Open AI's rise
Open AI reaches $1B in revenue, Mastercard leaves Binance, new IPO filling, and Google's email writer
🗞 In the Know
OpenAI is currently on pace to generate more than $1B in revenue over the next 12 months from the sale of artificial intelligence software and the computing capacity that powers it.
Mastercard ended its partnership with Binance, which offered crypto-funded cards in Latin America and the Middle East. In July, Visa ended a similar relationship with the crypto exchange in Europe. Binance faces multiple charges from the SEC and CFTC, and the DoJ is considering charges of its own.
Social Capital, the investment firm led by venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, tried to sell stakes in hundreds of young companies in June of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. The stakes for sale were worth $312M in total based on the valuations at which the companies last raised money.
X this week confirmed it’s lifting its ban on paid political ads, shortly after Elon Musk took over the social network previously known as Twitter. The company had originally banned such ads back in 2019 under then-CEO Jack Dorsey’s management, claiming at the time that “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”
🏁 VentureVista
Aily Labs, a startup that helps clients such as Sanofi track and evaluate different data streams, raised a $20.7M Series A round. Insight Partners was the deal lead.
Aily Labs provides a mobile-first AI decision intelligence app focused on how performance is tracked and commercial decisions are made within global business. With a 360° integrated view of enterprise data and AI/ML techniques, the app gives users at all levels real-time insights to make informed, instant decisions.Anytype, a startup that allows users to create peer-to-peer networks to share, access, and distribute information, raised a $13.4M in round led by Balderton Capital, with additional participation from Inflection and Square One. The company has raised a total of $14.6M.
Anytype is a local-first, E2E encrypted software designed as a secure place to create and store digital assets. You can use Anytype to create and connect your tasks, notes, ideas, documents, workflows, and more. Future versions will allow you to share your work and safely collaborate with others. Our long-term vision is for Anytype to enable large-scale collaboration to create a global repository of interconnected knowledge.Accounting platform Translucent has raised a £5M Seed funding round. The round was co-led by Chalfen Ventures and LocalGlobe.
Translucent simplifies accounting for multinational and multi-entity businesses allowing them to unify financial data and workflows by layering on top of existing accounting software, such as Xero, Quickbooks and Sage. The company says it is experiencing decent demand hence the swift follow-up with a Seed round.Jitty, a startup building an AI-powered property search engine that can read floor plans and understand photos and descriptions of homes, raised a $2M pre-seed round. Gradient Ventures was the deal lead, with Sequoia Capita, Atomico, True Global, Angel Invest, and Tiny VC also taking part.
The property search engine, which already has over 2,000 people on its waiting list, is built to enable home buyers to search and manage the process all in one place. Powerful AI uses large-language models and computer-vision, to read floor plans, and understand photos and descriptions of homes.
🔥 Exits:
Goldman Sachs said that it agreed to sell its personal financial management unit to a competitor named Creative Planning. Goldman acquired a team of about 220 financial advisors managing $25 billion in assets in May 2019, when it announced the $750 million acquisition of United Capital Financial Partners.
Data and marketing automation company Klaviyo just became the latest tech company to try to join the public markets. Klaviyo said that it plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “KVYO,” according to paperwork filed with the SEC.
💡Innovation Spotlight
Google’s Duet AI. Gmail’s new AI companion will be able to help you draft and customize your emails. The company had shared a number of updates about its AI-powered companion, Duet AI, which is becoming generally available for Workspace users, aiding them with various tasks across meetings, documents, Google Chat, and more.
OpenAI announced that it’ll team up with Scale AI, a data labeling startup, to bring together Scale AI’s fine-tuning tools and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 text-generating model. (GPT-3.5 is the predecessor to GPT-4, OpenAI’s flagship model, which understands images as well as text.)
📈 Insightful Data
Ongoing polling by Pew Research shows that although ChatGPT is gaining mindshare, only about 18% of Americans have ever actually used it. Of course that changes by demographic: Men, those 18-29 and the college educated are more likely to have used the system, though even among those groups it’s 30-40%
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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.Join the Roosh Ventures fam on 🐥 Twitter and 🔗 Linkedin. More about Roosh Ventures and its portfolio companies on 🌐 roosh.vc.
