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- Upcoming Founder & VC Events Happening This Week
Upcoming Founder & VC Events Happening This Week
Upcoming Events & The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds
Mariane Bekker
February 26, 2024
Networking events are a great way to meet fellow founders and investors. Here are events happening in San Francisco this week for founders.
🗓 Monday (Feb 26)
📍 Palo Alto
💬 Come and Meet Featured investors Featured VC: Sebastian Spitzer Corporate Venture Capital at Schaeffler
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join Brent Murri (M13) and Karine Hsu (Slope) for an evening of stimulating conversation about the latest breakthroughs in AI technology and how they are transforming the way we work, create, and build.
🗓 Tuesday (Feb 27)
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join SVB Catalyst 2045 as we celebrate and honor Black History Month on February 27, 2024, in San Francisco, CA.
📍 Berkeley
💬 Joining us for a fireside chat is the author of 'The Fast Founder: Startup to exit in 36 month', Eric Lam of Recast Ventures. He shares insights from 20 years of entrepreneurship and successful exits.
📍 Aura Cinema, San Francisco
💬 Join the latest conversations on AI with industry leaders, investors, founders, and enthusiasts.Pick your sticker as an Investor, Founder, Hiring manager, Infrastructure provider, or AI-curious; and get ready to mix and mingle.
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join us for an exciting evening of Generative AI demos in San Francisco at Wilson Sonsini! Generative AI is truly changing our lives and the way we work, and opening up new use cases and opportunities. See how startups are leveraging LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, Mistral, Meta, and more like Bard, ChatGPT, Claude, Command, Llama 2, Gemini - to create compelling new applications and solutions.
📍 Mountain View
💬 Calling all Latinx Founders and Investors on the Pod! We're hosting a get-together for Latinx Tech WhatsApp Group members in Mountain View, California! The magic of attending a Latinx Meetup is that people come together to listen, connect, and grow. No one wants to impress anyone. Not needing to pitch is the ultimate flex. Just Latinx founders and investors are supporting each other to thrive
🗓 Wednesday (Feb 28)
📍 Palo Alto
💬 Connecting Multi million dollar Investors to global tech startups for customers, funding and dealmaking to build successful ventures.
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join us for a simple group run winding through some landmarks of FiDi, San Francisco! Whether you're a seasoned runner or just starting, this event is for you. Meet fellow runners, challenge yourself, and enjoy the conversation with us. We are all about the community and the camaraderie that comes with the group running.
📍 San Francisco
💬 Bay Angels is hosting a networking and pitch event at Dynamic Space in San Francisco. Join us on February 28th, 5:15pm-8:30pm PT.
📍 San Francisco
💬 As seen in Entrepreneur Magazine. We’re SF's premier tech networking event with one of the largest membership groups in Southern California and growing every month! Don't miss this opportunity to meet your next big business connection!
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join us for an enriching roundtable event in the heart of Silicon Valley, hosted by Shirley Braun, PhD and Patricia Bravo, MBA. We understand the challenges of navigating today's complex landscape, filled with high business expectations, workplace strain, and pressing social issues.
🗓 Thursday (Feb 29)
📍 San Carlos
💬 We are thrilled to announce the return of our popular “Founders at Work” seminar series! Set to occur monthly, these seminars will alternate between our San Francisco and San Carlos locations. Each session features a distinguished current resident or alumnus from our community. These seminars provide an invaluable opportunity, especially for early-stage founders, to gain insights from those who’ve navigated the entrepreneurial journey successfully. It’s a chance to hear real-life stories, learn practical strategies, and understand the experiences that have shaped successful startups.
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join us at Above The Rim at Chase Center in downtown San Francisco for an invite-only event as we leap into exploring the lasting impact of AI. Discover firsthand how Google Cloud's cutting-edge technology is at the forefront of creating a brighter and more inclusive future through AI.
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join our Women Tech Meetup co-hosted by Puzzle, Gusto, Trellis and OutWeGo to celebrate Leap Year, as it will be another four years before you'll have another chance.
📍 San Francisco
💬 Join us for an electrifying evening on February 29th from 6:30pm to 8:30pm! We're thrilled to present "Networking | VC + Founder + Engineer + Designer" - an event that promises excitement, innovation, and connections galore.
📍 San Jose
💬 Join us for an exciting networking event at the Silicon Valley Capital Club in San Jose, CA, USA. Get ready to connect with fellow business enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and professionals from the vibrant Silicon Valley community.
🗓 Friday (Mar 1)
📍 San Francisco
💬 Dawn Patrol is in town for the first time, and we're ready to kickstart your day with (free) coffee and community! :)
📍 San Jose
💬 Come join entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast®. At a Bootstrappers Breakfast® we have serious conversations about growing a business based on internal cashflow and organic profit: this is for founders who are actively bootstrapping a startup.
