Clubhouse's news inside 👀
Flexport CEO chair in turbulance, OpenAI conference, and more
🗞 In the Know
OpenAI will host its first developer conference on November 6. At the one-day OpenAI DevDay event, which will feature a keynote address and breakout sessions led by members of OpenAI’s technical staff, OpenAI said in a blog post that it’d preview “new tools and exchange ideas”.
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the russian naval fleet.
Flexport CEO Dave Clark is resigning from the supply chain software startup and handing the reins over to founder and executive chair Ryan Petersen after one year in the role — and after just six months of helming the company solo. In July, Flexport said Petersen would join Founders Fund, the venture capital fund founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. Two days after Clark’s abrupt departure as CEO, Petersen said the company will rescind dozens of employment offers and look to lease out the company’s office space as it looks to get costs under control and “get its house in order." You can read Ryan’s letter to employees here.
Clubhouse is trying to make a comeback. At the peak of pandemic lockdowns, the invite-only social audio app soared with 10x month-to-month growth, then faded from public discourse almost as quickly as a16z investors opened their wallets. Last week, the company announced “the new Clubhouse,” which introduces a new format called “chats.”
Apple has signed a new deal with Arm for chip technology that "extends beyond 2040," according to Arm's IPO documents filed last week and reported by Reuters. Arm also unveiled pricing for what it hopes will be a $52B IPO, which would be the largest deal in the US this year.
🏁 VentureVista
Opna, a startup whose mission is to connect carbon projects with corporates seeking to reduce their overall carbon emissions, raised a $6.5M seed round led by Atomico, with previous investors Pale Blue Dot, MCJ Collective, Angelinvest, and Tiny VC also taking part.
Opna serves as a direct artery for corporates to find fully vetted project developers, saving them time and money sourcing projects to fund as part of their net-zero efforts. Additionally, Opna also helps facilitate the financing aspect through standardized processes and agreements while enabling businesses to monitor their portfolio of projects over time by KPIs and risk reporting.Enzai, a startup that helps its customers comply with rules and regulations regarding the use of AI, raised a $4M seed round led by Cavalry Ventures, with Seedcamp and Techstart Ventures also contributing.
Enzai is a web-based SaaS platform that allows clients to identify which parts of their business functions are subject to AI-related rules and then assesses what the company needs to do to comply with them. It then monitors that compliance.Bandana, a startup that is building a platform to help hourly wage workers find better jobs, raised a $3.8M seed round co-led by General Catalyst and Craft Ventures, with Triple Impact Capital and Sarah Smith Fund also taking part.
Founders are building a platform to help workers find jobs that pay above minimum wage, offer benefits like health insurance and paid time off, and provide a location as part of the job posting to enable people to find work reasonably close to where they liveAutomat, a startup that has created a no-code platform to help businesses automate their workflows, raised a $3.75M seed round led by Initialized, with additional capital supplied by Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Schox, and Goodwater Capital.
Automat was birthed based on its founders’ previous experience at Google, where they realised that creating automation should be as simple as describing it.Unlike traditional Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools that can be expensive and time-consuming to set up, Automat offers a usage-based SaaS subscription model. It incorporates features such as natural language processing and image recognition, made possible by generative AI.
Delphi, a startup that can create an AI chatbot that mimics a person's personality, manner of writing, or speaking style, raised a $2.7M round led by Founders Fund, with additional capital supplied by Lux Capital, Xfund, MVP Ventures, and SaxeCap.
With Delphi, users can simply upload as few as four documents containing his/her communications to it — and as many as thousands, including emails, chat transcripts, even YouTube videos or audio files such as podcasts or voicemails — and Delphi will create an AI chatbot that mimics, as closely as it can, user’s personality, manner of writing, or speaking, audibly, as of today, through a partnership with voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs.
🔥 Exits:
Venture-backed defense giant Anduril Industries is acquiring Blue Force Technologies, the advanced design and engineering firm behind the “Fury” unmanned fighter jet, as the company looks to build out its suite of autonomous systems for national security customers.
SAP announced that it is acquiring German startup LeanIX, a software service that helps companies map out their architecture. The purchase is expected to complement the 2021 Signavio acquisition, a German business process automation company that SAP bought for a reported price of $1.2B. While the companies did not share the purchase price, TechCrunch's sources say that the current acquisition price is in the same neighborhood but a bit higher.
💡Innovation Spotlight
Zoom joins the AI freenzy: Zoom says it’s prepared to plow forward with a ChatGPT-style chatbot to embed in its videoconferences and accompanying chats. Users will be able to chat with the AI Companion and ask it for help on a variety of office tasks, from quickly getting prepped for a meeting and receiving consolidated summaries of past sessions, to searching for specific documents.
Anthropic launches a paid plan for its AI-powered chatbot: Anthropic announced the launch of its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan, Claude Pro. For the monthly price of $20, customers get “5x more usage” than the free Claude 2 tier provides, the ability to send “many more” messages, priority access to Claude 2 during high-traffic periods and early access to new features.
📈 Insightful Data
Global wealth adjustment: UBS has issued its annual global wealth report. Here are some insights:
Along with the decline in aggregate wealth, overall wealth inequality also fell in 2022, with the wealth share of the global top 1% falling to 44.5%;
The number of USD millionaires worldwide fell by 3.5M during 2022 to 59.4 million;
Global median wealth, arguably a more meaningful indicator of how the typical person is faring, did, in fact, increase by 3% in 2022 in contrast to the 3.6% fall in wealth per adult.
Venturized is compiled and written by Ivan Taranenko, and Associate at Roosh Ventures.
Roosh Ventures is a Kyiv-based entrepreneurs-led, generalist VC firm investing in Pre-seed to Series A across EU and US markets. Powered by Roosh.
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