22 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $1B - Week of June 16, 2025

💰 Meta / Scale AI’s $14.3B Deal is More Than Just a Check. 🔍 The Act II of Search Era Has Begun 🚀 YC 2025 Spring Demo Day

Jun 16, 2025

Happy Monday!

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

💰 Meta / Scale AI’s $14.3B Deal is More Than Just a Check — Sometimes, a transaction is more than a transaction. Meta’s $14.3 billion (49% stake) in Scale AI is one of those moments. There is a shift in how Big Tech navigates the evolving AI landscape.

This is Meta’s first major AI acquisition since the launch of ChatGPT— and its second-largest acquisition ever, following WhatsApp’s $19 billion deal. The message is clear: Meta is not just playing catch-up in AI. It’s placing a bold, calculated bet on infrastructure.
Why not acquire Scale AI outright? Ownership without majority control might seem counterintuitive—until you consider Washington. By not taking a controlling stake, Meta avoids triggering FTC scrutiny. In today’s ongoing regulatory climate, it’s often smarter to buy influence, not ownership.
Early investors will walk away with billions in dividends. Bloomberg reports that Scale will distribute part of Meta’s investment directly to shareholders, proportionate to their equity stakes. It’s a page from the Microsoft/Inflection and Google/Character.AI playbooks: reward early backers and take the people, IP, and data.
The ripple effects extend beyond Meta. Scale’s biggest customers — Google, Amazon, Microsoft — will now be incentivized to seek alternative data-labeling solutions. That creates opportunity across the ecosystem. Here's a snapshot of potential beneficiaries:

Generated image showing a large GEO fish eating a smaller SEO fish. — *Created by Google Gemini*

🔍 The Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Era Has Begun — We’re entering Act II of search. Chatbots are replacing searches. Organic search traffic to websites like Business Insider declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025.

Even Google is using Gemini to disrupt itself — shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.

Enter the Generative Engine Optimization era — one that is driven not by page rank, but by language models. Page ranks were determined by indexing sites based on keyword matching, content depth and breadth, backlinks, user experience engagement, etc. Today, with LLMs acting as the interface for how people find information, visibility means showing up directly in the answer itself.

It’s no longer just about click-through rates — it’s about reference rates: how often your brand or content is cited or used as a source in model-generated answers.

GEO becomes the system of record for interacting with LLMs, allowing brands to track presence, performance, and outcomes across generative platforms. Own that layer, and you own the budget behind it.

Google turned into a digital advertising powerhouse when it acquired DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion and AdMob in 2009 for $750M.

Who will be the DoubleClick and AdMob in The Age of GEO?

🚀 YC Demo Day — At Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 Demo Day this week, nearly every startup had something to do with AI — they’re either building AI agents for X industry or a Cursor-style tool for X role. Some impressive statistics shared by Garry Tan: