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Employees stand outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters on March 10, 2023 in Santa Clara, California. 

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has thousands of tech startups wondering what happens now to their millions of dollars in deposits, money market investments and outstanding loans.

Most importantly, they’re trying to figure how to pay their employees.

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“The number one question is, ‘How do you make payroll in the next couple days,'” said Ryan Gilbert, founder of venture firm Launchpad Capital. “No one has the answer.”

SVB, a 40-year-old bank that’s known for handling deposits and loans for thousands of tech startups in Silicon Valley and beyond, fell apart this week and was shut down by regulators in the largest bank failure since the financial crisis. The demise began late Wednesday, when SVB said it was selling $21 billion of securities at a loss and trying to raise money. It turned into an all-out panic by late Thursday, with the stock down 60% and tech executives racing to pull their funds.

While bank failures aren’t entirely uncommon, SVB is a unique beast. It was the 16th biggest bank by assets at the end of 2022, according to the Federal Reserve, with $209 billion in assets and over $175 billion in deposits.

However, unlike a typical brick-and-mortar bank — Chase, Bank of America or Wells Fargo — SVB is designed to serve businesses, with over half its loans to venture funds and private equity firms and 9% to early and growth-stage companies. Clients that turn to SVB for loans also tend to store their deposits with the bank.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which became the receiver of SVB, insures $250,000 of deposits per client. Because SVB serves mostly businesses, those limits don’t mean much. As of December, roughly 95% of SVB’s deposits were uninsured, according to filings with the SEC.

There's going to be a lot of anxiety over SVB the next couple days, says FirstMark Capital's Rich Heitzmann

The FDIC said in a press release that insured depositors will have access to their money by Monday morning.

But the process is much more convoluted for uninsured depositors. They’ll receive a dividend within a week covering an undetermined amount of their money and a “receivership certificate for the remaining amount of their uninsured funds.”

“As the FDIC sells the assets of Silicon Valley Bank, future dividend payments may be made to uninsured depositors,” the regulator said. Typically, the FDIC would put the assets and liabilities in the hands of another bank, but in this case it created a separate institution, the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara (DINB), to take care of insured deposits.

Clients with uninsured funds — anything over $250,000 — don’t know what to do. Gilbert said he’s advising portfolio companies individually, instead of sending out a mass email, because every situation is different. He said the universal concern is meeting payroll for March 15.

Gilbert is also a limited partner in over 50 venture funds. On Thursday, he received several messages from firms regarding capital calls, or the money that investors in the funds send in as transactions take place.

“I got emails saying saying don’t send money to SVB, and if you have let us know,” Gilbert said.

The concerns regarding payroll are more complex than just getting access to frozen funds, because many of those services are handled by third parties that were working with SVB.

Rippling, a back office-focused startup, handles payroll services for many tech companies. On Friday morning, the company sent a note to clients telling them that, because of the SVB news, it was moving “key elements of our payments infrastructure” to JPMorgan Chase.

“You need to inform your bank immediately about an important change to the way Rippling debits your account,” the memo said. “If you do not make this update, your payments, including payroll, will fail.”

Rippling CEO Parker Conrad said in a series of tweets on Friday that some payments are getting delayed amid the FDIC process.

“Our top priority is to get our customers’ employees paid as soon as we possibly can, and we’re working diligently toward that on all available channels, and trying to learn what the FDIC takeover means for today’s payments,” Conrad wrote.

One founder, who asked to remain anonymous, told CNBC that everyone is scrambling. He said he’s spoken with more than 30 other founders, and talked to a finance chief from a billion-dollar startup who has tried to move more than $45 million out of SVB to no avail. Another company with 250 employees told him that SVB has “all our cash.”

A SVB spokesperson pointed CNBC back to the FDIC’s statement when asked for comment.

‘Significant contagion risk’

For the FDIC, the immediate goal is to quell fears of systemic risk to the banking system, said Mark Wiliams, who teaches finance at Boston University. Williams is quite familiar with the topic as well as the history of SVB. He used to work as a bank regulator in San Francisco.

Williams said the FDIC has always tried to work swiftly and to make depositors whole, even if when the money is uninsured. And according to SVB’s audited financials, the bank has the cash available — its assets are greater than its liabilities — so there’s no apparent reason why clients shouldn’t be able to retrieve the bulk of their funds, he said.

“Bank regulators understand not moving quickly to make SVB’s uninsured depositors whole would unleash significant contagion risk to the broader banking system,” Williams said.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday met with leaders from the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency regarding the SVB meltdown. The Treasury Department said in a readout that Yellen “expressed full confidence in banking regulators to take appropriate actions in response and noted that the banking system remains resilient and regulators have effective tools to address this type of event.”

On the ground in Silicon Valley, the process has been far from smooth. Some execs told CNBC that, by sending in their wire transfer early on Thursday, they were able to successfully move their money. Others who took action later in the day are still waiting — in some cases, for millions of dollars — and are uncertain if they’ll be able to meet their near-term obligations.

Regardless of if and how quickly they’re able to get back up and running, companies are going to change how they think about their banking partners, said Matt Brezina, a partner at Ford Street Ventures and investor in startup bank Mercury.

Brezina said that after payroll, the biggest issue his companies face is accessing their debt facilities, particularly for those in financial technology and labor marketplaces.

“Companies are going to end up diversifying their bank accounts much more coming out of this,” Brezina said. “This is causing a lot of pain and headaches for lots of founders right now. And it’s going to hit their employees and customers too.”

SVB’s rapid failure could also serve as a wakeup call to regulators when it comes to dealing with banks that are heavily concentrated in a particular industry, Williams said. He said that SVB has always been overexposed to tech even though it managed to survive the dot-com crash and financial crisis.

In its mid-quarter update, which began the downward spiral on Wednesday, SVB said it was selling securities at a loss and raising capital because startup clients were continuing to burn cash at a rapid clip despite the ongoing slump in fundraising. That meant SVB was struggling to maintain the necessary level of deposits.

Rather than sticking with SVB, startups saw the news as troublesome and decided to rush for the exits, a swarm that gained strength as VCs instructed portfolio companies to get their money out. Williams said SVB’s risk profile was always a concern.

“It’s a concentrated bet on an industry that it’s going to do well,” Williams said. “The liquidity event would not have occurred if they weren’t so concentrated in their deposit base.”

SVB was started in 1983 and, according to its written history, was conceived by co-founders Bill Biggerstaff and Robert Medearis over a poker game. Williams said that story is now more appropriate than ever.

“It started as the result of a poker game,” Williams said. “And that’s kind of how it ended.”

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny, Ashley Capoot and Rohan Goswami contributed to this report.

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup. 

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than  million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

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The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.

On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.

Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.

Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.

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