Microsoft bought nearly 500K Nvidia chips & OpenAI may pay its nonprofit arm ‘billions of dollars’ in conversion to for-profit.

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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS

Startup Funding Updates

SandboxAQ, a Palo Alto, CA-based company delivering solutions at the intersection of AI and quantum techniques, raised more that $300M in funding. The round, which valued the company at $5.3 billion on a pre-money basis, was led by Fred Alger Management, LLC, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Mumtalakat, Parkway Venture Capital, Breyer Capital, Rizvi Traverse, S32, US Innovative Technology Fund, Ava Investments, Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff, David Siegel, Yann LeCun, IQT, and other investors.

Plume, a NYC-based provider of an integrated modular Layer-1 blockchain focused on Real World Asset Finance (RWAfi), raised $20M in Series A funding. Backers included Brevan Howard Digital, Haun Ventures, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Superscrypt, Hashkey, Laser Digital (Nomura Group), A Capital, 280 Capital, SV Angel, Reciprocal Ventures, and others.

BVNK, a London, UK-based stablecoin payments infrastructure company, raised $50M in Series B funding. The round was led by Haun Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Scribble Ventures, DRW VC and existing investors Avenir and Tiger Global.

ICEYE, a Helsinki, Finland-based company which specializes in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite operations for high-fidelity Earth Observation, persistent monitoring, and natural catastrophe solutions, raised $65M extension to existing growth round. Backers included Solidium Oy, BlackRock, Seraphim, Plio Limited, and Christo Georgiev.

Mojave, a Sunnyvale, CA-based air conditioning company, raised $9.5M in Series A funding. The round was led by Fifth Wall and At One Ventures, with participation from returning investors Myriad Venture Partners, Starshot Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and new investor Earth Venture Capital.

Simulation Theory, a San Diego, CA-based startup dedicated to reducing waste by optimizing compute resources, raised $2M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Larry Russ, managing partner at Russ, August & Kabat with individual investors including Ryan Peterson, former CEO of Finger Food Advanced Technology Group and Robert Wallace of Strategic Alternatives.

Jome, an Austin, TX-based AI-powered real estate marketplace that helps buyers find, compare, and purchase new construction homes, raised $9.8M in Series A funding. The round was led by Geek Ventures with participation from investors U.Ventures, Toloka VC, and Forefront VP.

Kurrent, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an event-native data platform that captures complete historical context for data analytics, application development and AI, raised $12M in funding. The round was led by Crane Venture Partners with participation from Creandum.

Scripta Insight, a Boston, MA-based digital health company, raised $17M in Series B funding. The round was led by led by Aquiline, with participation from Contour Venture Partners and Eastside Partners, as well as ReMY Investors, bringing the total amount to $42M.

Hamming.ai, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an AI voice agent reliability platform, raised $3.8M in Seed funding. The round was led by Mischief, with participation from Y-Combinator, AI Grant, Pioneer, Coalition Operators, Coughdrop and angels including Hiten Shah, Ran Makavy, Max Kolysh, Richard Aberman and Kulveer Taggar.

Orqa, an Osijek, Croatia-based company which specializes in advanced autonomous drone solutions, raised €5.8M in Seed funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Radius Capital, Decisive Point and existing investor Day One Capital.

SiteOne Therapeutics, a San Francisco, CA-based biopharmaceutical company developing selective ion channel modulators for the treatment of pain, cough, and other conditions, raised $100M in Series C funding. The round was led by Novo Holdings, with participation from OrbiMed, Wellington Management, Mission BioCapital, BSQUARED Capital, and existing investors.

Basis, a New York based startup that automates accounting tasks for accounting firms, raised $34m in Series A funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures.

Airtasker Limited (ASX: ART), a Sydney, Australia-based online marketplace for local services, received a $6M investment from Mercurius Media Capita.

Salt AI, a Los Angeles, CA-based AI workflow orchestration company, raised $3M in Seed funding. The round was led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from Struck Capital, and Irregular Expressions.

Blue J, a Toronto, Canada-based provider of generative AI-powered tax research to accounting and tax professionals, raised an undisclosed amount in Series C funding. The round was led by Ten Coves Capital. 

