This is at least the third investment in a U.S. chip startup by the VentureTech Alliance in the past month. In May, the VentureTech Alliance participated in funding rounds for Ayar Labs and Ethernovia for $25 million and $64 million, respectively.

As the viral success of ChatGPT sparked an AI boom, this brought another round of investment in AI hardware. But some startups that raised big money in previous years have struggled.

SiMa.ai develops software and hardware to run artificial intelligence algorithms on devices such as industrial robots, drones, security cameras, self-driving cars, and more. SiMa.ai declined to reveal its current valuation, but CEO and founder Krishna Rangasayee said the company has started generating revenue since its founding in 2018 and has more than 50 customers testing its chips. Rangasayee also highlighted the results of a recent test by SiMa.ai, which beat AI chip giant Nvidia in terms of both performance and power consumption, the test data was released by MLCommons.

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The investigation order was issued at the request of Aguinaldo Ribeiro, the Speaker of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. Google was severely warned for placing a link expressing a dissenting attitude on Google Brazil’s site ahead of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies’ vote on Bill 2630, the Anti-Fake News Law, in early May.

It is learned that the bill requires Internet companies and social information service providers to take the initiative to take responsibility for discovering and reporting bad information and charge high fines for companies that refuse to deal with bad information in a timely manner. Google and Telegram have previously been critical of it.

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Tesla posted more than 700 job ads on its website late last month for positions in Nay Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, California, including 423 for technical and IT positions, and 74 for autonomous driving and robotics jobs.

The move suggests that Tesla is working hard to hire AI engineers – after all, artificial intelligence is a fundamental capability essential to developing Tesla’s robotics and self-driving technology.

According to Nikkei, Tesla’s hiring campaign seems to have come at the right time, as it coincides with a number of large tech companies that are laying off employees at this stage, thus exporting a large pool of AI talent to the community.

Nikkei reached out to the real estate company behind the office. A spokesperson said it had received a letter of intent from Tesla, but as of the end of January had yet to reach an agreement with the electric car maker. Tesla reportedly appears to be planning to lease 29,700 square meters of office space.

It’s worth noting that the building is home to HP’s HPE corporate headquarters until 2019, and Tesla leased part of the building currently located next to the former HPE offices from HP in the fall of 2021, with about 30,000 square meters of office space where Tesla teams are currently developing technologies like Optimus humanoid robots and Dojo.

As a follow-up, Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas in 2021, but is still hiring cutting-edge talent at its original Palo Alto, California headquarters. Musk has said that new products and services using artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars and humanoid robots, are “Tesla with orders of magnitude and potential market capitalization gains.

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The U.S. West Coast has always been a major destination for ambitious software engineers eager to travel to in hopes of finding better-paying tech jobs there. However, massive layoffs in the tech industry have created hiring opportunities for German companies.

They cut jobs, we hire,” said Rainer Zugehoer, chief people officer at Cariad, the software subsidiary of automaker Volkswagen. We have hundreds of open positions to fill in the U.S., Europe and China.”

Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta announced a combined total of nearly 40,000 layoffs due to fears of inflation and a worsening recession. Germany has one of the world’s most aging populations and a huge workforce gap, with 137,000 IT jobs currently open, according to IT industry group Bitkom.

The German government is simplifying immigration rules and using the promise of easy access to citizenship to attract potential migrants with key skills. Judith Gerlach, Germany’s Bavarian state minister for digitalization, said in a LinkedIn message to those recently laid off, “I invite you to Bavaria.”

With the euro nearly equal in value to the dollar, few European companies can offer salaries comparable to the hundreds of thousands of dollars offered by their California counterparts, but some hope cheaper health care and a lower cost of living compared to hot spots like San Francisco will help.

Added Gerlach, “Did I mention Oktoberfest?” Munich’s famous Oktoberfest may be attracting new unemployed people. But some are skeptical, with Bitkom CEO Bernhard Rohleder pointing out that Germany is not only competing with other countries for the best talent, but also with the home countries of that talent.

German bureaucracy may be another challenge: Many companies have already reported months of delays in scheduling appointments for new employees in order to obtain work permits.

Diana Stoleru of Berlin-based startup Lendis says, “For most people, Germany is extremely bureaucratic, especially if they don’t speak German.”

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Brokerages and investors say tech workers are flooding the secondary market, a channel through which employees of private companies can pay third parties, as former darlings of the industry such as Klarna and Stripe are forced into aggressive cost-cutting measures. selling stock in the company).

