C+ (9). This is a super useful list by by Aaron Harris & Justin Duan:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M0r26xzCEFzzq29IcPHtioDcs9r8SYrE8GPiqKIsx2I/edit?usp=sharing

💰 Why Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 Billion — I always enjoy hearing the Stripe founders' insights on the future of stablecoins. While the use cases — remittances, foreign worker payroll, trade finance, and commodity trading — are well known, it’s still fascinating to see real-world adoption. One standout example: Scale AI is now using stablecoins to pay its overseas workers. Watch All In Podcast.

💰 Mubadala Invests $436.9M in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF - Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Company, has acquired $436.9 million worth of shares in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF during Q4 2024. A regulatory filing released on Friday confirmed the purchase, making it one of the first known sovereign wealth fund allocations to Bitcoin-related financial products. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF has grown to become the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, currently holding around $56 billion and surpass $750 billion in cumulative trading volume.

⚔️ Is Paypal’s Honey stealing Influencers’ money — A controversy among YouTube influencers has sparked lawsuits accusing the PayPal Honey browser extension of hijacking their affiliate commissions. The case highlights the opaque world of affiliate marketing—a $12 billion industry—where “last-click attribution” determines who gets paid. This model credits the final affiliate link clicked before a purchase.

Could AI disrupt this system entirely? Take a listen on the WSJ Podcast.

Last week a total of 22 startups raised $1.4314B in funding, 2 M&A:

• $1.2371B goes to 15 Enterprise startups

• $100M goes to 1 HR startup

• $69M goes to 3 Healthcare startups

• $18M goes to 1 Environmental startup

• $4.2M goes to 1 Automotive startup

• $3.1M goes to 1 Other startup

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Lambda (AI developer cloud platform) raised $480M Series D led by Andra Capital, SGW

• Together AI (AI acceleration cloud) raised $305M Series B led by General Catalyst, Prosperity7 Ventures

• Genspark AI (AI agent search engine) raised $100M Series A

• Hightouch (agentic marketing platform) raised $80M Series C led by Sapphire Ventures

• Baseten (AI inference platform) raised $75M Series C led by IVP, Spark Capital

• Arize AI (AI observability and LLM evaluation platform) raised $70M Series C led by Adams Street Partners

• Sanas (real-time speech understanding platform) raised $65M Series B led by Quadrille Capital

• Guidde (AI video platform) raised $15M Series A led by Qualcomm Ventures

• Sawmills (telemetry data management platform) raised $ 10M Seed led by Team8

• Singulr AI (AI governance and security platform) raised $10M Seed led by Dell Technologies Capital, Nexus Venture Partners

• OpenInfer (AI inference for edge applications) raised $8M Seed

• CTGT (AI risk management and performance platform) raised $7M Seed led by Gradient

• Lingo (app localization engine for developers) raised $4.2M Seed led by Initialized Capital

• Aomni (customer intelligence platform) raised $4M Seed led by Decibel Partners

• Pulse (unstructured document extraction platform) raised $3.9M Seed led by Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman

HR

• Mercor (AI hiring platform) raised $100M Series B led by Felicis

Healthcare

• Endovascular Engineering (clot removal technology platform) raised $42M Series B led by 415 Capital, S3 Ventures

• Perceive Pharma (small molecule neuroprotective therapeutics in ophthalmology) raised $15M Series A from Deerfield Management, Johnson & Johnson, Braidwell LP, GV, the Retinal Degeneration Fund, Catalio Capital, and Perceive Pharma

• Millie (tech-enabled maternity clinic) raised $12M Series A led by Foreground Capital, TMV

Environmental

• Resynergi (advanced plastic recycling technology) raised $18M Series B led by Taranis Investment

Automotive

• AiDEN Auto (connected vehicle technology) raised $4.2M Seed led by Nuri Venture Partners

Other

• Riley (all-in-one parenting platform) raised $3.1M Seed led by True Ventures

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

• HP acquired Humane (computer manufacturer) for $116M

• GrubMarket acquired Bay Cities Produce (foodservice distributor)

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