Choclate 🍫 Weekly
Inside: NVIDIA Shares down 10% year-to-date
👋🏻 Happy Sunday.
We had two standout fundraises this week, with one pattern.
Granola, a meeting notes startup founded in 2023, raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, six times its mark from ten months ago. Harvey, a legal AI startup, raised $200 million at $11 billion, its third jump in valuation in under a year.
One tidies your calls, the other reads your contracts. Apparently, the market is tired of doing both
Let’s get into the rest of this week’s news:
💼 Business
Nokia is preparing layoffs in India that could affect up to 20% of its local workforce, mirroring its global restructuring plan as the company consolidates from three business segments into two. The company is replacing country head Tarun Chhabra with Samar Mittal, effective April 1.
Gold steadied above $4,500 per ounce on Friday after rebounding from a four-month low of $4,098 per ounce earlier in the week, as investors returned to haven assets amid elevated oil prices above $110 and ongoing geopolitical stress tied to the Iran conflict.
NVIDIA shares fell below $170, down 10% year-to-date and trading below the S&P 500’s forward price-to-earnings multiple for the first time in over a decade. Analysts at Wolfe Research and Wells Fargo maintained price targets of $275 and $265, respectively, citing the company’s Blackwell and Rubin GPU pipeline.
NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang | Image Credits: Bloomberg Bitcoin fell 4% to $71,000 after a U.S. Producer Price Index reading showed wholesale prices rising 3.4% year-over-year, double the monthly consensus estimate, triggering $151 million in leveraged long liquidations and dashing near-term expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts.
Global M&A volume crossed $1 trillion in Q1 2026, a 27% increase over the same period last year, driven by stabilized interest rates and corporate demand for AI and energy infrastructure, with the $170 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger as the quarter’s defining deal.
BYD shares rose more than 3% after the company unveiled its Megawatt Flash Charging 2.0 technology and announced plans for 20,000 flash charging stations, as European registrations climbed 162% year-on-year in February, surpassing Tesla for the second consecutive month.
BYD Showroom Analyst Trip Chowdhry, a longtime Tesla bull, issued a sell rating with a $150 price target, arguing that the company’s AI investment thesis has collapsed, as Tesla shares trade at roughly 210 times projected earnings and year-to-date losses reach 18%.
Bank of America agreed to pay $72.5 million to settle a civil lawsuit brought by Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, who alleged the bank ignored suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein, following similar settlements of $290 million with JPMorgan Chase and $75 million with Deutsche Bank in 2023.
⚙️ Startup & Tech
A federal judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s supply-chain risk designation against Anthropic. Ruling the Trump administration’s measures were likely unlawful and appeared designed to punish the company for refusing to allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
OpenAI indefinitely shelved its adult content feature for ChatGPT, the third product deprioritized in a week alongside Instant Checkout and Sora, as the company pivots toward business users and coders amid intensifying competition from Anthropic.
Google expanded its AI-powered Search Live feature to more than 200 countries and territories, enabling real-time camera-assisted conversations powered by its new Gemini 3.1 Flash Live audio model, after limiting the feature to the U.S. and India since its July 2025 launch.
Google’s Search Live preview A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in a landmark social media addiction trial. Awarding the plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $6 million in punitive damages, with Meta bearing the majority of the total $5.4 million liability.
Reddit announced it will require suspected bot accounts to complete human verification using passkeys or biometric services, while labeling confirmed automated accounts, as the platform removes an average of 100,000 bot accounts per day.
Apple is preparing to introduce search-based ads in Apple Maps as soon as this summer, allowing businesses to bid for placement in results tied to relevant keyword searches, according to Bloomberg.
Apple CEO Tim Cook | Image Credit: Getty Images Leonid Radvinsky, the majority owner of OnlyFans who acquired a 75% stake in the platform in 2018, died at 43 after a battle with cancer. This happened months after reports emerged that he was in negotiations to sell a 60% stake at a $5.5 billion valuation.
💸 Deals
Series B+ and Growth
Lucid Bots raised a $20 million Series B co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners to scale production of its Sherpa drones and Lavo robots, which clean building exteriors for commercial clients, as the company approaches 1,000 units sold after taking five years to ship its first 100.
Swish, a Bengaluru food delivery startup, raised $38 million in a Series B led by Hara Global and Bain Capital Ventures at a $139 million valuation, more than double its valuation a year ago, as it scales its 10-minute fresh food delivery service to 20,000 daily orders across 10 micro-markets.
Meeting notes startup Granola raised $125 million in a Series C led by Index Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, up from $250 million at its last round, as the company expands beyond individual note-taking into enterprise workspaces and AI workflow APIs.
Granola, AI meeting notes taker Legal AI startup Harvey raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation in a round co-led by GIC and Sequoia, bringing total funding past $1 billion and tripling its valuation from $3 billion in just over a year.
Series A
Glimpse raised a $35 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to scale its AI agent platform, which automates the process of identifying and disputing invalid retail deductions for more than 200 consumer brands, including Suave and ChapStick.
Deccan AI raised $25 million in a Series A led by A91 Partners to expand its India-based AI post-training data and evaluation platform, which serves customers including Google DeepMind and Snowflake through a network of more than one million contributors.
Seed and Early Rounds
Arinna raised $4 million in seed funding to develop ultrathin solar panels for spacecraft made from transition metal dichalcogenides, a new class of atomically thin semiconductors that the Stanford PhD-founded startup claims are cheaper and more durable than current space solar technology.
Conntour raised $7 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and others to scale its AI-powered video surveillance platform, which lets security teams search camera feeds using natural language and claims to monitor up to 50 feeds from a single consumer GPU.
Littlebird raised $11 million, led by Lotus Studio, for its AI productivity tool that reads and stores computer screen activity as text, allowing users to query their full digital context without relying on screenshots, with plans starting at $20 per month.
Funds
BKR Capital closed CA$20 million of its CA$50 million Fund II target, continuing its strategy of backing high-growth technology companies founded by Black entrepreneurs primarily in Canada, with check sizes ranging from $250,000 to $1.5 million.
Kleiner Perkins raised $3.5 billion across two funds, including $1 billion for early-stage ventures and $2.5 billion for a late-stage growth vehicle, nearly doubling its $2 billion fundraise from less than two years ago as the firm deepens its focus on AI.
Acquisitions
DeleteMe acquired Block Party, the social media harassment protection tool founded by engineer Tracy Chou in 2018, combining Block Party’s platform controls with DeleteMe’s personal data removal service under one roof. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Until next week, Ciao 🫡