Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of July 20 2020.

It was August 13, 1993, I arrived in America as a high school exchange student. It was also Friday the 13th and it was the luckiest day of my life.  I was so thankful that I finally made it to Indiana and ready to begin my American dream.

My non-resident status has progressed from a J-1 exchange visa, F-1 student visa, optional practical training (OPT) program, H-1B working visa, and finally, after 20 years, I became a permanent resident of the United States. 

Fast forward to today, the Trump Administration has temporarily suspended new H-1B work visas and barred over 500,000 workers from coming to America. Earlier this month, he also made an attempt to deport over a million F-1 visa students if they can only take classes online due to COVID-19.

The Trump administration's action will permanently damage America’s reputation as an innovating and welcoming country for our future entrepreneurs. Over 55% of this country’s unicorn companies had at least one immigrant as a founder or CEO. These companies would not have existed if the visa programs were suspended:

• Elon Musk - founder of Tesla, SpaceX
• Sergey Brin - co-founder of Google
• Sundar Pichai - CEO of Google
• Satya Nadella - CEO of Microsoft
• Pierre Omidyar - founder of eBay
• John and Patrick Collison - founders of Stripe
• Garrett Camp - co-founder of Uber
• Mike Krieger - co-founder of Instagram
• Arash Ferdowsi - co-founder of Dropbox
• Jyoti Bansal - founder of AppDynamics
• Jawed Karim - co-founder of YouTube
• Max Levchin - co-founder of Paypal
• Jan Koum - founder of Whatsapp

And of course my partner at Race Capital and founder of BEA Systems, Alfred Chuang.  I am very proud of Alfred speaking up on this issue this past week on Yahoo News TV.   

Watch his thoughts and opinion.

This week a total of 17 startups raised $430.4M in funding, 2 M&As:

• $90M goes to 6 Enterprise startups
• $37M goes to 1 HR startup
• $37.8M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $50M goes to 1 eCommerce startup
• $128M goes to 3 AI startups
• $1M goes to 1 Blockchain startup
• $86.6M goes to 3 Healthcare startups