Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of October 18, 2021. Dexterity (Warehouse Robotics) Raised $140M Series B

I will be heading to FII (Riyadh and Dubai), Web Summit and Breakpoint (Portugal).  A bit nervous but excited about my very first international flight after 22 months!

The rich schools are getting richer.  Harvard University reported this week that the size of its endowment fund grew 27% to $53.2 billion in 2021, while its investment return was 34%. The biggest driver was private equity (inclusive of VC), with a whopping 77% return on investment!  Harvard's endowment distributed more than $2 billion toward the school's operating budget, one-third of annual revenue.  This is a great validation of the venture capital industry supporting the university endowment investment model championed by the late David Swensen of Yale.

I had a pretty serious discussion on Bloomberg with Emily Chang on the topic of China venture capital.  Here are some highlights:

• China is still the 2nd biggest market in the world with over 1.4 billion people and $15 trillion GDP
• Venture investing is not slowing down. Healthcare and semiconductors will stay strong. Sequoia China did 96 deals in the past 90 days!
• Everyone in China need to play by the rules.  Doesn’t matter whether you are Alibaba, Meituan or Didi or even PBOC and CIC
• Hong Kong will be the hot spot for IPOs for Chinese companies. Yay Hong Kong 💪
• China always has love / hate relationship with Crypto and has successfully crushed Bitcoin's hashrate down to 0%. 
• This crackdown is rebalancing the Crypto world and long term good for the blockchain ecosystem in the West and for the world.
• Race Capital will stay focused and continue to invest early and help our founders build core infrastructure software for enterprise, developers, middleware, AI, data infrastructure (Databricks, Opaque), and fintech infrastructure (FTX, Saber).

• $461.7M goes to 11 Enterprise startups
• $90M goes to 3 FinTech startups
• $20M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
• $118.7M goes to 2 Edtech startups
• $240M goes to 2 Logistics startups
• $55M goes to 1 Real Estate startup
• $1.5M goes to 1 Social Media startup
• $10M goes to 1 Gaming startup
• $168M goes to 4 Healthcare startups
• $80M goes to 1 BioTech startup
• $60.5M goes to 2 Environmental startups