The metro’s share of US venture funding across sectors has climbed to a recent high of 41% this year.
Notably, deal activity in Silicon Valley remains overwhelmingly early-stage.
That means it’s not just a handful of more established startups raising massive rounds. More than two-thirds of Silicon Valley’s deals this year are at the seed or Series A stages.
It takes the median AI company just 7 years to exit from the year it was founded, compared to 13 years for non-AI companies.
Corporations are among the top acquirers of AI startups — both for talent and tech.
The AI boom gives recent public debuts a boost
We analyzed 15 of the companies with the largest tech IPOs since 2022 to see whether they’ve gained or lost value since they filed to go public.
The majority (10 out of 15) have either held steady or gained value as public players — a positive indicator for tech IPOs more broadly.
And AI is an important factor driving gains for several of these companies.
For instance, Arm’s value has nearly tripled since debuting (it’s a leader in CPUs for AI computing hardware). Tempus is deploying AI across its precision medicine offerings, which has helped buoy its value by 31% since its IPO filing.
Here’s a roundup of our favorite tech drama from last week:
Boardroom shake-up: Klarna’s board has agreed to oust Mikael Walther, an ally of co-founder Victor Jacobsson (a major shareholder) who left in 2012. Jacobsson is “a thorn in the side” of current CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, per the Financial Times. Klarna has been tidying up shop ahead of a planned IPO.
Whole week?: Whole Foods (owned by Amazon) had a townhall with its CEO Jason Buechel about the 5-day return-to-office mandate. There were 1,200 questions. Per Fortune, the following phrases were uttered at the town hall — “office experience task force” and “freedom within a framework of a norm of an office-based culture.” Yes — it went as you might have expected.
A divided house: In July,Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen of a16z endorsed and donated to Donald Trump (before Biden dropped out of the US presidential race). On Friday, Horowitz emailed employees at the firm saying he and his wife will make a “significant” personal donation to Kamala Harris’ campaign. Cue the tweets.
Severance: The WordPress/WP Engine saga continues. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg (also the founder of WordPress) said 159 employees (8.4% of staff) who disagreed with his handling of the dispute took a severance package. I can’t remember the last time WordPress was in the news this much.
Group project: French president Emmanuel Macron believes the EU is at major risk of becoming uncompetitive on the global stage: “Our former model is over — we are over-regulating and under-investing. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market.” This is very true. Europe’s mantra of “Why innovate? Regulate” isn’t really working.
Shockingly lax: UK challenger bank Starling was fined 29 million pounds ($38M) for “shockingly lax” controls against financial crimes. Per Therese Chambers of the Financial Conduct Authority, “It left the financial system wide open to criminals and those subject to sanctions.”
Ctrl C: A YC-backed startup PearAI caught flak online for copying an open-source project and putting its own closed license on it (the company has since apologized and released it under an open-source license). YC CEO Garry Tan at first defended it, then last week released a personal apology “correcting the record." Move fast and break things.
AI slugfest: Meta announced a new AI video & audio generation model called Movie Gen in competition with OpenAI’s Sora. There’s also a very detailed (very long) 92-page paper you can read about it. People online were impressed. You can watch Zuck leg-pressing chicken nuggets here.
