16 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $762.3 Million - Week of January 20, 2025

📕 TikTok Refugees Love Xiaohongshu 🛍️ VCs are Buying Traditional Businesses 💰 Goldman is Telling Founders to Reconsider IPOs 📺 SEC Chair Gary Gensler Farewell 🏎️ Why Phoenix is Hot for Hard Tech

Jan 20, 2025

Happy Monday!

Today is the second inauguration for Donald J. Trump — love him or hate him, this is going to be an eventful next four years.

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

📕 TikTok Refugees are Pouring into “Redbook” & The Americanization of Xiaohongshu 小红书 or Little Red Book — Founded in 2013, Xiaohongshu was founded by Miranda Qu and Charlwin Mao. They raised $917M from Notable Capital, Tencent, Alibaba, Temasek, Hong Shan and DST Global. The closest thing I can think of is that Xiaohongshu is the Pinterest of China - but it has Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok elements as well. Thanks to Xiaohongshu’s interface being bilingual (Chinese and English; and they just released an update that includes a text translation tool like X has) it topped the most downloaded apps in the US this past week. This is how much American users hate American apps (or is it Mark Zuckerberg mostly 😬 the one person most people can agree on hating 😂).

Also, the second top app is Bytedance’s Lemon8 - which itself is a clone of Xiaohongshu. We have achieved social media Möbius.

🛍️ AI-Powered Acquisitions. VCs are Buying Traditional Businesses — Both a16z & General Catalyst are pushing to integrate AI and automation into traditional services companies. Instead of going to market from scratch, a new asset class is emerging around AI enabled roll ups. VCs are pushing for buying traditional services businesses. By automating many of the core workflows with AI enabled software, you could buyout teams in call centers, HOA management, HR solutions, mobile gaming, property management, MSPs, legal, healthcare, and accounting. Read more.

💰 Goldman Sachs is Telling Founders to Reconsider IPOs — What? Last week, David Solomon said startups can scale just as big and get plenty of money in the private markets, without having to deal with the hassle of being a publicly traded company. “It’s not fun being a public company,” he said. “Who would want to be a public company?” Goldman is working more and more with large private companies, including helping Stripe on its $6.5 billion round in 2023. Stripe is part of the growing class of large, private tech companies that are deciding to remain private for much longer. Read more on Techcrunch.

📺 SEC Chair Gary Gensler Bids Farewell — Gary Gensler did his final public interview on CNBC to discuss his tenure leading the SEC, his thoughts on bitcoin and the crypto industry at large, and the future of regulation, etc. I like Joe’s comment on his legacy “You either stood in the way for a total new industry or unable to prevent a huge bubble that is going to end very badly. Either way the outcome were not good.” Click the image to watch on YouTube.

🏎️ Why Phoenix Became a Hot Spot for Tech Companies — Phoenix, Arizona is the fifth largest U.S. city and has been a longtime hub for aerospace and defense. Now it’s becoming the epicenter of semiconductor manufacturing and autonomous vehicles. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(TSMC) recently completed the most advanced chip fab on U.S. soil and has pledged to invest $65 billion in the area. The city is also where Waymo launched its commercial robotaxi service, and now it’s the new home of Amazon’s long-awaited Prime Air drone delivery service. Click the image to watch on YouTube.