12 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $423.7M - Week of September 23, 2024

💰OpenAI Is Burning $5 Billion a Year 🔥 India IPO Market is on Fire 💪 White House Become Anchor LP for an EV Fund 📧 How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails

Sep 30, 2024

Happy Monday from San Francisco!

I had a great visit in Singapore 🇸🇬 last week at all the tech events, and was able to check out the F1 too (thank you Temasek) — congrats to Lando Norris — check out all the tech logos on his car.

Here are a few great things to read/watch this week:

💰OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning $5 Billion a Year — Hard to imagine raising $5 billion in funding would only last the company less than 18 months! Some key KPIs:

2024 Estimated revenue for ChatGPT - $2.7 billion
2024 Estimated revenue - $3.7 billion
2025 Estimated revenue - $11.6 billion
Monthly Revenue August 2024 - $300M (up 1700% in 12 hours)
Paying Customers for ChatGPT - 10M
Net Loss for 2024 - $5 billion
Seeking $7 billion at $150 billion

Impressive numbers and reporting by the NY Times.

🔥 India IPO Market is on Fire & India’s President Modi is Having His Moment with Silicon Valley’s CEO — The IPO boom comes as India’s rapid economic expansion makes it a bright spot amid the challenges facing peers such as the US and China. Indian listings have already raised $8.6 billion in 2024. Most of the 240 offerings in India this year raised under $100 million. Macquarie analysts wrote in a recent note that India’s price-to-earnings ratio stands at about 21 times, compared with 10 times for emerging markets overall, 14.5 times for global markets, 17 times for the U.S., and 8 times for China. Meanwhile, President Modi met with Nvidia, Alphabet & IBM’s CEOs in in New York. Nvidia has been operating in India for past 24 years with over 10K engineers. Alphabet CEO is also committing another $20B for India. See comment by Jensen Huang. Read more.

💪 White House Become Anchor LP for an EV Fund by Monroe Capital — Last week, the White House said it had selected Monroe Capital to run a $1 billion fund to invest in EV and other auto industry companies, backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration. This fund will invest in EV related hardware, complementary SaaS and other auto technology and business service providers that cater to the industry.

🇺🇸 Intel is Now a Corporate Actor on the Geopolitical Stage - Intel is the most visible example of those that “have become both the objects and instruments of foreign policy. Don’t forget tht TSMC started in 1987 (37 years ago) and Samsung started its foundry business in 2005 (19 years ago). Becoming a foundry business in North America is very expensive and almost impossible to do it in a few year. Read on on Fortune.

📧 How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails — Whether it's for sales, recruiting or making new connections, cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably know, most cold emails either are ignored or end up in the trash. So what can you do to make sure your emails break through the noise? Great reminder video by Aaron Epstein from Y Combinator: