Silicon Valley Bank collapses, Meta halting their Reels Bonus Program, Bitcoin has fallen ~8% to under $20K

Regulators from the government of California have shut down Silicon Valley Bank; SVB had a total of $209B in assets and $175.4B in total deposits; the FDIC has stated that insured depositors will have access to their funds by Monday, and uninsured depositors will be paid an advanced dividend within the next week - Link

Bloomberg sources: In November, Greenoaks Managing Partner Neil Mehta warned startups that Silicon Valley Bank and others might get pinched due to the Fed’s interest rate hikes; Mehta wrote in an email that the banks were in a tough position having a large amount of long-term, low-interest loans - Link

Engadget sources: Meta will be halting their Reels Bonus Program, which compensated creators if their content achieved certain metrics; creators could earn as much as $35K per month using the program - Link

Bitcoin has fallen ~8% to under $20K, prompted by a large stock sell-off in the markets and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate - Link

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This Week In Startups

Eric Newcomer joins to break down all the trending tech topics, including Stripe raising $6B (16:31), major generative ai fundraises (35:55), Silicon Valley Bank dropping 60% (50:35), and more! - Link

Microsoft is making ChatGPT available in its own Azure OpenAI service; the tech giant said that Azure customers can start accessing the service for as little as 1000 tokens for $0.002 - Link

UK fintech company Railsr, which operated in the world of embedded finance, has filed for bankruptcy; the once unicorn had raised a total of $185M, including a down round in October 2022, valuing it at $250M - Link

Vantage, a New York-based startup, has raised a $21M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz; Vantage currently helps 300 customers manage $1B in cloud infrastructure costs, including Square, NASA, and BuzzFeed - Link

Epic Games is now allowing developers to self-publish to the Epic Games Store; Epic’s draw is its low 12% commission on game sales - Link

Soccer superstar Lionel Messi among others, have invested $21M into a Web 3.0 soccer game developer, Matchday - Link

This Week in Startups

E1695: Stripe to raise $6B, $SIVB drops 60%, generative AI funding

E1694: Ask an Angel! Startup funding overview, investor red flags, negotiating early-stage terms

E1693: ANGEL: Threshold VC’s Emily Melton on market distortion, healthcare investing & culture

E1692: Crypto climate bill resurfaces, BlocPower raises $155M + Arcadia CEO Kiran Bhatraju

E1691: Sequoia resigns from Citizen's board, IPO window opens, chaos at Dapper Labs

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