Venturized. April 25th, 2023
Starship first launch, news Apple's savings account, Yonder Series A round from Northzone, and many more
Interesting news
📢 SpaceX’s Starship exploded a few minutes after successfully lifting off on an uncrewed test flight, abruptly ending the inaugural flight of a vehicle that Elon Musk wants to use for pioneering deep-space missions.
📢 WeWork is almost out. WeWork, the co-working company, could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange if its shares don't rise above $1 over a consecutive 30-day trading period. The company, once valued by investor SoftBank at a very optimistic $47B, is currently valued at less than $400M and recently received a compliance notice.
📢 Apple and Goldman Sachs offer US savings account with 4.15% annual interest. Apple and Goldman Sachs seek to lure US depositors to a new savings account by offering to pay interest at more than 10 times the national average rate. This is well ahead of the average US savings account rate of 0.37%, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It also outstrips competitors such as American Express, which is offering 3.75%, and Goldman’s standalone savings account, which operates under the Marcus brand, which offers 3.9%.
📢 For those on the side of Spotify in music streaming – WSJ asked Spotify’s Head of Personalization to explain the algorithms behind it. See the short video here.
📢 By Silicon Valley Bank's own admission, 70% of its loans consisted of “low credit loss lending” to vineyards, private equity funds and “innovation economy influencers," says the FT. About 9% of the total went to companies that the bank considered unlikely to be able to pay back what they owed unless they could find a buyer or raise new money, it also reports.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Enter, a startup that uses a combination of tech and human expertise to help its customers decarbonize their homes, has raised a $21.3M Series A round led by Target Global, with Coatue, Foundamental, A/O Proptech, and Partech also participating.
Homeowners complete a digital survey, then get an assessment of the energy status of their building, and suggestions on how to reduce their outgoings. Enter also takes care of the appropriate subsidy applications for renovations.
🚀 Yonder, a London startup that has developed a credit card product with a strong emphasis on rewards shopping, raised a $15.4M round from Northzone and RTP Global at a valuation in excess of $86M.
Yonder is a credit card closest in operation to Amex or Chase Sapphire in the U.S.; however, it combines that credit card shopping model with a points-based rewards scheme to use at London venues such as cinemas, wine merchants and eateries. In other words, it’s as if it was a combination of a travel experience startup and a credit card.
🚀 Kindred, a members-only home-swapping network, has raised $15M in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Earlier backers Andreessen Horowitz, Caffeinated Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Outset Capital also joined the round, along with several new individual investors, including Evan Moore (former Khosla investor), and Figma CEO Dylan Field.
The idea is that the network is a “trusted” one so that members can feel comfortable swapping homes. Interestingly, no money is exchanged between members, who pay Kindred a fee to have the ability to allow someone to stay in their home, and vice versa.
🚀 Evergrow, a startup whose platform helps companies purchase clean energy tax credits, raised a $7M round led by previous investors First Round Capital, XYZ Venture Capital, Congruent Ventures, and Garuda Ventures.
By partnering with Evergrow, developers, corporations, brokers, syndicators, and other market participants can easily transact in green tax credits, which provide funding for new clean energy infrastructure projects. The company also announced that it now has over $150M worth of clean energy projects on its platform that are expected to come online over the next year.
🚀 Primo, a French startup that helps small businesses manage their devices without the need for a dedicated IT manager, raised a $3.4M seed round. Headline and Global Founders Capital co-led the deal.
“The complexity of IT has completely changed — it has become operational. When someone joins the team, there are 35 tasks to do,” Primo co-founder and CEO Martin Pannier told TechCrunch. It’s a time-consuming process and chances are the task list is not even up to date.
Exits:
🔥 Razor Group, raised $88M in its Series C round to acquire and consolidate Amazon and other marketplace retailers. The company, which says it is profitable, has acquired one of its competitors in the aggregator space, Stryze Group, as part of a bid to be “the consolidator of consolidators.”
🔥 Epic Games is expanding its footprint in Latin America by purchasing Aquiris, a 16-year-old, Brazilian game company. Aquiris will become Epic Games Brazil, giving the social gaming giant a foothold in the country’s fast-growing gaming market.
Promising technology
👾 OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it. OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy and a slew of investigations in other EU countries. If it fails, it could face hefty fines, be forced to delete data, or even be banned. But experts have told MIT Technology Review that it will be next to impossible for OpenAI to comply with the rules. That’s because of the way data used to train its AI models has been collected: by hoovering up content off the internet.
👾 Codex from Google. Google’s conversation AI tool Bard can now help software developers with programming, including generating code, debugging, and code explanation — a new set of skills added in response to user demand. Bard, the generative AI experiment Google launched earlier this year, can review and help users debug their source code line by line. Google said developers could tell Bard, “This code didn’t work. Please fix it,” and it will help debug.
Insightful data
A fintech struggles . Fintech startups attracted over $14B in VC funding in Q1 2023. This is far from 2021 levels but more than the last two quarters. the vertical’s funding is so far on track to surpass 2020 while falling short of both 2021 and 2022.
Meme of the week
