🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-09-10
This week, big funding numbers hint at exciting shifts in AI and tech investments.
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The numbers this week are big numbers.
The numbers are also spread across funds, funding, and M&A.
These five stories caught my eye.
Techmeme: Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström's Atomico raised $1.24B for its sixth batch of new funds, including a $754M growth-stage fund and a $485M early-stage fund (Ryan Browne/CNBC)
By Ryan Browne / CNBC. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 That is a lot of capital to deploy and I wonder if this means Graphcore adjacent companies within the EU will see new infusions soon.
Techmeme: Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised $1B from a16z, Sequoia, DST, and others, sources say at a $5B valuation (Reuters)
From Reuters. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 The Happy Fun Ball skit from SNL comes to mind but you have to wonder if adding the word “safe” to the name will jinx it.
Techmeme: Source: Sequoia Capital completed its $861M purchase of Stripe shares from Sequoia limited partners last week; Stripe didn't receive any proceeds (Dan Primack/Axios)
By Dan Primack / Axios. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 💳 Stripe continues to defy patterns and I can’t wait to see what happens next even if what happens has nothing to do with IPOs.
Techmeme: Sources: Tokyo-based chip startup Rapidus seeks to raise ~$696M from existing and new investors by issuing new shares to finance its chip development efforts (Taro Fuse/Bloomberg)
By Taro Fuse / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🍪 The balkanization and supply chain resilience around silicon is going to alter our understandings of “cheap as chips” and just how far intelligence will press to the edge of the network.
Techmeme: Glean, which uses AI to offer unified search across apps used at a company, raised $260M+ at a $4.6B valuation, after raising $200M+ at $2.2B in February 2024 (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)
By Amy Thomson / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 Considering that agentic A.I. is already shifting to repackaging as “useful” A.I., these funding levels are probably in line with the expectations and burn rate that will be required to realize even 10% of those expectations.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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