Many workers who lost their jobs had 60 days to cash out their stock holdings, forcing them to sell amid the worst economic downturn in nearly a decade. Brokerage companies said that some companies allow employees to postpone the sale of stocks, but some sellers still hope to sell as soon as possible because they are worried that the market will deteriorate further next year.

“We’ve seen a huge influx of laid-off employees coming in and selling,” said Greg Martin, managing director of private stock exchange Rainmaker Securities. own stock.”

Martin added: “Overall, we’re seeing a 30% to 80% decline in stock prices from a year ago.”

The rise in sellers has put downward pressure on the shares of many tech startups. With rising U.S. interest rates and anemic conditions for public tech stocks seeping through to private markets, fears are growing that valuations for startups across the industry will be restructured.

The sharp drop means it is increasingly difficult to assess the current valuations of many startups. Many startups have avoided funding through venture capital firms this year for fear they might be forced to lower their valuations, making it difficult for the outside world to assess the specific impact of the macro environment on them through tangible data.

At the same time, informal private secondary markets set up by companies like Rainmaker are often illiquid, complicating the process of accurately assessing the “market capitalization” of these companies.

The head of a technology venture capital fund in Silicon Valley said that he has received a large number of invitations to invest in companies through secondary stock sales this month, reaching 10 times the normal number.

Fintech firms Klarna, Chime and Stripe, as well as multibillion-dollar startups such as e-commerce firm Instacart and automated delivery company Nuro, have all laid off 10% to 30% of their workforces in recent months. Their move mirrors that of publicly traded tech giants: Facebook parent Meta and Amazon have both announced in recent weeks that they would cut more than 10,000 jobs.

Anduril, an artificial intelligence defense company, has received investments from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $8.5 billion. But the company was selling for $16.95 a share on the secondary market in November, nearly halved from $31.50 in March, according to Rainmaker data.

SoftBank-backed Chime was valued at $25 billion in its latest round of outside funding in August 2021, but since then the company has lost a quarter of its value on the secondary market and is now trading at $1.99 per share. $60.

“The number of sellers has increased significantly and the number of buyers has decreased significantly, which has resulted in lower prices that are more in line with valuations in the open market,” Rainmaker’s Martin said.

However, private market stock trading shows that after the venture capital financing boom in 2021 drove valuations to climb sharply, many private company stocks, although not small, are still at the same price as before the epidemic, or even improved from before the epidemic.

The head of a venture capital fund said that the valuations of the companies he invests in have plummeted, but only relative to their all-time highs. “Valuations are really miserable, but they’re also crazy when they go up. Yes, the stock price is really terrible. It used to be much higher than this before, but in the context of the past few years, it’s not too bad.” He said.

The U.S. IPO (initial public offering) market has shrunk to its lowest level in 20 years, a dismal situation that has also forced some technology companies to create structured liquidity plans that have employees dump large amounts of stock. But at the same time, the valuation of the company itself often shrinks significantly.

Kevin Swan, the private markets specialist at Morgan Stanley’s Workplace Financial Solutions business, said companies preparing to go public this year are “scrambling to find access to loans or to sell shares in the secondary market.”

Startup employees and investors who had hoped to cash in on blockbuster new stock listings this year, but the prospect of an IPO are forcing them to act, Swan added.

Glen Kernick, head of Kroll Silicon Valley, a startup valuation service provider, said that in addition, some employees of technology companies are increasingly worried that their options will become “diving options”. The company cannot be listed in the short term. The so-called “diving option” refers to an option whose strike price is higher than the market price, making the option meaningless.

“When a company is about to IPO or it’s about to raise money, there’s increased demand from the buy side … but both of these are ruled out,” Konico said. Because of the impact these issues could have on the company’s share price, some companies are even restricting current employees from selling shares in the secondary market, he added.

Private companies such as Klarna, Stripe and Checkout.com in Europe, as well as Instacart, have all lowered their internal valuations. After lowering the stock price, employees will get higher benefits should the company conduct an IPO in the future. While layoffs in the tech industry are spreading more widely, the competition for top-notch engineers remains fierce.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is trying to arrange a round of mostly employee-owned stock sales that would value it at $150 billion. This valuation represents a 20% increase from the previous round and should help generate strong returns for employees and shareholders.

The value of a company’s common stock is determined by trading volume, how investors price preferred shares, and the company’s own internal valuation. Internal valuations are typically determined by the board of directors and independent advisors during the “409a” assessment process for tax purposes.

How to create liquidity for employees while maintaining sky-high valuations? This is something businesses “must address over the next 12 months”. “Almost every company is thinking about it,” said Ravi Viswanathan, founder of California-based venture capital fund NewView Capital.

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