With President Donald Trump set to impose sweeping tariffs on a wide swath of U.S. trading partners this week, corporate America is awash in uncertainty.

LightSource, a San Francisco startup whose software helps companies manage their procurement process, costs and vendor relationships, didn’t know what the president’s tariffs plan would look like before raising its first funding round. But the timing didn’t hurt.

LightSource has just closed a $33 million financing, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from J2 Ventures.

“Tariffs and trade winds are shifting so fast, it’s enough to make your head spin,” said Ajay Agrawal, a partner at Bain and now a board member at LightSource. “For a company with hundreds or thousands of different parts and suppliers — even just understanding what the impact will be on their whole enterprise is unbelievable.”

President Trump’s plans to slap “reciprocal tariffs” on all countries with duties on U.S. goods is set to be announced on Wednesday. Concerns surrounding the impact of those moves pushed the Nasdaq down more than 10% in the first quarter, the index’s biggest drop for any period since 2022.

Trump has already said he would impose 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United States.” Autos is a market that co-founder and CEO Spencer Penn knows well.

LightSource was started in 2021 by Penn and CTO Idan Mintz, while the two were working in different parts of Alphabet. Penn was at robotaxi unit Waymo, and Mintz was in the Google X “moonshot factory.”

Prior to Waymo, Penn worked at Tesla when the electric vehicle maker was starting to mass produce its popular Model 3 sedans. He said that finance, sourcing and engineering professionals have to work together to find, or sometimes custom order, high-quality parts. They also have to maintain their best supplier relationships while evaluating new potential vendors and negotiating fair prices.

Often these teams rely on “hundreds of disparate processes and information that’s stuck in thousands of emails, spreadsheets and randomly formatted invoices and contracts,” Penn said.

LightSource, which has about 30 employees, connects a company’s procurement-related information sources and systems to streamline that complex work. The aim is to speed up a company’s procurement process, saving the business time, money and pain while working with suppliers.

Mintz describes LightSource’s offering as a kind of “operating system” for procurement. Penn says it has the potential to do for procurement what Salesforce did for customer relationships.

Whether it’s a global pandemic, a natural disaster cutting off a shipping route, or a major shift in tariffs and trade policy, Mintz said, any supply chain disruption can make a huge difference to a company’s profit margins and its ability to deliver a product on time.

Current customers include consumer packaged goods companies, aerospace ventures, e-commerce companies and automotive giants.

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Artificial intelligence chip developer Cerebras said Monday that it has obtained clearance from a U.S. committee to sell shares to Group 42, a Microsoft-backed AI company based in the United Arab Emirates.

That clearance came from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, and it’s a key step for Cerebras in its effort to go public. Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are the industry’s choice for training and running AI models, but most of its revenue comes from a customer called Group 42.

Cerebras filed to go public in September but has not provided details on timing or size for the initial public offering. The regulatory overhang was tied to the company’s relationship with Group 42, which was the source of 87% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024, made the IPO look uncertain.

“We thank @POTUS for making America the best place in the world to invest in cutting-edge #AI technology,” Andrew Feldman, Cerebras’ co-founder and CEO, wrote in a Monday LinkedIn post. “We thank G42’s leadership and the UAE’s leadership for their ongoing partnership and commitment to supporting U.S headquartered AI companies.”

Lawmakers have previously worried about Group 42’s connections to China. Last year Mike Gallagher, then a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, said in a statement that he was “glad to see G42 reduce its investment exposure to Chinese companies.” Microsoft later announced a $1.5 billion investment in Group 42.

Both Cerebras and Group 42 had given voluntary notice to CFIUS about the sale of voting shares, according to the Sunnyvale, California-based company’s IPO prospectus. Group 42 had agreed to buy $335 million worth of Cerebras shares by April 15, according to the prospectus. The two companies later changed the agreement to say Group 42 would be buying non-voting shares, prompting them to withdraw their notice, because they said they did not believe CFIUS had jurisdiction over sales of non-voting securities.

CFIUS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Just a handful of technology companies have gone public since 2021, as higher interest rates made unprofitable companies less desirable. But in recent months, Cerebras and a few technology-related companies have taken steps toward IPOs, and last week, AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave went public.

CoreWeave shares fell 7% on Monday, its second day of trading.

WATCH: Cerebras Systems likely to postpone IPO after facing delays with CFIUS Review, reports say

Tesla’s stock just wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022 and suffered its third-steepest drop in the company’s 15 years on the public market.

Shares of the electric vehicle maker plunged 36% in the first three months of the year.

The last time Tesla had a worse stretch was at the end of 2022, when the stock cratered 54%. That quarter included CEO Elon Musk’s sale of more than $22 billion worth of Tesla shares to finance his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, later renamed X. On Friday, Musk said his artificial intelligence startup xAI has acquired X in a deal valuing the social media company at $33 billion.

Tesla’s first-quarter drop wiped out over $460 billion in market cap. The majority of the quarter overlaps with Musk’s time in the second Trump administration, leading an effort to slash government spending and regulations, and terminating tens of thousands of federal employees.

Musk is leading what’s known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. As of Monday, the DOGE website claimed that, through March 24, the program had notched $140 billion in federal spending reductions, a number equal to less than one-third of Tesla’s valuation loss in the first quarter.

“My Tesla stock and the stock of everyone who holds Tesla has gone, went roughly in half,” Musk said on Sunday night at a rally he held in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to promote the right-wing judge he’s backing for Tuesday’s state supreme court election. “This is a very expensive job is what I’m saying.”

DOGE’s website contained numerous errors previously, causing the group to revise its own claims about its savings. And many of Musk’s allegations about waste, fraud and abuse in the federal budget have also been shown to be misleading or false.

Musk recently said on a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, that he and DOGE plan to slash $1 trillion from total federal spending levels by May.

Musk’s role in the White House is one factor weighing on Tesla’s stock, as it’s contributing to waves of protests, boycotts and violent attacks on Tesla stores and vehicles around the world. President Trump’s automotive tariffs are also a concern as they involve Tesla’s key suppliers, notably Mexico and China. Tariff fears sparked a broader selloff in tech stocks, with the Nasdaq closing the quarter down 10%, its biggest drop since 2022.

Tesla faces other headwinds, such as a steep decline in new vehicle sales, and pressure to deliver on Musk’s promises for robotaxis while rivals extend their lead in the market.

Musk has said Tesla will launch a driverless ride-hailing business in Austin, Texas in June, but some analysts are voicing skepticism about the company’s ability to meet that deadline.

For about a decade, Musk has promised that existing Tesla cars can be turned into robotaxi-ready vehicles with one more software upgrade. On the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Musk said that a forthcoming version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software will require a hardware upgrade as well.

While the first-quarter stock drop has been painful for shareholders, they’ve experienced similar volatility in the recent past. In the first quarter of 2024, the shares plunged 29% due to declining auto sales and increased competition. But the stock rallied the rest of the year to finish up 63%.

“Long term, I think Tesla stock is going to do fine,” Musk said at the Green Bay rally. “So, you know, maybe it’s a buying opportunity.”

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