Venturized. April 12th, 2023
Late last-week news from VC and startup world, those you waited for.
Interesting news
📢 Google plans to add conversational AI features to its flagship search engine, as CEO Sundar Pichai told WSJ. “The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before", CEO highlighted.
📢 FBI and international law enforcement agencies have seized Genesis Market, which has been active since 2017 as an invitation-only online marketplace that sells stolen credentials, cookies, and digital browser fingerprints gathered from compromised systems. This is the biggest operation of its kind. The takedown has involved law enforcement agencies from the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Canada, Germany, Poland, and Sweden.
📢 Anthropic, an AI-driven research company that focuses on increasing the safety of large-scale AI systems, plans to raise $5B over the next two years to compete with OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries. Anthropic describes the planned frontier model as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching,” tentatively called “Claude-Next” — 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI.
📢 Nathan Lambert, Berkley Ph.D., and Research Scientist at well-known AI startup Hugging Face, shared his thoughts on how it is - to be an AI professional in the current global AI rally.
📢 Paris voted to ban e-scooter companies, meaning 15,000 e-scooters have to be yanked from the city by September 1. The ban marks the first time that any major city globally that had offered contracts for e-scooter rentals in the center of town has made a complete U-turn on its policy.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 M^ZERO Labs, a Berlin startup that is developing decentralized infrastructure to enable institutional investors to link assets in the global financial system with decentralized applications, raised $22.5M in a round led by Pantera Capital, with Road Capital, AirTree, Standard Crypto, The SALT Fund, ParaFi Capital, Distributed Capital, Kraynos Capital, Mouro Capital, and Earlybird also piling on.
M^ZERO shared that its objective is to equip accredited financial institutions that comply with their local regulations with advanced middleware for on-chain and open-source value transfer.
🚀 ElevenLabs, a startup that was founded by Google and Palantir alumni and uses AI to transfer text into realistic spoken word, is raising $18M in funding co-led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Daniel Gross, an early investor in the likes of Uber, Coinbase, and Figma.
The company has developed a platform that allows users to create text-to-speech voiceovers and audio dubs in different languages. ElevenLabs also conducts research into AI voice intelligence to hone its product offering. It uses that research to help it deliver a speech that can generate human intonation and inflection.
🚀 Spendflo, a startup that helps companies understand the total cost of their SaaS investments, raised an $11M Series A round. Prosus Ventures and Accel were the co-leads.
The Spendflo platform currently includes a buying hub that reduces procurement time and ensures savings, a management hub that helps companies avoid paying for tools their teams don’t use, and a security hub that accelerates vendor onboarding. It addresses the needs of high-growth companies that use more than 150 SaaS tools, spend over $2M in subscriptions, and devote 900 hours to buying and managing them
🚀 Tally Health, a startup that provides supplements and personalized recommendations to combat the effects of aging, raised a $10M seed round led by Forerunner Ventures, with L Catterton, G9 Ventures, and Second Sight Ventures also contributing.
Tally Health’s longevity platform has three pillars. The first is an age test done with a cheek swab. Next, Tally’s platform creates personalized recommendations for clients based on their test results and a lifestyle survey of their diet, fitness, and mental health. Tally also has a daily supplement (unlike the lifestyle recommendations, the supplement is one-size-fits-all) with five different ingredients that target the hallmarks of aging. The company racked up a 270,000-person waitlist ahead of its February launch.
🚀 Zealy, a Paris startup that helps web3 and web2 companies engage with their communities by giving them tasks that they can achieve in exchange for various rewards, raised a $3.5M pre-seed round led by Redalpine, with Connect Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Kima Ventures, Purple, Station F, Founders Future, and Pareto Holdings also contributing.
“Zealy is an action layer on top of every application,” co-founder and CEO Mathis Grosjean told TechCrunch. Companies use Zealy in combination with a Discord server, a subreddit, or any kind of community hub to create gamified tasks for the most enthusiastic community members. Tasks include creating user-generated content, boosting something on social networks, or coding a web page.
Exits:
🔥 Savvy Games Group, a games and esports company part of the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund, has agreed to acquire mobile games studio Scopely for $4.9B. Founded in 2011, Scopely is known for several popular mobile games, including Yahtzee With Buddies, Star Trek Fleet Command, Marvel Strike Force, Stumble Guys, and Scrabble Go.
🔥 Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment has agreed to merge with UFC to form a new publicly traded company controlled by Endeavor Group, the companies announced. The deal would pair two of the biggest sports entertainment brands in the world. The deal values WWE at $9.3B and UFC, which is owned by Endeavor, at $12.1B, the companies said in a press release.
Promising technology
👾 A new educational era. Just days after OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in late November 2022, the chatbot was widely denounced as a free essay-writing, a test-taking tool that made it laughably easy to cheat on assignments. But advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more. Educational-tech companies, including Duolingo and Quizlet, have already integrated OpenAI’s chatbot into their apps. And OpenAI has worked with educators to put together new approaches to a new era of education.
👾 The tech front run. Substack launched its Twitter-like Notes just days after Twitter throttled Substack links. Notes could prove to be a worthy Twitter alternative for some, especially for Substack writers who have already built audiences on the platform. Substack’s Notes will appear in their own separate tab, meaning they’ll be separate from the full newsletters you can read in the Inbox tab or the threads you can read in the Chat tab, where you can read newsletters.
Insightful data
Unfair handicap. Just one of the UK’s 20 best-funded tech companies pays women more than men — and it isn't Monzo, Revolut, or Checkout.com. The latter two are also in the bottom five for a percentage of women in their highest pay quartile.
Meme of the week