Retellio, a St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada-based provider of a B2B customer insights software platform, raised $1.3M in funding. The round was led by Pelorus Ventures, with participation from Island Capital, East Valley Ventures, The51, the Women’s Equity Lab and others.

Hauler Hero, a cloud-based software platform for waste-management companies providing route planning, management, billing and customer portal services, raised $10 million in seed funding. The round was led by I2BF Ventures, with participation from K5 Global, Somersault Ventures, and executives from Gusto and ServiceTitan, as well as some of Hauler Hero's customers.

Access, a NYC-based subscription app providing guaranteed reservations at top restaurants through a membership model, raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Initium Management, with participation from the family office of former Goldman Sachs partner Ron Marks.

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NEW VCs IN THE MARKET

Venture Capital Updates

Menlo Ventures and Anthropic's Anthology Fund, a $100 million fund focused on AI startups building on top of Anthropic's models, has invested in 18 startups after launching five months ago.

This provide each startup with $100,000 or more in funding and $25,000 in Anthropic model credits.

Julien Codorniou is joining London-based 20VC as its third general partner for early-stage investments, leaving his position at Felix Capital where he had been a founding advisor since 2015 and partner since 2021. The move follows 20VC's recent announcement of its third investment vehicle of $400 million, with Codorniou bringing extensive experience from his 11-year tenure at Facebook (Meta) and investments in companies like Pigment, Omada, and TechWolf.

Skyseed, a newly announced $1 million fund to support startups building on Bluesky's AT Protocol, was launched by Peter Wang. The fund will support development of applications focused on data privacy controls for AI usage, parental controls, and local community apps on the decentralized social platform, which now has 25 million users.

KEY STORIES IN TECH

Latest In Tech

Perplexity, an AI search company, acquired Carbon, a Seattle-based startup specializing in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology for connecting AI systems to external data sources. The acquisition was announced by CEO Aravind Srinivasan, with plans to integrate Carbon's technology to enable enterprise search capabilities across platforms like Notion, Google Docs, and Slack by early 2025.

Microsoft purchased 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips in 2024, more than doubling the purchases of its next closest rival Meta (224,000 chips). The news, reported by the Financial Times using data from consultancy firm Omdia, shows Microsoft's significant investment in AI infrastructure, with the company tripling its Nvidia chip purchases compared to 2023.

Intel's Arc B580 "Battlemage" GPU has been highly praised, quickly selling out upon release, and Intel is working to replenish inventory weekly to meet high demand. The Arc B580 has received positive reviews for being an outstanding budget GPU option, outperforming competitors like the RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 in various aspects including price and performance. Despite rapid sellouts, the supply of the Arc B580 is considered substantial, and restocks are expected soon through major retailers, with additional models priced at both $250 and higher.

OpenAI has given API developers complete access to the latest o1 model, replacing the previous o1-preview version, as part of several new updates available starting today. The updated o1 model reinstates key features such as developer messages and a "reasoning effort" parameter, allowing for more tailored chatbot interactions and efficient handling of queries. The new model delivers results faster and more cost-effectively with enhanced accuracy, using 60% fewer thinking tokens and improving accuracy by 25 to 35 percentage points on various benchmarks.

LAST COFFEE SIP

Other News

OpenAI is reportedly in talks to pay its nonprofit board billions of dollars to cede control of the company, according to The New York Times. The discussions come as OpenAI faces pressure to restructure within two years or risk converting its recent $6.6 billion funding to debt.

NASA has postponed the return of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams from the ISS to late March 2025, extending their mission significantly beyond the initial plan. The astronauts initially traveled to the ISS on Boeing's Starliner but will now return on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission due to issues with the Starliner's propulsion system. Wilmore and Williams will spend over nine months in space, as Crew-10's launch is delayed to March 2025, allowing time for a handover and spacecraft preparations.

REPORT THAT YOU SHOULD LOOK

In-Depth Insights

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• All-In-One Fundraising Resources For Founders: From deciding whether VC is right for you to the closing deal. get access to all resources.

• How to Talk About Valuation Numbers When Investor Ask? Founders often get trouble in discussing valuation number when investors ask.

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