Deel acquires Papaya Global?
Startup removed from Y Combinator, OpenAI on track for $1B revenue, and more
đ In the Know
Call of Duty partners with Modulate to use AI to fight toxicity in voice chat, VentureBeat reports. This system will complement Call of Dutyâs existing moderation efforts, which include text-based filtering across 14 languages and a robust in-game reporting system.
OpenAI is on track for $1B of annual revenue as businesses adopt the technology behind ChatGPT. The Information reports thatâs far ahead of revenue projections the company previously shared with its shareholders, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
Y Combinator has removed an Indian startup from its batch after discovering âirregularitiesâ at the firm, reports TechCrunch. Medobed, an Indian startup that promises medicine delivery in 10 minutes, was initially selected in Y Combinatorâs S23 batch. An investor whom Medobed had separately pitched said a founderâs claims had raised suspicions. The founder frequently altered his account of his educational history and the companyâs growth metrics (â$1M of monthly GMV and EBITDA profitabilityâ) appeared inconsistent.
Deel, a $12B HR startup, is contemplating an acquisition of competitor Papaya Global. "While we are not directly privy to the company's financials, we are very much aware of the company's overall situation and we believe that there is room for strong partnership between the companies notably having Papaya Global using our unique and comprehensive in-house HR global Infrastructure," Bouaziz wrote.
Leaders in the tech industry, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoftâs Satya Nadella, Alphabetâs Sundar Pichai, OpenAIâs Sam Altman, NVIDIAâs Jensen Huang, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, will gather at the Capitol next month for a series of policy forums to discuss the regulation of AI.
đ VentureVista
Ideogram, a text-to-image start-up trying to make its mark in a sector dominated by AI models such as DALL-E and Midjourney, has raised $16.5M in seed funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Other backers include AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures and Two Small Fish Ventures, along with various industry experts.
Ideogram claims to be developing state-of-the-art AI tools to make creative expression âmore accessible, fun, and efficient.â The company is developing its AI model to generate images based on simple text descriptions.DeForm, a startup that aims to give marketers blockchain-based tools to tailor marketing initiatives for web3 users, raised a $4.6M seed round led by Kindred Ventures, with Elad Gil, Scalar Capital, A.Capital, and Alchemy Ventures also contributing.
Born from its parent firm Contribution Labs, the startup gives marketers blockchain-based tools to help augment the digital marketing landscape. Marketers can use the DeForm platform to understand a user based on their wallet transaction history and token ownership, and thus provide tailored marketing initiatives.FirstMate, a startup that creates marketplaces for NFT creators and issuers, raised a $3.8M seed round led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures and NextView Ventures also participating.
FirstMate explained that its new product will allow NFT creators and issuers to put up all of their NFTs in one place where they can enforce royalty payments on their own terms, while also customize a marketplace that âreflects on the quality of their artwork.â The company was founded in 2022 by people with experience from companies such as Instagram and Walmart.Context.ai, a product analytics platform for LLM-powered applications, launched last week with $3.5M in funding co-led by GV and Theory Ventures.
Context.ai lets businesses track frequently discussed conversation topics, identify where their product is performing well versus poorly, debug bad conversations, monitor brand risks, understand user retention, and measure the impact of new releases.ÂAgave, a startup that has put together a unified API that connects with more than 30 construction software systems, raised a $2.9M seed round led by Accel.
A lot of the most popular construction software was developed 20 to 40 years ago, and many systems donât talk to each other. As a result, the information stored in them is fragmented, adding extra work for building teams. Agave team came in to solve the problem.
đ„ Exits:
Amazon announced its acquisition of Fig, a Y Combinator startup that aims to enhance the command line terminal. In a blog post by CEO and co-founder Brendan Falk, it was revealed that Amazon has acquired Figâs technology, and that its employees, including two co-founders, would be joining Amazonâs cloud subsidiary, AWS.
TechCrunch, the digital tech and business publication owned by Yahoo, has acquired StrictlyVC, a media startup, from longtime Silicon Valley journalist Connie Loizos, according to Axios. Loizos, who currently serves as TechCrunch's Silicon Valley editor, has also been appointed editor-in-chief and general manager of TechCrunch. The deal represents Yahoo's commitment to TechCrunch under its new ownership. It also signals a shift by TechCrunch back to its roots covering venture investments and startups in Silicon Valley.
đĄInnovation Spotlight
Deepmind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images. A software called SynthID is created using two neural networks. One takes the original image and produces another image that looks almost identical to it but with some pixels subtly modified. This creates an embedded pattern that is invisible to the human eye. The second neural network can spot the pattern and will tell users whether it detects a watermark, suspects the image has a watermark, or finds that it doesnât have a watermark
Adobe releases Substance 3D Sampler 4.2. The tool is a new and improved version of its picture-to-3D material and photogrammetry software, previously known as Substance Alchemist, as noted by 80lv. The release comes with a slew of new features and enhancements, with one of the most notable upgrades being those to the application's Image to Material tool, which can generate material channels, such as Base Color, Roughness, Normal, Displacement, and Metallic, from a single image.
đ Insightful Data
The noise about ChatGPT reached fair equilibrium. Since May, OpenAI traffic has declined by 29.15%. There are a variety of theories that explain this without suggesting that generative AI interest or use is actually declining:
Theory A) Professional/regular use is still at an all-time high or growing; itâs only new users/those-checking-it-out-with-no-specific-tasks that are falling off
Theory B) A huge amount of use is connected to schoolwork, and educational users in the US, Canada, and other countries with summer vacations are responsible for the decline mirage
Additionally, the data shows that most people used prompts for programming purposes (29.14%), followed by education (23.30%), and content creation (20.79%)
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Venturized is compiled and written by Ivan Taranenko, 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.Â
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