16 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $644.8 Million - Week of October 21, 2024

🇯🇵 Trends from Japan 💸 How to Recruit Scale Engineering Teams 💰 Johor New Data Hub of SE Asia 💰 20 Min Scored $400M 🎉 Vectara’s HHEM Surpassed 2M Downloads 😮 Teenager Legendary Hacker

Oct 21, 2024

Last week, we announced our $7M seed funding in Clerk Chat (AI telecom / messaging platform). Clerk Chat plugs its messaging AI chatbot directly into telecom infrastructure to allow any business phone number to be used for two-way text messaging with SMS, Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp and Apple Inc.’s iMessage. It’s pretty cool. Check it out.

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

🇯🇵 Technology Trends I Learned from Japan - Here are a few fascinating trends I learned from a Web Summit dinner I attended and with some of my friends based in Japan:

Watch out MKBHD and Kimberly Loaiza, the VTuber industry is HUGE in Japan! The Virtual YouTuber market is targeted to be $44 billion by 2032. Read more.
Sakana is not OpenAI of Japan - they are a foundational model that happened to be HQ’d in Japan and aren’t trained on Japanese data.
Can Shisa be the new Japan LLM? You can learn more about Shisa here and here.
DX (Digital Transformation) is a Big Deal - the Japanese government is heavily pushing all industries to DX.
Next Generation Founders in Japan Will be Immigrants? Japan is trying to loosen residency rules for foreign founders. Will the next gen founders in Japan all be immigrants?
Here is a short list of 8 Japanese unicorns (according to CBInsights):
- Preferred Networks ($2B) - deep learning for IoT applications
- SmartNews ($2B) - news app
- SmartHR ($1.6B) - HR plartform
- Spiber ($1.2B) - special fiber
- Sakana ($1B) - foundational Model
- Go ($1B) - mobility systems
- Play.co ($1B) - gaming
- Opn ($1B) - fintech / payment processing

💸 How to Recruit, Build, and Scale World Class Engineering Teams - On November 6, I am hosting an invite-only meetup with seasoned founders and engineering leaders from Microsoft, Linkedin, Coursera, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Databricks. 👉 Apply to attend!

💰 Johor Bahru - The New AI & Data Center Hub of SE Asia - Johor Bahru, Malaysia (aka JB) was named as the fastest growing market within Southeast Asia. Over the past few years, the country has attracted billions of dollars in data center investments, including from Google, Nvidia and Microsoft. Lots of Singaporeans are also moving there for cheaper rents as its only an hour drive away. Read more

💰 20 Minutes Scored $400M Fund - Congrats to Harry Stebbings for closing his $400M fund. Despite European venture funding being still pretty much dead without much of a pulse lately, he managed to raise the largest VC fund in Europe. A bit unconventional for sure how he achieved podcast stardom before raising serious money, rather than the reverse.

😮 How A Teenager Became a Legendary Hacker - Arion Kurtaj’s life in hacking began at age 11, and ultimately led to his participation in the hacks of major companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Uber. Take a listen on WSJ.

🎉 Vectara’s HHEM Surpassed 2 Million Downloads - HHEM which stands for Hughes Hallucination Detection Model has now surpassed 2 million downloads on Hugging Face! Building a RAG pipeline is difficult and there is definitely an increased demand in RAG AI Assistant and demand for accuracy in production use cases. Learn more about this here and here.

Last week a total of 15 startups raised $644.8M in funding, 4 M&As: