Venturized. April 18th, 2023
OpenAI bounty program, new State of Crypto report, Angry Birds acquisition, and more in the digest.
Interesting news
📢 OpenAI will start paying people to help the company find bugs in its artificial intelligence systems, such as the ChatGPT chatbot. The company will pay cash rewards depending on the size of the bugs uncovered, ranging from $200 for what it calls “low-severity findings” to $20,000 for “exceptional discoveries.”
📢 Elon goes for the American SUVs market. Tesla's Model Y can now be purchased for less than the average new vehicle in the US – since January, Tesla has lowered the Model Y starting price by 24%, the biggest drop of any of its vehicles.
📢 TechCrunch highlights Amazon is jumping into the generative AI race, but not in the way you’d expect. Unlike Microsoft and Apple, which both have sought to build AI models in-house, Amazon is recruiting third parties to host models on AWS. The effort is called Amazon Bedrock, and startups are given the ability to build generative AI-powered apps via pre-trained models from startups, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI.
📢 Global PC shipments dropped by a third in Q1’2023. After a nice spike during the first two years of the pandemic, global PC shipments continued to drop for a fourth consecutive quarter.
📢 Andreessen Horowitz released its newest, second-ever State of Crypto report. “Overall, the report reflects a healthier industry than market prices may indicate, and a steady cycle of development, product launches, and ongoing innovation", wrote a16z’s Daren Matsuoka, Eddy Lazzarin, Robert Hackett, and Stephanie Zinn in a blog post.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Sei, a layer-1 blockchain focused on trading, has raised $30M in funding, including from Jump Crypto, Distributed Global, Multicoin Capital, Asymmetric Capital Partners, Flow Traders, Hypersphere Ventures, and Bixin Ventures.
While many Layer-1 blockchains provide general-purpose networks that developers can build on top of, Sei focuses on the crypto trading network through its chain. Its team comprises former employees from Goldman Sachs, Databricks, Robinhood, Google, and Nvidia.
🚀 Otterize, a network policy automation startup, has raised $11.5M in seed funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from Dig Ventures, Vine Ventures, Jibe Ventures, Crew Capital, and Operator Partners.
Otterize aims to allow developers to securely connect different software services to each other and infrastructure by automatically configuring existing security controls.
🚀 Graneet, a startup that says it's building an all-in-one software-as-a-service product focused on small construction companies, has raised €8M in Series A funding from its two biggest investors to date, Point Nine and Foundamental.
Graneet is a vertical SaaS, meaning that the startup is building a product specifically designed to address the needs of an industry in particular. As construction work usually takes several months, it can be hard to track margins at any point in time. Clients pay in multiple tranches, and construction companies gradually spend money. Having a copilot like Graneet can improve the planning strategy of construction companies.
🚀 Distyl AI, an analytics firm that helps large companies use generative AI and language models, has raised $7M in seed funding and formed an alliance with OpenAI. Coatue and Dell Technologies Capital led the round, joined by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Altimeter founder and CEO Brad Gerstner, and Jim Cash, a professor at Harvard Business School.
Distyl AI was founded by Arjun Prakash and Derek Ho, who worked at Palantir before. They said their goal was to integrate AI into the core business workflows of enterprise-scale companies, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development.
🚀 Axle, a startup whose universal API for insurance data aims to make it far easier for fleet managers, lenders, and gig services to quickly verify personal insurance information, has raised $4M in seed funding led by Gradient Ventures. Other backers in the round included Soma Capital, Contrary Capital, Rebel Fund, BLH Ventures, a group of angel investors, and earlier investor Y Combinator.
Axle allows users to connect their insurance accounts to trusted companies in seconds through a developer-friendly API or one of Axle’s low-code or no-code options. After launching a year ago, the company is seeing double-digit customer and revenue growth and has grown its carrier network by over a hundred carriers.
Exits:
🔥 Sega acquires Angry Birds maker Rovio for $776M. The deal would be for the entirety of Rovio’s outstanding shares and options, valuing the stocks at 9.25 euros per share, a roughly 19% premium to their closing price before the announcement.
🔥 Zoom announced plans to acquire Workvivo, a startup focused on improving companies’ internal communications and culture via asynchronous comms. Zoom said that it expects the Workvivo transaction to close by the end of next month. After this, it will set about integrating Workvivo’s features into Zoom itself.
Promising technology
👾 A ChatGPT for everyone. In an effort to democratize large-scale alignment research, OpenAssistant Conversations was released — a dataset containing 161,443 messages in 35 languages from over 13,500 volunteers. A ChatGPT-like LLM model, OpenAssistant, was built using this dataset and performed comparably to GPT-3.5-turbo (ChatGPT). All code and data have been released with unrestricted licenses, which means OpenAssistant is completely open (open data, model, code, weights, paper, training reports, etc) and will no doubt accelerate both the development and deployment of LLM in the near future.
👾 Google is eager to fight. Google is developing an all-new AI-powered search engine, Magi, and updating its current engine with AI features in response to mounting competition from AI-enhanced rivals, such as Microsoft's Bing. The tech giant was alarmed by Samsung's consideration to replace Google with Bing as the default search engine on its devices (potentially jeopardizing $3B in annual revenue). Magi aims to provide users with a more personalized experience and anticipate their needs. It's still in the early development stages, with the release timetable unclear.
Insightful data
A probability of succeeding. Just 9% of European VC deals make the coveted 10x return on investment. Plus, only 6% of investment proposals VCs receive turn into done deals, while 45% of investments made by VCs fail.
Meme of the week
