14 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $369.4M - Week of August 26, 2024

👨‍👦‍👦 Unit 8200 is the Silicon Valley’s Hot Talent Pipeline 💰 Are NFTs Securities? 🖥️ Keep Code Behind AI Open 🇺🇸 Tech for America 👮 Pavel's Arrest Boosted Telegram Downloads

Sep 02, 2024

Happy Monday!

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

👨‍👦‍👦 Unit 8200 is the Silicon Valley’s Hot Talent Pipeline - This Israeli Army Unit has become an incubator for cybersecurity startups defending the world’s biggest companies against hackers. There are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni that are publicly traded in the U.S.

Palo Alto Networks—$116.0 billion
Check Point Software Technologies—$21.3 billion
CyberArk Software—$12.4 billion
Wix.com—$9.1 billion
Radware—$900 million

Read more on WSJ

💰 Are NFTs Securities? - OpenSea has received a Wells notice from the SEC threatening to sue because they believe NFTs on our platform are securities. Read more on X

🖥️ Keep the Code Behind AI Open - Ion Stoica & Martin Casado said this not the first time America’s tech industry and its standard-setters and regulators have had to think about open-source software and open standards with respect to national security. Similar discussions took place around operating systems, the internet and cryptography. In each case, the overwhelming consensus was that the right way forward was openness.

A second reason is the widely accepted view that open-source makes systems safer. More users—from government, industry and academia, as well as hobbyists—means more people analyzing code, stress-testing it in production and fixing any problems they identify. Read more on the Economist

🇺🇸 Tech for America: What’s Ahead for Government Tech - I am co-hosting with Hanwha Life on September 12th in San Francisco featuring Bruce Andrews - Chief Government Affairs Officer at Intel Corporation, Thomas Osborne, MD - Chief Medical Officer | Microsoft Federal Civilian, David Smith - Founder and CEO at MLtwist and Carolyn McGourty Supple - Head of Public Affairs and Customer Engagement at Google Public Sector. Register here to join us!

💪 OpenAI, Adobe, and Microsoft have Expressed Support for California's AB 3211 - this bill requires watermarks in the metadata of AI-generated photos, videos and audio clips. Lots of AI companies already do this, but most people don’t read metadata. AB 3211 also requires large online platforms, like Instagram or X, to label AI-generated content in a way average viewers can understand. OpenAI, Adobe and Microsoft are part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which helped create C2PA metadata — a widely used standard for marking AI-generated content. Read more on Techcrunch

👮 Telegram Founder Pavel Durov's Arrest or Alleged Failure to Moderate Illegal Content has unexpectedly boosted the app's downloads and rankings. The app has climbed to top positions in various App Store categories, particularly in France, with global iOS downloads increasing by 4%. The cryptology charge also raised eyebrows at U.S. tech companies. Telegram is also often described as an encrypted messaging app, it tackling encryption differently than WhatsApp, Signal and others. So if Mr. Durov’s indictment turned Telegram into a public exemplar of the technology, some Silicon Valley companies believe that could damage the credibility of encrypted messaging apps. Read more on the NY Times

This week a total of 14 startups raised $369.4M in funding, 3 M&As: