Nvidia is setting its sights on Cloud?
Arm and Instacart de-freezing IPO market, Square outage, and more
🗞 In the Know
Nvidia is leveraging its dominance in AI hardware to generate cloud software revenue. The move puts Nvidia in competition with traditional cloud providers that buy its chips. Read the story on The Information.
Arm, the startup that designs chips for companies like Apple and Nvidia, raised $4.87B in its IPO last week, valuing the company at $54.5B. In its Nasdaq debut, Arm soared 24.7%.
Instacart is raising its IPO price range by almost 10%, targeting a fully diluted valuation of $10B. The price hike signals robust investor demand for the San Francisco-based company, which is looking to list its shares this month after years of waiting in the wings.
Small business payments company Square has experienced an outage, causing many small businesses in the United States to revert to cash only for payments. Square said since Noon on Thursday, 7th September, sellers have been unable to access accounts or accept payments.
JPMorgan announced launching digital payroll processing in partnership with Gusto, stepping up its fight over small businesses with Square and PayPal. The Wall Street giant has recently sunk billions into building in-house fintech capabilities like a credit card reader with same-day settlement, that directly compete with fintech offerings.
🏁 VentureVista
Bold, a that provides personalized virtual exercise plans for older adults, raised a $17M Series A round led by Rethink Impact, with Samsung Next and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, GingerBread Capital, and Primetime Partners also contributing.
Bold provides each member with a personalized, evidence-based exercise program in order to prevent falls, reduce musculoskeletal pain and disability, and increase physical activity levels. The company partners with innovative Medicare plans and providers to support underserved members, many of whom suffer from chronic conditions, mobility issues, and pain.Moment, embedded fixed income trading fintech raised a $17M Series A led by a16z, Venrock, The Fintech Fund, and NEO.
Moment enables global fintechs, traditional brokerages, and RIAs to deliver a complete fixed-income solution to their clients — including automated best execution across every source of liquidity, real-time risk management capabilities, and comprehensive data and analytics tailored to digital platforms.
Series AI, a startup that is building game development tools, raised a $7.9M seed round. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Bitkraft, F4 Fund, and the Siqi Chen Access Fund.
Seed funding round is planned to put towards a “suite of AI-powered game authoring tools.” The company is working on these tools as a way to help decrease the amount of time spent on menial tasks in game development.Glass Health, a startup building an AI tool and LLM that can suggest medical diagnoses raised a $5M seed round led by Initialized Capital, with additional funds provided by OneMedical founder Tom Lee, Epocrates, and Galileo Health.
Glass Health now offers an AI tool powered by an LLM, tech similar to that behind ChatGPT, to generate diagnoses and “evidence-based” treatment options to consider for patients. Physicians can type in descriptions like “71-year-old male with a history of myocardial infarction presents with subacute progressive dyspnea on exertion” or “65-year-old women with a history of diabetes and hyperlipidemia presents with acute-onset chest pain and diaphoresis,” and Glass Health’s AI will provide a likely prognosis and clinical plan.Parallax, the company building a cross-border payments system, raised $4.5M in seed round led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Circle Ventures (the issuers of the USDC stablecoin), General Catalyst, and Zach Abrams, former head of product at Brex and Coinbase.
Initially focused on helping remote workers and freelancers get paid from abroad, Parallax, which was founded last year, plans to expand into other use cases, like remittances for migrant workers. It uses blockchain technology, supports users from more than 150 countries, and says the transfer of money is near-instant.
🔥 Exits:
Independent music distribution service DistroKid last week announced that it recently acquired Bandzoogle, the website builder designed for musicians. The acquisition is a smart move for the company since DistroKid users can now power digital, physical and on-demand sales “within the DistroKid ecosystem,” the company noted in its announcement.
Ripple, a blockchain-based digital payment network, announced that it intends to acquire Fortress Trust—a Web3-focused financial, regulatory, and technology infrastructure provider.
💡Innovation Spotlight
Visa makes Stablecoins available to acquirers. Visa is making Stablecoin settlement available on the fast and cheap Solana Blockchain and partnering with Worldpay and Nuvei. In the past, the money didn't move between banks or payment companies until overnight or days later via Visa Treasury. The new service creates real-time settlement available to clients, meaning acquirers can get paid instantly.
Monzo's new feature lets customers know if they're being scammed in real-time. Digital bank Monzo has become the first UK bank to launch a “call status” tool to prevent its customers falling victim to impersonation scams. The in-app feature will tell customers whether the bank is calling them or if they are being targeted by fraudsters with an attempted scam.
📈 Insightful Data
State of financial crime. The survey, which spoke to people in charge of compliance at financial companies, found that:
Banking was the worst affected subsector, with 42% of companies affected. Crypto came in second with 37% of firms experiencing breaches.
Banks also used electronic verification the least, followed by crypto — 40% of respondents in those sectors still use manual verification methods for customers.
41% said they have seen an increase in money laundering attempts and/or financial crime in the past 12 months.
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.
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