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Alphabet, stand to reap returns as high as 200 times for seed investors, among them Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts and Index Ventures. The $32 billion all-cash Wiz deal on Tuesday marked a major win for about 25 firms on Wiz's cap table, according to PitchBook, a rarity in the past few years as high interest rates and tight antitrust scrutiny reduced exit events. Among the investors, the biggest beneficiaries are those that put money into Wiz early and continued to invest over the years. Their success demonstrated the power law in venture capital when a small number of investments generate the majority of returns.

Voice AI startup ElevenLabs has raised $180 million in a series C funding round, tripling the company’s valuation to $3.3 billion within a year.

corruption against former finance minister P Chidambaram's son and Congress MP, Karti Chidambaram, for allegedly giving relief to alcoholic beverage company Diageo Scotland over a ban on the duty-free sale of its whisky, officials said Thursday. The case pertains to an alleged suspicious payment made to Advantage Strategic Consulting Pvt. Ltd, «an entity controlled» by Karti P Chidambaram and his close aide S Bhaskararaman by Diageo Scotland and Sequoia Capitals, the CBI FIR said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has told investors it raised $5 billion in a funding round valuing it at $50 billion—more than twice what it was valued at several months ago. Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority, and investment firms Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to participate in the round, according to people familiar with the matter.

Surge, Peak XV’s programme for early-stage startups, has selected 14 startups for its tenth cohort, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), financial services, consumer sectors and healthcare. Rajan Anandan, managing director of Peak XV, told ET that this is Surge’s most broad-based cohort, both geographically and across sectors. This also marks Surge’s second cohort since Peak XV Partners was formed following the split from Sequoia Capital.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Singapore's Temasek Holdings is close to buying Peak XV's 18-20% stake in Bengaluru-based Cloudnine Hospitals for around $125 million, three people aware of the development said. The deal, which has been in the works for more than a year and a half, may value the specialist mother and baby care hospitalat around $600 million, the people cited above said on the condition of anonymity.

OpenAI's new financing round is expected to come in the form of convertible notes, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, who said its $150 billion valuation will be contingent on whether the ChatGPT-maker can upend its corporate structure and remove a profit cap for investors. The details of the conditions of the $6.5 billion funding, which have not been previously reported, shows how far OpenAI, the most valuable AI startup in the world, has come from a research-based non-profit, and the structural changes it's willing to make to attract ever more investment to fund its expensive pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The outsized funding round has seen strong investor demand and could be finalized in the next two weeks, given the rapid growth of OpenAI's revenue, sources added.

A few months ago, it might have seemed that the stakes of the artificial-intelligence investment wave couldn’t have gotten much higher. Well, they have. Sequoia Capital last September published a report arguing that Nvidia infrastructure would have to collectively generate $200 billion in lifetime revenue to justify companies’ spending on those advanced AI systems over the course of just one year—and the spending wasn’t anywhere near that mark.

Volt Typhoon is exploiting a bug in a California-based startup to hack American and Indian internet companies, according to security researchers. Volt Typhoon has breached four US firms, including internet service providers, and another in India through a vulnerability in a Versa Networks server product, according to Lumen Technologies Inc's unit Black Lotus Labs. Their assessment, much of which was published in a blog post Tuesday, found with «moderate confidence» that Volt Typhoon was behind the breaches of unpatched Versa systems and said exploitation was likely ongoing. Versa, which makes software that manages network configurations and has attracted investment from Blackrock Inc and Sequoia Capital, announced the bug last week and offered a patch and other mitigations.

Ruholamin Haqshanas is a contributing crypto writer for CryptoNews. He is a crypto and finance journalist with over four years of experience. Ruholamin has been featured in several high-profile crypto...

Is Generative AI worth the money? Tech leaders like Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott says costs will come down and capabilities improve, but as Wall Street heads toward correction territory— Nvidia and Microsoft, two stocks that have ridden the AI wave, are down more than 15% and 8% respectively since 10 July—enterprises are grappling with a deeper problem: How do they put AI to use and measure the return on that investment? Confusion over the answer has led to discomfort, sparked by bearish reports from Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital questioning whether GenAI will make as much money as the market seems to think. AI capital expenditure will reach between $600 billion and $1 trillion in the coming years, the reports estimate, and spending on infotech will rise 8% this year, according to Gartner. If investors are taking a breather, that’s good.

Caldera, a rollup ecosystem helping projects deploy their blockchains on popular stacks with a single click, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Founders Fund, with participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital, and Lattice, among others.

A group of investors will put up $6 billion to fund development of artificial intelligence by Elon Musk’s xAI

Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, successfully raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round on May 26. The latest Series B round included participation from Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.

X.AI Corp. is set to close its funding round at a valuation of about $18 billion as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter.

Wiz said Tuesday it raised $1 billion in a deal valuing the fast growing cloud security startup at $12 billion. Wiz said the funding round, which brings the company’s total funding to $1.9 billion, was led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital. Greylock Partners, Wellington Management and existing investors Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital and former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz also participated.

ChrysCapital has invested about Rs 600 crore ($70 million) in Ahmedabad-based La Renon Healthcare, valuing it at $800 million. ChrysCap has acquired about 8% stake from the promoter family in a secondary transaction. Incorporated in 2007 by Pankaj Singh, La Renon is engaged in the manufacturing and marketing of branded generic formulations. ChrysCapital is close to acquiring a minority stake in La Renon Healthcare via secondary sale of shares, at a valuation of Rs 6,500 crore ($800 million), ET first reported on February 12. At present, promoter Pankaj Singh & family own about 80% stake in the formulations manufacturer while Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital) owns 14% and domestic VC fund A91 Partners owns 6% stake in La Renon. In FY24, La Renon posted a revenue of Rs 1,400 crore and an Ebitda of Rs 300 crore, said sources. O3 Capital advised La Renon on the transaction.

Paradigm, a key player in crypto venture capital, is eyeing a significant fundraising goal for its latest investment fund.

British digital bank Monzo on Tuesday raised $430 million in fresh capital from investors to help it relaunch its services in the U.S.