15 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $508M - Week of June 30, 2025

🧬 Renee Zhao’s Magical Milli-spinner 🧠 Zuckerberg’s Genius List of 2025 💻 Andrej Karpathy: Software 3.0 💰 Shein Heads to Hong Kong for IPO 📈 QSBS May Be Getting an Upgrade

Jun 30, 2025

Happy Monday!

🗞️ Interesting Reads this Week

🧬 Renee Zhao’s Magical Milli-spinner — The Milli-spinner, developed by Stanford University’s Zhao Lab, could radically change how we currently treat stroke, heart attack, and kidney stone patients.

The milli-spinner is a tiny, magnetically-driven hollow tube outfitted with fins and slits — capable of spinning through blood vessels to break up clots or blockages. It's been tested in both tethered and untethered formats, and already demonstrated promise in vascular models and pig studies.

This could be one of the most promising microrobotics breakthroughs in years — a blend of precision medicine, magnetic control, and miniaturization that reimagines how internal surgical interventions are performed.

Read more on Fortune.

Illustration of a Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by swirling dollar bills and brains. — *Source: WSJ*

🧠 Zuckerberg’s Genius List of 2025 — The people on “The List” aren’t just smart — they’re calibrated for the AI era. Most have Ph.D.s from institutions like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon. They’ve passed through labs like OpenAI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London. They're in their 20s and 30s. And yes — they all know each other.

This is the talent pool that Mark Zuckerberg is quietly indexing: not for their résumés, but for their ability to shape the future of Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.

Read more on WSJ.

💻 Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) — We’re entering the age of Software 3.0, where the most powerful programming interface isn't Python or JavaScript — it’s English.

As Andrej Karpathy puts it, in this new paradigm, developers don’t write logic — they describe intent. Natural language becomes the prompt, and the model does the rest.

For investors, the implications are huge: developer productivity accelerates, software creation gets democratized, and the next great platforms may look less like IDEs — and more like ChatGPT, Cursor, or Replit.

The amount of money raised through new listings jumped 80% to HK$83 billion this year. Photo: AI generated — *Source: Caixin Global*

💰 Forget the U.S.; Shein Heads to Hong Kong IPO — After months of speculation and delays, Shein has officially pivoted its IPO plans from the U.S. to Hong Kong.

The move sidesteps increasing regulatory scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers over data privacy, supply chain practices, and geopolitical tensions — all of which had become friction points for a stateside listing.

For investors, this is a signal: the global IPO map is shifting. Companies with Chinese ties or complex international operations may start viewing Hong Kong — not Nasdaq or NYSE — as the path of least resistance to liquidity.

Read more on Reuters.

Rich Silicon Valley Investors In Line for $17 Billion Windfall in GOP Tax Bill - Bloomberg — *Source: Bloomberg*

📈 Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) May Be Getting an Upgrade — Under current Internal Revenue code, an early investor who puts $30 million into a startup can theoretically receive $300 million in gains — entirely tax-free under QSBS.

Now, that ceiling may rise even higher. A proposed bill would increase the maximum tax-free gain from $10 million to $15 million, with both thresholds indexed to inflation starting in 2027.

Read more on Bloomberg.

Last week a total of 15 startups raised $607.7M in funding, 3 exits: