Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of November 8, 2021. Nuro Raised $600M Series D led by Tiger Global

After 23 months of hiding, I joined almost 50K Web Summit 2021 attendees in Lisbon this past week. Thank you Paddy Cosgrave and Casey Lau and the Web Summit team for keeping me super busy.  And congratulations for the amazing, vibrant, masked and massive turnout. I did my annual China Internet Report 2021 update. Here is the deck if you are interested.

I am super excited to support Frost Li and lead Social Chat's $6.2 million seed round along with Gradient Ventures, Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch; Tony Zhao, founder of Agora.io; Ran Makavy, former chief product officer at Lyft. Social commerce will be the standard for every brand and every store. It's time for brands to take back control of their customer data so they don’t lose their audience to another platforms. Frost and the SocialChat team will do just that and giving power back to the brands!

I really enjoy reading this DAOs: Absorbing the Internet piece. A great read covering from what is DAO, its mechanics, type of DAOs to legal implication.

Facebook rebranded to ‘Meta’ - a holding company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps, VR and ‘the metaverse’ which Mark Zuckerberg believes is the next platform after smartphones. I do think Facebook it is a PR stunt in the mist of all the data privacy whistleblower news. Then two days later, a Chicago-based company called Meta filed a court case against Facebook, saying Mark stole its name.  Watch Mark talks like a robot.

Race Capital portfolio companies are hiring!  Check out our job board. 

This week a total of 28 startups raised $1.742B in funding, 2 exits:

• $234M goes to 10 Enterprise startups
• $320M goes to 3 FinTech startups
• $202M goes to 1 LegalTech startup
• $139M goes to 3 HR startups
• $46.2M goes to 2 eCommerce startups
• $30M goes to 1 Marketplace startup
• $18M goes to 1 Gaming startup
• $3.5M goes to 1 Education startup
• $108M goes to 3 Healthcare startups
• $600M goes to 1 Autonomous Vehicle startup
• $39M goes to 1 MarineTech startup
• $2.6M goes to 1 Environment Tech startup