16 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $469.5M - Week of May 19, 2025

🇸🇦 Nvidia/Humain’s Partnership 🇨🇳 Bytedance is Bigger than Facebook 🧬 Sam Altman on ‘Core AI Subscription’ 🇫🇷 Expedition 33 Made $100M in 12 Days 🏙️ The World’s Largest 3D Printed Neighborhood

May 19, 2025

Happy Monday!

Here are a few great things to read/watch this week coming out of Silicon Valley:

Saudi Arabia accelerates digital economy growth through Nvidia partnership — The Kingdom’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Al-Swaha's meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang aims to support and strengthen the region’s digital economy. Source: Arab News

🇸🇦 Nvidia / Humain’s Partnership will Further Neoclouds Strategy - As the Gulf states race to become the world’s AI supernodes, a new pattern is emerging—one that Nvidia has not only spotted but is actively shaping.

This month, Nvidia unveiled a multibillion-dollar partnership with Saudi Arabia’s newly launched AI firm, Humain — a move that signals the kingdom’s intent to leapfrog straight to the forefront of compute infrastructure. Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, G42 is planning a hyperscale data center that could add billions to its annual revenue — effectively turning capital cities into capital markets for AI.

But here’s the paradox: Nvidia’s largest customers are also its biggest threats. While Amazon’s AWS is spending billions on Nvidia chips, it’s also fast-tracking Trainium, its proprietary AI processor. In this world, hyperscalers are frenemies — partners in public, competitors in silicon.

That’s why Nvidia is nurturing a new species of cloud company — CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe, Lambda — what it calls “Nvidia Cloud Partners”. - alternative neocloud ecosystem. Shares of CoreWeave traded up ~22% on Friday after one of Nvidia’s recent filings revealed that it participated in CoreWeave's IPO, increasing its ownership from 5.2% to ~7%.

These moves are not just about chips—it’s about new platforms, new distribution power, and the reshaping of global AI supply chains. The infrastructure play is no longer abstract. It’s geopolitical. Read more on FT.com.

🇨🇳 Bytedance is Bigger than Facebook by MAU and Revenue - ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, now boasts over 4 billion monthly active users across its suite of apps — slightly edging out Meta’s empire of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, which clocks in at 3.98 billion. Revenue? Nearly neck and neck. ByteDance expects to generate $186 billion in 2024, while Wall Street pegs Meta at $183–187 billion.

And yet, the market tells a very different story. Meta’s market cap has soared to $1.6 trillion. ByteDance, by contrast, was recently revalued by SoftBank’s Vision Fund at just over $400 billion.

Same users. Same revenue. One company is worth 4X more than the other.

This is more than a valuation gap. It’s a mirror reflecting deeper assumptions — about trust, geopolitics, platform risk, and the ever-present “China discount.” Investors don’t just price fundamentals; they price fears.

So the question isn’t just whether ByteDance is undervalued. It’s whether the discount is structural. Will global capital forever penalize Chinese-born platforms, no matter how dominant they become? Or will there be a tipping point — a moment, as with Alibaba or Huawei in earlier decades?

This isn’t just about ByteDance. It’s a case study in perception vs performance, and a reminder that sometimes, the biggest opportunities lie behind the biggest blind spots. Read more on Bloomberg.

🧬 Sam Altman on Building the ‘Core AI Subscription’ for your Life - Not long ago, OpenAI was a 14-person research lab chasing the dream of artificial general intelligence. Today, it’s something closer to a societal operating system —anchored not in code, but in behavior.

Sam Altman wants to build a personal AI that knows you — your conversations, your emails, your preferences—and operates across every surface of your digital life. It’s not search. It’s not software. It’s memory, intuition, and utility fused into something that feels inevitable. And younger users already get it. For them, ChatGPT isn’t a chatbot — it’s life advisor. A default.

Sam, now armed with $40 billion, says he wants to focus on “things that are in front of you.” It’s a statement that should raise eyebrows. For a company that began with first-principle rigor and moonshot restraint, this sounds uncomfortably like scope creep disguised as ambition.

🇫🇷 The French Hit it Big with Expedition 33 - A French studio most investors had never heard of — Sandfall Interactive — released a turn-based role-playing game called Clair Obsur: Expedition 33. No franchise. No Hollywood IP. No VC funding. Just strong narrative, elegant mechanics, and a loyal online following.

And in just 12 days, it sold 2 million units, generating nearly $100 million in revenue. At a $49.99 price point on consoles and PC. In a world dominated by free-to-play economics and AAA budgets, this wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did.

My gamer friends can’t stop talking about it. And I don’t even invest in gaming. But maybe I should? Because this isn’t just a hit — it’s a signal. A reminder that in an era of algorithmic discovery and digital tribes, games don’t need a Marvel logo to go viral. They just need to resonate. It’s proof that craft still scales—and that the next billion-dollar IP might not come from a studio in LA or Tokyo, but from an unexpected corner of Europe, armed with art direction and conviction an maybe a bottle of wine or two.

🏙️ The World’s Largest 3D Printed Neighborhood - Lennar, one of the America’s largest homebuilders, has partnered with ICON, a 3D printing startup, to construct 100 homes using concrete-printing robotics. On the surface, it’s a quirky experiment. But underneath, it’s a provocation — a challenge to the way we’ve built homes for over a century.

These one-story homes aren’t just novel. They’re engineered to be wind-resistant, fire-resistant, mold-resistant — in short, climate-resilient by design. And the promise runs deeper: by slashing labor costs and compressing production cycles, 3D printing could recalibrate the unit economics of housing, especially in regions open to rethinking zoning and construction codes.

This may be a category formation moment for construction with focus on automation, materials science, robotics, and climate resilience. Much like Tesla redefined the car, 3D-printed housing may soon redefine what “affordable” and “scalable” mean in the built world. ICON itself has raised more than $500 million, with backers ranging from Norwest, Tiger, to NASA.

Last week a total of 16 startups raised $469.5M in funding, 4 exits: