8 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $1.08B - Week of March 24, 2025. 💰 Google to Acquire Wiz for $32B

💰 Google to Acquire Wiz for $32B 💰 a16z Speedrun 🦄 IPO fever is heating up 🇨🇳 How China Could Beat The U.S. To Nuclear Fusion 🎤 Nvidia’s GTC 2025 Announcements

Mar 24, 2025

Happy Monday!

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

💰 Google to Acquire Wiz for $32B — Its Biggest Deal Ever - Google is making waves with its largest acquisition to date: a whopping $32 billion for cloud security startup Wiz. To put that in perspective, that’s more than 2.5x what they paid for Motorola Mobility back in 2012. Wild. So why is Google shelling out a jaw-dropping 64x revenue multiple for a five-year-old startup with a $500M run rate?

Simple: Wiz is riding two of the biggest cloud trends right now:

Cloud-native: Faster to deploy, easier to scale, and built to adapt.
Multi-cloud: Secure workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Multi-cloud support also boosts chances of clearing regulatory hurdles, which will be a major test for FTC’s new chairman, Andrew N. Ferguson. Watch the official announcement.

Here’s how Wiz stacks up against Google’s other major buys:

I had the pleasure of meeting Ami Luttwak, Wiz’s CTO, just three weeks ago at the Citizen Investor Conference. His talk was one of the most refreshing takes on cybersecurity that I’ve heard.

His analogy stuck with me:

“Traditional security is like waiting until you’re sick to see a doctor. Wiz is about security wellness—real-time awareness of risks before they become problems.”

Think of it like a full-body scan for your cloud infrastructure — proactive, preventative, and constantly running in the background. No wonder Google wanted in.

💰 a16z Speedrun Demo Day — Back for round two at the a16z Speedrun Demo Day — and it didn’t disappoint. Hats off to Andrew Chan for curating a sharp lineup of 42 experienced founders. Compared to YC’s rapid-fire 160 pitches last week, founders here had a luxurious three minutes to tell their story. A few quick themes from the day:

~40% gaming studios (gaming is still eating the world)
~35% AI-powered game dev tools (build smarter, not harder)
~15% consumer + social apps with AI baked in
~5% Web3
~5% Robotics

Fun energy in the room — definitely a different flavor than your typical demo day.

🦄 IPO fever is heating up! — StubHub rocked the ticketing game, scoring an impressive $1.77B in 2024, while Klarna kept the buy-now-pay-later magic alive, hitting a dazzling $2.8B in 2024, and Coreware is also joining the party with $1.9B revenue last year. Investors, get ready—these unicorns might soon gallop onto the public markets!

🎤 Nvidia’s GTC 2025 —Last week’s GTC San Jose was a significant event for both the AI industry, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The quick takeaway: it was solid, though without major surprises. Most developers & analysts walked away reassured by Nvidia’s roadmap, but still cautious with the short term. Here is a short list of all the announcements:

Blackwell Ultra AI Chips (2025): Successor to Hopper, offering more power and efficiency for AI workloads.
Rubin Ultra & Feynman Chips (2027+): Long-term roadmap highlighting continued AI chip innovation.
Dynamo Software Platform: AI "factory OS" designed to fine-tune and maximize hardware efficiency.
Isaac GR00T N1 Robotics Platform: Toolkit to accelerate humanoid robot development, partnered with Disney & DeepMind.
GM Partnership: Integrating AI into next-gen vehicles, factories, and robots.
6G Wireless Project: Collaborating with T-Mobile and Cisco to develop AI-native 6G network hardware.
Personal Supercomputers: Partnering with Dell, HP, others to launch desk-side AI systems for developers and researchers.
Quantum Computing Lab (Boston): New research initiative to push forward emerging quantum technologies.
Photonics Breakthrough: Revealed new chip system combining silicon and light waves for faster, more efficient AI compute.

🇨🇳 How China Could Beat The U.S. To Nuclear Fusion, As AI Power Needs Surge — For decades, the U.S. has led the race in nuclear fusion—a potential source of limitless, clean energy. But now, China is outspending the U.S. by more than 2-to-1 and building faster, aiming to be the first to achieve commercial fusion power.

As AI’s insatiable demand for energy accelerates, private investment in fusion has surged. Billions have poured in from players like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft, and Google. Startups such as General Fusion, TAE Technologies, Helium, and Commonwealth Fusion are pushing the frontier. Yet satellite imagery reveals China is rapidly constructing massive new fusion facilities while aggressively locking down both the supply chain and top talent—setting the stage for a geopolitical race to control the future of energy. Learn more on CNBC.

Last week a total of 8 startups raised $1.08B in funding, 2 exits: