Venturized. August 8, 2023
NASA streaming service, new fund from Reed Jobs, Hopin collapse, Rapyd's new acquisition, and more
Interesting news
📢 NASA gets into streaming. NASA announced that it’s going to launch a new streaming service later this year called NASA+. The ad-free, no-cost streaming portal will include live coverage of future launches, documentaries and new original series that will be exclusively available on the platform.
📢 Reed Jobs, a son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, is stepping into the spotlight with a new venture capital firm to invest in emerging cancer treatments. Called Yosemite — after the national park where Reed’s parents were wed — the firm has already closed its debut fund with $200M from prominent individuals and institutions, including MIT, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and John Doerr.
📢 Hopin is fast coming down to earth. The company announced that it had sold its main events business to RingCentral for an undisclosed sum. Meanwhile, Hopin founder Johnny Boufarhat – who reportedly sold $195M of his own shares as investors flocked to his company – is set to be replaced by Hopin's current CTO, Badri Rajasekar.
📢 Meta is preparing to launch a range of AI-powered chatbots that exhibit different personalities as soon as next month to boost engagement with its social media platforms.
📢 New early-stage fund from Coatue. Coatue Management has raised $331M for its third fund focused on early-stage startups, a 34% less than its target and lower than its previous early-stage fund.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Socket, a startup that provides a scanning tool to detect security vulnerabilities in open source code, raised a $20M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with additional funds provided by Abstract Ventures, Wndrco, Unusual Ventures, and the co-founders of Box, Figma, Okta, Vercel, and Eventbrite.
“Over the past decade, it’s become clear that open-source software has won,” CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh told TechCrunch. “Sharing code freely has made it drastically cheaper and faster to build software — and tech innovation has accelerated. But security has often been an afterthought. New technology spreads because it’s useful, not because it’s safe. Criminals are exploiting the trust in open source software to carry out brazen attacks that spread destructive malware.”
🚀 Haus, a startup that helps companies measure the ROI on their marketing efforts, raised a $17M Series A round led by Insight Partners, with Baseline Ventures, Haystack Ventures, Upside Partnership, Octave Ventures, and Mantis Venture Capital also participating.
Haus is designed to be used by any brand spending on marketing across one or more channels (e.g. social media, SMS, display advertising and so on). With Haus, users can configure on-demand regional experiments to test different marketing strategies and conduct demand forecasts, accounting for the effects of seasonality and a business’ general health.
🚀 Lightup, a startup that helps companies improve the quality of their data, raised a $9M Series A round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Newland Ventures, with Spectrum 28 Capital, Shasta Ventures, Vela Partners, and Incubate Fund also pitching in.
“We leverage the compute fabric of those scalable data warehouses and data lakehouses instead of moving data. So the big difference for us is that traditional systems would take out data from where it lives, and we leave it in place,” Co-Founder Manu Bansal said.
🚀 Reflex, a startup that is building a low-code web app development platform based on Python, raised a $5M seed round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Abstract Ventures, Box Group, Y Combinator, Picus Capital, and Outset Capital.
The company just wants to make it easier for people with little or no web app development experience to build and launch an app quickly while building something that can go into production. The idea seems to be catching on, with 5,000 developers building 15,000 apps since they released the open-source framework in December.
🚀 Jericho Security, a startup that says it assists enterprises in defending against social engineering attacks, raised a $3M pre-seed round led by Era, with Lux Capital, FoundersXFund, MetaLabs, Alcove, Textbook, Alumni Venture Group, Thorntree Capital Partners, and Contrary Capital also piling on.
Jericho Security’s approach marks a new frontier for cybersecurity, using machine-learning capabilities to essentially “fight AI with AI.” Jericho pits an AI red team against an AI blue team in simulations to uncover vulnerabilities and develop more robust defenses.
Exits:
🔥 DoubleVerify, a publicly-listed ad verification company, has entered into an agreement to acquire AI-powered adtech firm Scibids in a cash and stock deal valued at $125M. DoubleVerify helps marketers avoid having their ads appear next to objectionable content and lets them verify that those ads were viewable to real people. Scibids technology uses the data generated by a marketer's advertising stack to automate bidding in ad auctions and how much budget to devote to each campaign
🔥 Rapyd, the fintech-as-a-service startup that provides APIs to enable payments, card issuing, digital wallet and other financial services to companies like Uber and Ikea, is taking a significant step forward in its growth with a big acquisition: It is paying $610M to acquire a giant piece of PayU — the payments group of internet giant Prosus that focuses on emerging markets.
Promising technology
👾 Meta has released a new AI music generator. Meta released a new open-source AI code called AudioCraft, which lets users create music and sounds entirely through generative AI. It consists of three AI models, all tackling different areas of sound generation. MusicGen takes text inputs to generate music. This model was trained on “20,000 hours of music owned by Meta or licensed specifically for this purpose.” AudioGen creates audio from written prompts, simulating barking dogs or footsteps, and was trained in public sound effects.
👾 MIT engineers developed a new type of concrete that can store energy. MIT engineers developed the new energy storage technology — a new type of concrete — based on two ancient materials: cement, which has been used for thousands of years, and carbon black, a black powder used as ink for the Dead Sea Scrolls around 2,000 years ago. The concrete could also be used to make roads that can charge electric vehicles as they drive.
Insightful data
Last year’s techwide reckoning continues. The running total of layoffs for 2023 based on full months to date is 224,503. Tech layoffs conducted to date this year currently exceed the total number of tech layoffs in 2022.
Meme of the week
