Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of May 3, 2021. Brex Raised $425M Series D led by Tiger Global

Big congrats to Noam Ben-Zvi and Team Placer.ai for raising Series B! I am honored to be an investor and part of their journey since 2017. Placer.ai collects geolocation data from mobile devices users, and creates anonymized and aggregated consumer profiles. A super useful tool for hedge funds, commercial real estate, and offline retail businesses.

The pandemic and the forced digital adoption gives Silicon Valley technical platforms a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to "supersize" their power over all walks of the American life.  Similar to how Alibaba came into power during SARS outbreak in China, Apple, Google, Amazon Microsoft, and Facebook have achieved a combined revenue of more than $1.2 trillion. The founders of these tech giants beat Warren Buffet to the top! 

This gap between tech giants, and everyone else is getting wider and wider. It's mind boggling to think that Jeff Bezos alone is worth more than 1.6X of HSBC and Amazon is 14X bigger than Goldman Sachs by market cap. 

On that note, I am excited to host and chat with Catherine Zhou, Global Head of Ventures, Digital Innovation & Partnerships at HSBC today (May 3, 2021 6 pm PST) at the FoundersHK Capital Conversation event.  Catherine will talk about their startup investment strategies (what, where, and how) to weather the storm and compete with these crazy big internet giant.

Join us! 

This week a total of 25 startups raised $1.1558B in funding, 0 M&As:

• $298.6M goes to 14 Enterprise startups
• $538M goes to 3 FinTech startups
• $83.2M goes to 2 Blockchain startups
• $6M goes to 1 eCommerce startup
• $8M goes to 1 AR/VR startup
• $55M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $53M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $105M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $9M goes to 1 Other startup