📶 Amazon pledges $230 to gen AI

AMZN becomes a major gen AI player, pensions want out of private equity, Lightspeed shifts to secondaries, and funding for visual media is up 90%

June 17, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Good morning 👋

And Happy Monday.

VC markets are getting weird.

Corporates are backing early-stage companies, institutional LPs are rethinking asset allocation, and tier one funds are focusing on secondary markets.

Let’s get into all of it plus the other headlines we read over the weekend.

TL;DR:

HEADLINES
Amazon becomes a major gen AI player 🤖

  • Pensions Piled Into Private Equity. Now They Can’t Get Out. (WSJ)

  • Amazon says it’ll spend $230 million on generative AI startups (TechCrunch)

  • Early AI Funding May Be Showing Some Cracks (Crunchbase)

  • Evolve, Bank for Mercury and Synapse, Hit With Fed Action (The Information)

  • Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed shifts focus to secondary markets (FT)

  • Hugging Face CEO says he hears from 10 AI founders a week who want to sell their startups (Fortune)

  • FTC chair Lina Khan plans to go after Big Tech’s ‘mob boss’ instead of ‘the henchmen at the bottom’—targeting AI giants OpenAI, Microsoft, and Nvidia (Fortune)

  • VC funding for AI visual media surges nearly 90% (Pitchbook)

  • Enveda raises $55M to combine ancient remedies with AI for drug discovery (TechCrunch)

  • Dublin-based fintech startup CleverCards raises $8.6M in funding to help businesses issue prepaid cards and prevent abuse (TechStartups)

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RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in Friday’s piece:

If you were to pick one geography to invest in startups over the next ten years, where would it be?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ United States only 🇺🇸 (3)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ North America as a whole 🇨🇦 (5)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ South America 🇧🇷 (5)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Europe 🇪🇺 (8)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Asia 🌏 (8)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Africa 🌍 (9)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Somewhere else 🤷‍♂️ (7)

45 Votes

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