📍 San Francisco
💬 We are hosting casual gatherings with tech start-up founders, offering networking opportunities to find partners, clients, investors, or like-minded friends.
🗓 Saturday (Mar 2)
📍 San Francisco
💬 You can run either 5K or 10K at your conversational pace, with a few pace groups available, or you can choose your own pace to cover the distance of your choice. The most important thing is that we start together. We run easily, chat along the way, and then we grab coffee together and continue the conversation.
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds
After last week saw 10 rounds of $100 million or more, investors followed up with another strong week that saw a half-dozen startups raise similarly.
1. Ascend Elements, $162M, batteries: It was only about five months ago that Ascend Elements made this list with a huge $460 million Series D led by Decarbonization Partners — a partnership between BlackRock and Temasek focusing on companies in the decarbonization space — Temasek and Qatar Investment Authority. Well, this week the Westborough, Massachusetts-based startup followed up that round with a $162 million investment from investors including Just Climate, Clearvision Ventures and Irongrey. Ascend is a manufacturer of sustainable battery materials for EVs. Founded in 2015, the company has now raised $1.7 billion, per Crunchbase.
2. Abridge, $150M, healthcare: AI is making a big impact on healthcare — and funding to healthcare startups. Abridge, which is building AI-powered clinical documentation tools, is the latest startup in that realm to raise big. The Pittsburgh-based startup raised a $150 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. The new round reportedly values the company at about $850 million. Founded in 2018, the company has raised nearly $208 million, per Crunchbase.
2. Antora Energy, $150M, energy: Speaking of Decarbonization Partners, the New York-based partnership led a $150 million Series B for Antora Energy this week. The Sunnyvale, California-based startup uses renewable electricity to heat blocks of carbon. That stored heat is then delivered to large industrial customers. The company also produces a thermal battery. Founded in 2017, Antora has raised $230 million, per the company.
4. Hornblower Group, $121M, leisure: Strategic Value Partners acquired a majority ownership stake in New York-based Hornblower, a travel experience company. The M&A agreement also gives Hornblower a fresh infusion of $121 million in financing from SVP-managed funds and Crestview Partners, which retains a minority stake in the company. Hornblower also announced a reshuffling of some of its units, including trying to sell its overnight cruising business. Clearly a lot is going on.
5. Recogni, $102M, artificial intelligence: Although most startup chipmakers have not seen much love from investors so far this year, Recogni seems to have bucked that trend. The San Jose, California-based firm, which is developing its AI inference chip for both the generative AI and automotive industries, raised a $102 million Series C co-led by Celesta Capital and GreatPoint Ventures. While the company has its roots in designing chips that help autonomous vehicles detect objects, it is now also exploring the AI market. The company’s accelerator chip uses live data in trained models for predictions — all while requiring less energy, the company says. U.S.-based semiconductor funding has slowed in recent quarters, despite the need for new chip designs, thanks to industries such as AI and automotive. Last year such startups saw only $1.2 billion in 66 deals — per Crunchbase data — after raking in more than $2 billion in 2022. This year has seen only a trickle of deals.
6. Eigen Labs, $100M, blockchain: Seattle-based Eigen Labs, the creator of EigenLayer for staking Ethereum, raised a $100 million round from a16z crypto. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $164 million, per Crunchbase.
7. Hadrian, $92M, manufacturing: Per a report, this round actually was completed in December but never really formally announced. Hawthorne, California-based Hadrian raised a $117 million Series B that included $25 million in debt. RTX Ventures, the venture arm of defense prime contractor RTX (formerly Raytheon) and a16z, participated in the round. The company builds “highly automated precision component factories” mainly to produce components for the space and defense industries. Founded in 2020, the company has raised nearly $217 million, per Crunchbase.
8. Frontier Medicines, $80M, pharmaceuticals: South San Francisco, California-based Frontier Medicines, a startup researching therapies against undruggable disease-causing targets, raised an $80 million Series C co-led by Deerfield Management Co. and Droia Ventures. Founded in 2018, Frontier says it has raised $235.5 million.
9. Clumio, $75M, data backup: As risk and regulation grow, so does the data backup industry. After reportedly increasing its ARR 4x last year, Clumio locked up $75 million in a Series D led by Sutter Hill Ventures. The Santa Clara, California-based startup provides data backup and recovery services for companies using the public cloud. Founded in 2017, Clumio has now raised $261 million, per the company.
10. Fabric, $60M, artificial intelligence: New York-based Fabric, which uses artificial intelligence to automate clinical and administrative healthcare work, raised a $60 million round led by General Catalyst. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $80 million, per Crunchbase.
Hi! I'm Mariane Bekker, a tech executive with over a decade of experience building high-performing engineering teams at leading startups such as New Relic and Mindbody. I've led engineering through 5 acquisitions and 1 IPO.
I'm passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion in the tech industry and helping founders succeed. That's why I founded Upward, an agency specializing in assisting early-stage startups find and hire top local engineering talent.