The Rundown

I was delayed this week getting out the weekly run down, mainly because big news stories happened simultaneously. Also, I took a painfully long trip on the LIE, from which I had just gotten off. Thank you, Erica Wenger and the Brex team, for such an awesome event out East.

First, last week, Crowdstrike shut down airlines, hospitals, and other major pieces of critical infrastructure after a code after a botched update. I myself was stuck in urgent care, left with doctors scrambling with a pen and paper to manage the inflow of patients. This was a major wake-up call for regular consumers on how unknown B2B companies can pervade every part of their lives and that their failure can cause widespread consequences.

Second, there was the election. President Biden stepped down on Sunday and endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Within a single day, the DNC had one of its best fundraising periods for, a what was moribund, endeavor. Now, Silicon Valley is coming out in full force on the left, with Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla swinging against Ben and Marc, who are going “all-in” on Trump. While pet issues around immigration and crypto while a major concern for the A16Z crowd, probably doesn’t move the opinion needle. My prognosis is that there will be a fallout. Founders will likely start considering which investors they take based on their politics and their need for government access.

Third, Wiz the darling of Silicon Valley and Silicon Wadi announced the $23bn deal with Google is off. The announcement killed the excitement that the M&A winter was finally thawing. Curious to see what this will mean for the fall and whether Lina Kahn will stay in her job.

Fourth, and probably one of the smaller news stories this week, Mercury suddenly shut down accounts for hundreds of immigrant founders. The most affected were Ukrainian, Belarussian Nigerian, and Russian founders who found themselves locked out of their accounts. I myself have invested almost exclusively in immigrant founders, and I have a particular fondness for those from the Former Soviet Union. It was incredibly disheartening to see how many people were affected by this change and how it is for a company that is meant to support entrepreneurs. For those who were affected, I recommend that you switch to either Brex or Rho.

News I Have Been Reading

• More collaboration between major tech players and legal tech companies. Litify collaborates with AWS and Anthropic to support responsible AI solutions in the legal industry, emphasizing data security and privacy using advanced cloud services and single-tenant architecture. Read in Litify News.

• Is there a turning point in the Russia-Ukraine war? Russia's much-vaunted offensive against Kharkiv started in May is faltering, and its advances elsewhere, particularly in Donbas, have been minor and costly. The focus now is on how long Russia can maintain its operational pace. Read in The Economist

• What is it like investing in GenAI right now? Here is a framework that early-stage funds might adopt, and addressing various aspects of the Generative AI market, including potential opportunities and challenges. Read in East Wind 

•  CrowdStrike, a major player in cloud-based endpoint detection, faced fallout after a botched software update, causing disruptions for major companies and prompting some to consider switching to rivals. Read in The Information 

• How Mercury really screwed up and screwed foreign founders. Read in TechCrunch 

• Dividing lines are getting set between left and right as VCs back their new horses. More tech Democrats now openly supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. This shift comes despite previous reluctance to vocally support President Joe Biden, as tensions rise between Trump-supporting VCs and their left-leaning counterparts. Read in Dealmaker 

• The darling IPO everyone wanted is off. Wiz, a cloud security startup valued at $12 billion, has declined a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google's parent company, Alphabet. Instead, Wiz aims for an IPO and to achieve $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. CEO Assaf Rappaport emphasized the company's ambition to remain independent and the support from investors. Regulatory scrutiny may have also influenced the decision. Wiz recently raised $1 billion in venture funding and has made acquisitions like Gem Security and the developer-focused cloud platform Rafft. Read in Fortune 

• There are new bunch of 20-something VCs changing SV landscape. Read in Business Insider

• My friend Zach Abramowitz discusses the increasing demand for AI in the legal industry, particularly highlighting his recent busy quarters and the shift from outbound to inbound client engagements. The newsletter also includes links to two podcasts recorded live. Read in Legally Disrupted 

Podcast Episodes

A new podcast came out with Ofer Medelevitch, Head of Developer Relations at Vectara.

Raises

• Clio, a Clio is a cloud-based law practice management software company, raised $900 million with the lead investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) here.

• Illumex, has developed a Generative Semantic Fabric platform for structured enterprise data and helps organizations to overcome data challenges by automating the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and adds business context, as well as generating a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terminology Raised $13 million with the lead investor Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures here.

• Redactive helps enterprises build, deploy, and govern their own intellectual property leveraging Generative AI. Their platform allows LLM-powered applications to connect to various enterprise data sources, ensuring secure and scalable live data access and enforcing permissions in real-time. They address critical issues such as data pipelining, data access control, auditing, AI governance, and query performance. They raised $7.5 million USD ( $11.5 Million AUD) with the lead investors Felicis, Blackbird, Atlassian Ventures, and Zapier here.

• Fireworks AI, a Fireworks AI, provides an inference engine to build production-ready, compound AI systems raised $52M with the lead investor Sequoia Capital here.

Final Thoughts

I left Global Millennial Capital to focus on supporting entrepreneurs and helping build generation-defining companies. I have some exciting opportunities on the horizon! Please reach out to my email, [email protected], since I have more time to speak with people and help where I can. I am still actively angel investing.