Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-06-18
Tech giants jockey for market cap, trucking goes autonomous, materials science meets AI, and cybersecurity M&A heats up.
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Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-06-18
Off the cuff analysis in a rapid fire format.
A few things that caught my attention today in big funding and M&A moves in tech.
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Techmeme: Nvidia passes Microsoft during intraday trading to become the most valuable public company, with a ~$3.33T market cap; NVDA is up over 9x since January 2023 (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
By Kif Leswing / CNBC. View the full context on Techmeme.
📊 + ⚖️ Expect more breathless coverage of relative market cap jockeying between Apple, Microsoft, as the FAANG, MAANG, etc. swap out letters or do enough M&A with stock for the EU and US Government to determine who’s ripe for disassembly.
Techmeme: Autonomous trucking startup Waabi raised a $200M Series B led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, after an $83.5M Series A in 2021, and aims for a full launch in 2025 (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)
By Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters. View the full context on Techmeme.
🚚 + 🤖 Fun fact: When I lived in Las Vegas just over a decade ago, there were parts of the highway system between Nevada and Arizona that were approved for semi-autonomous trucking.
Techmeme: Cambridge, UK-based CuspAI, which is developing AI-powered tech for designing new materials, raised a $30M seed and adds Geoffrey Hinton to its advisory board (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)
By Mark Bergen / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
🔮 + 🤖 While I don’t use my college degree much (Materials Science and Engineering), it is fascinating to see how the quest for novel or first mover advantage in materials science is approaching A.I. alchemy status.
Techmeme: Boulder, Colorado-based Enveda, which combines AI with ancient remedies for drug discovery, raised a $55M Series B extension from investors including Microsoft (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
By Marina Temkin / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
🧙 + 🤖 Same thing. Just replace alchemy with potions. But seriously, consider the fact that potential MRSA remedies date back to a time where slathering on garlic, onions, wine, and bile was probably cutting edge proper compounding at the time.
Techmeme: Maryland-based Huntress, an SMB-focused managed security platform, raised a $150M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, and Sapphire at a $1.5B+ valuation (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal)
By James Rundle / Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
🔐 + 🤑 As the appetite for Enterprise cybersecurity size M&A enjoys big bets status for the next 2-3 years, I expect higher velocity MSSP and cybersecurity related deals like this to continue in 2024.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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