Happy Monday!

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

💕 Stanford HAI: The First Open Virtual Assistant Workshop — It was incredibly stimulating to attend my friend Monica Lam’s workshop, she’s a CS Professor at Stanford and the Faculty Director of the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Laboratory. She hosted the very first Workshop on a Public AI Assistant to World Wide Knowledge (WWK). I found it particularly interesting to hear how the academic community views the debate between open source vs. closed source technologies, the impact of DeepSeek, the creation of SSQL (Structured and Unstructured Query Language), and the latest developments regarding the Storm project.

You can watch the full workshop by clicking here.

💰 The America Sovereign-Wealth Fund Is Coming. How Others Work — Sovereign-Wealth Funds are created in one of two ways:

1. Government Pension Fund of Norway or the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, are funded by a nation’s excess wealth or commodities such as oil.

2. Singapore’s Temasek or the Turkey Wealth Fund are considered “umbrella” funds that are seeded with stakes in companies considered national champions.

It isn’t certain from the executive order directing the Treasury and Commerce department to create a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund exactly where the U.S. is headed with this type of fund or how it will be funded. Backing a fund with budget surplus dollars isn’t practical for the U.S. either, as the Nation runs persistent budget deficits into trillions of dollars. Read more on Barrons.

Here are the Top 10 Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund Ranked by Total Assets (click here for the top 100 list by Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute)

👴🏼 Interview with Morris Chang, Founder of TSMC — Acquired hosts Ben & David flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. At the young age of 93, Morris shares his stories of a few crucial moments from TSMC’s history which have only been written about in 張忠謀自傳 his (currently Chinese-only) memoirs, including how TSMC won Apple’s iPhone and Mac chip business and a 2009 discrepancy with NVIDIA that almost jeopardized their relationship, and the lessons he took from them. I also love their previous episode on The Complete History & Strategy of TSMC. Listen to the full interview by the Acquired.

🤖 Let’s Dance with $16,000 Unitree G1 Robot — Unitree Robotics is one of the leading robotic startups based out of Hangzhou, China. They’ve raised over $166M from Shunwei Capital, Chuxin Capital, Winreal Investment, CITIC, etc. The G1 is priced at US$16K and up. I really like his dance moves, but the laundry and dishwashing is what I really want one for.

💡 ARK’s Big Ideas 2025 - Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Energy Storage, Public Blockchains, and Multiomic Sequencing. Here are the 11 Big Ideas by Cathie Wood. Click here for the full report or watch the highlights here.

Last week a total of 18 startups raised $851.1M in funding, 3 M&A:

• $134M goes to 5 Enterprise startups

• $14.5M goes to 2 FinTech startups

• $405M goes to 2 Legal Tech startups

• $20M goes to 1 InsurTech startup

• $50M goes to 1 Food and Beverage startup

• $56.4M goes to 2 Healthcare startups

• $55M goes to 2 BioTech startups

• $11M goes to 1 Construction startup

• $105.2M goes to 2 Hardware startups

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Fal (generative AI media creation platform) raised $49M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital

• SGNL (legacy access management) raised $30M Series A led by Brightmind Partners

• QuSecure (quantum-safe cybersecurity) raised $28M Series A led by Two Bear Capital

• Suger (API-driven cloud marketplace platform) raised $15M Series A led by Threshold

• Tofu (unified AI B2B marketing platform) raised $12M Series A led by SignalFire

FinTech

• Fifteenth (AI-powered tax planning) raised $8.3M Seed led by A* Capital, General Catalyst

• Era Finance (wealth management platform) raised $6.2M Seed led by MaC Venture Capital, Third Kind Venture Capital, Protagonist

Legal Tech

• Harvey (AI-powered solutions for legal professionals) raised $300M Series D led by Sequoia Capital

• Eudia (augmented intelligence platform for legal teams) raised $105M Series A led by General Catalyst

InsurTech

• Comulate (broker accounting automation platform) raised $20M Series B led by Bond and Workday Ventures

Food and Beverage

• OLIPOP (soda) raised $50M Series C led by JP Morgan Growth Equity Partners

Healthcare

• Candid Health (healthcare revenue cycle automation platform) raised $52.5M Series C led by Oak HC/FT

• VoiceCare AI (healthcare administration general intelligence platform) raised $3.9M Seed led by Caduceus Capital Partners

BioTech

• Allay Therapeutics (non-opioid pain therapeutics) raised $45M Series D

• Junevity (cell reset therapeutics for longevity) raised $10M Seed led by Godfrey Capital, Goldcrest Capital

Construction

• Beam (construction financial management platform) raised $11M Series A led by Zigg Capital

Hardware

• EnCharge AI (in-memory-computing AI chip) raised $100M Series B led by Tiger Global Management

• Oso Semiconductor (high-performance chipsets for wireless communication) raised $5.2M Seed led by Engine Ventures

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

• Harness acquired Traceable (API security platform)

• Biolog acquired Anaerobe Systems (microbiology research)

• Seagate acquired Intevac (thin-film processing systems)