When to Raise a Series A? 16 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $622.9M Last Week

💰 Sigma Computing Raised $200M Series D 💰 Top Universities For Funded Founders 🔢 Social Capital Fund Return (2011-2023) 👑 Palmer Luckey Wants to Be Silicon Valley's War King

Happy Monday from San Francisco!

Are you enjoying this newsletter on Substack? Give it a ❤️ if you like it. Also, love to know what else you are reading related to VC.

Me hosting a PR for Startups workshop at Techcrunch Early Stage 2024.

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

• 💰 Top Universities For Funded Founders- - The winners are Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley and UPenn. Read more on Crunchbase.

• 💸 When to Raise a Series A - There is no clear cut to this question as it really depends on your individual situations. Having said that, there are a few key elements all early stage founders should think hard about:

  • Burn - How much money do you have left in the bank? If you have less than one year, you should start the process now. You don’t want to wait until you have 3 months of run rate left while you are still negotiating your terms for Series A. 

  • Promises - Did you achieve what you said you would do since your seed round? If yes, get your seed investors to commit to your Series A; it speaks a thousand words to others. 

  • Minimal Viable Growth Momentum - The most important factor in timing your Series A funding is traction.  6 months+ of somewhat consistent month-over-month (MoM) growth 10%–20% or higher is expected from an investor point of view. The difference between a 10% growth rate and a 20% growth rate is the difference between ~3X growth and ~9X growth over the span of a year.

  • Metrics - As a founder, you need to know your numbers cold. Sales, revenue growth, user and customer growth, retention, engagement, churn, key customers, etc. “Let me ask my CFO” is not an acceptable answer. Read this by Initialized if you need a refresher. 

  • Signals - Do you have any marquee customers and testimonial, known hires, new launches and media buzz, etc? These are signals showing product-market fit. 

  • Future - How much you need to raise depends what milestones you want to accomplish. What is your projected growth rate in terms of revenue, number of users/paying customers?  What is you next major product milestone? And more importantly what are your growth strategies. (P.S. posting on social media marketing is not a strategy.)

  • Cash Needed - The median Series A funding round in the first quarter of 2023 was $6.4 million.  What is your ideal, worst or best case scenario in terms of Series A funding?

  • Timing is Everything - Avoid December, July and August if you are in the United States & Europe. Avoid Ramadan if you are in the Middle East, Indonesia and Pakistan. Avoid Lunar New Year if you are in China, Korea and South East Asia.  Avoid Golden Week if you are in China.

• 🔢 Social Capital Fund Return (2011-2023) - Running big funds really is tough to achieve outsize TVPI and DPI. Read more.

2023 Annual Letter

• 👑 Palmer Luckey Wants to Be Silicon Valley's War King - This venture investment thesis is not something I want to support, but it is definitely a rising trend in Silicon Valley.  Watch this interview by Emily Chang and American Dynamism thesis by a16z. 

• 🔥  The True Impact of OpenAI GPT-4omni - GPT-4o (the letter “o” for “omni”) launched last week and is significant, as it’s the very first model combining all of these modalities (text, vision, and audio) processed by the same neural network. By creating Her, could this potentially happen to all our young people?

  • Live translation - I tested this in Chinese and ChatGPT spoke Chinese with an America accent.  Quite funny!

  • Tutoring

  • Real Time Image Analysis - The voice description sounds better than my Meta Ray Ban, but the form factor is not that cool.

This week a total of 15 startups raised $612.9M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $363.1M goes to 7 Enterprise startups

• $2.8M goes to 1 HR startup

• $6.2M goes to 1 Web3 startup

• $35M goes to 1 BioTech startup

• $6.5M goes to 1 Electric Vehicle startup

• $150M goes to 1 Robotics startup

• $20M goes to 1 Transportation startup

• $20M goes to 1 Wellness startup

• $9.3M goes to 1 Other startup

I am heading to Consensus Austin 2024 on May 29-31 2024 giving everyone the latest updates from my Hong Kong Web3 Report 2024 at 3:00 PM CDT at Startup Village. Join me!

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Edith
X, LinkedIn

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Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Sigma Computing (cloud analytics solution) raised $200M Series D led by Spark Capital and Avenir Growth Capital

• Alkira (network infrastructure as a service) raised $100M Series C led by Tiger Global Management

• Gorgias (customer experience platform for eCommerce) raised $29M Series C led by SaaStr Fund and Alven,

• Gamma (AI powered presentation platform) raised $12M Series A led by Accel

• Recall.ai (virtual meeting data) raised $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures

• LanceDB (database for multimodal AI) raised $8M Seed led by CRV

• Pythagora (AI app dev tool) raised $4.1M Seed from Y Combinator, Polish Inovo VC, 500 Emerging Europe, Moonfire, Rebel, and Uphonest Capital

HR

• Apriora (AI interviewing platform) raised $2.8M Seed led by 1984 Ventures

Web3

• ChainML (web3-enabled AI platform) raised $6.2M Seed led by Hack VC

BioTech

• Elegen (synthetic DNA) raised $35M Series B led by Triatomic Capital

EV

• Orange Charger (EV charging smart outlet for multifamily homes) raised $6.5M Seed led by Climactic VC, Munich Re Ventures

Robotics

• The Bot Company (household robot) raised $150M Seed from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Nabeel Hyatt, Patrick Collison, John Collison and Quiet Capital

Transportation

• Glydways (on-demand personal rapid transit - PRT) raised $20M Series B from Suzuki Motor Corporation, ENEOS Holdings, and Mitsui Chemicals

Wellness

• Fay (nutrition therapy support platform) raised $20M Series A led by Forerunner Ventures

Other

• Honey Homes (home maintenance membership service) raised $9.3M Series A led by Era Ventures

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IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)  

• N/A