Top News of the Week:
NTT’s $40B buyout of Docomo fuels talk of Softbank interest (link)
Roblox game platform could go public at $8B valuation (link)
Allbirds raises $100M @ $1.7B valuation (link)
Tencent acquires search engine Sogou for $1.2B (link)
CFTC, DoJ charge founders of BitMEX—arrest CTO (link)
Weekly Synthesis:
This week, the tech markets remained hot with new and planned IPOs (Palantir, Asana, Roblox, McAfee), M&A (NTT-Docomo, Tencent-Sogou, Ivanti-MobileIron, Cisco-PortShift), and fundraises (Allbirds, XtalPi, Bitpanda). At the same time, non-tech companies and industries are struggling: Disney laid off 28,000 people, Goldman laid off 400 (70,000 total across the banking industry), and the NYC and SF commercial real estate and rental markets are tanking. Lastly, the CFTC and DoJ charged the founders of BitMEX for operating an unregistered trading platform as well as violating anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulations, arresting the CTO today in Massachusetts. This, as DeFi hit monthly records of $11B AUM and $22B in monthly trading volumes—causing Ethereum’s miner fee revenues to hit $166M, 6.4x that of Bitcoin’s at $26M, according to glassnode:
Braintrust Raises $18M in Strategic Growth Funding:
On Thursday, Braintrust announced that it raised $18M in strategic growth funding and added EY, AthenaHealth, Mural, Coursera, Stanley Black and Decker, and other Fortune 1000 clients to its platform. (Covered in TechCrunch, CoinDesk, The Block, and many more.)
IDEO CoLab Ventures invested in Braintrust’s seed round in 2018—I published this blog post on why we invested in Braintrust and are so proud to be a part of their journey from the very beginning.
Covid-19 Related News:
Amazon says 19,000 employees have gotten Covid-19 (link)
Disney lays off 28,000 workers amid slump (link)
Goldman cuts 400 jobs—1% of workforce (link)
NYC offices empty—only 1 in 10 workers have returned (link)
Artificial Intelligence:
Nvidia, VMware announce partnership in AI (link)
Musk: AI doesn’t need to hate us to destroy us (link)
Facebook open sources AI that answers questions (link)
XtalPi raises $319M from Softbank for AI drug discovery (link)
Blockchain & Crypto:
Uniswap is first DeFi app to reach $2B AUM (link)
Hong Kong picks ConsenSys for CBDC pilot (link)
EY launches blockchain procurement system (link)
Bitpanda raises $52M from Thiel’s Valar Ventures (link)
Consumer Tech:
E-commerce solution VTEX raises $225M @ $1.7B valuation (link)
Pew Research: 26% of U.S. adults get news from YouTube (link)
LinkedIn introduces stories to create friendlier platform (link)
2020 trends report on Gen Z (link)
AR / VR and Gaming:
Farmville shutting down for good December 31 (link)
You can go back to the office—if you use a VR headset (link)
Enterprise Tech:
Sales software Seismic raises $92M @ $1.6B valuation (link)
Golden raises $15M to build wiki of tech knowledge (link)
Pixie Labs raises $9M for Kubernetes observability platform (link)
Back-office platform raises $8M from General Catalyst (link)
Mergers and Acquisitions:
Ivanti acquires IT security platform MobileIron for $872M (link)
Cisco acquires DevOps startup PortShift (link)
Uber considering acquiring Daimler, BMW ride hailing venture (link)
Via acquires AI delivery logistics startup Fleetonomy (link)
IPOs:
Cybersecurity firm McAfee files for IPO (link)
Chip maker Kioxia calls off $16B IPO after Huawei fallout (link)
Tech vs. Government:
Seattle passes minimum pay rate for Uber, Lyft drivers (link)
Uber wins back license to operate in London (link)
Judge stops Trump’s TikTok ban—says U.S. overstepped (link)
Things I’m Involved In / Tracking:
Stanford #1, UC Berkeley #2 schools in world for startups (link)
Grammy-winning DJ RAC launches $RAC token (link)
How crypto is helping musicians create new revenue streams (link)
About Synthesis
Synthesis is a weekly newsletter of the top tech and innovation news for busy executives. Stay up to date, and save time. Delivered every Friday.
About the Author
I’m Ian. I’ve been in the venture and corporate innovation space for the last 10 years and helped build and operate investing, venturing, and innovation units at IDEO, Citigroup, and Deloitte. You can find me on Twitter here, mostly rambling about the latest in decentralization and crypto.
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