Venturized. December 13th, 2022
Powered by Roosh
Interesting news
📢 App Store significantly expands pricing options. Apple last week loosened its requirements around how developers have to price their apps - the company announced an expansion of its App Store pricing system to offer developers access to 700 additional price points, bringing the new total number of price points available to 900. It will also allow US developers to set prices for apps, in-app purchases, or subscriptions as low as $0.29 or as high as $10,000.
📢 Alphabet's Google plans to combine the team working on the mapping service Waze with the group overseeing the company’s Maps product, as the search giant faces pressure to streamline operations and cut costs.
📢 The Federal Trade Commission sued Microsoft to block its planned $75B acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The law enforcement agency said the deal is illegal because it would give Microsoft the ability to control how consumers beyond users of its own Xbox consoles and subscription services access Activision’s games. The company could raise prices for people who don’t use Microsoft’s hardware to access the games or even cut off access entirely.
📢 Continuing the story on avatars from Lensa AI – the AI was originally trained on 2.3B captioned images from the internet, some of which are watermarked and copyrighted works, as well as a number of images from sites like Pinterest, Smugmug, Flickr, DeviantArt, ArtStation, Getty and Shutterstock. The issue at hand is that artists didn’t opt-in to have their work included in the training data, nor can they now opt out. Oops, seems unfair.
📢 The Securities and Exchange Commission is asking public companies to detail their exposure to distressed crypto entities following the collapse of trading platform FTX and its affiliates. Many public companies have little or no exposure to cryptocurrencies, but a handful have built or redesigned their businesses around the asset class (including Coinbase Global, bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings, or crypto-focused bank Silvergate Capital)
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Pactum, a startup whose AI-powered software aims to help big companies like Walmart automate routine supplier negotiations, raised a $20M round led by 3VC; additional investors included NordicNinja VC, Maersk Growth, and previous investors Atomico, Project A, Metaplanet, and Taavet+Sten. Maersk and Pactum already worked to resolve severe capacity imbalances in the spot trucking market. Pactum’s machine learning stepped in to analyze routes, propose prices to the best truckers, and secure capacity.
🚀 Vaultree, a startup that has developed software that lets companies work with fully encrypted data without first needing to decrypt it, raised a $12.8M Series A round led by Molten Ventures, with Ten Eleven Ventures, SentinelOne, Elkstone Partners, CircleRock Capital, and Cyber Club London also pitching in. Vaultree uses a form of encryption known as “homomorphic encryption” to secure data. Unlike traditional forms of encryption, which make using encrypted data impossible without decryption, homomorphic encryption allows the software to perform computations, searches, or analytics as if the data wasn’t encrypted. With homomorphic encryption, users don’t have to surrender their encryption keys.
🚀 Cacheflow, a startup that maps out the last-mile tasks of closing a software deal with a customer, raised a $10M "seed+" round led by GV, with participation from previous investor GGV Capital. Cacheflow’s solution simplifies the SaaS sales flow, integrating it into a single, no-code platform. It lets sales teams generate dynamic quotes in seconds and streamlines the buying process with simple configuration, interactive B2C-style checkout, and integrated payments. Cacheflow’s customers see 3x faster deal closes after integrating the product.
🚀 Syncfy, a startup that allows customers to access data from more than 125 different banks, digital wallets, tax authorities, utility providers, crypto exchanges, and blockchains across Latin America, as well as internationally, raised a $10M seed round. Point72 Ventures was the deal lead; JAM Fund, Ausum Ventures, Avalancha Ventures, FJ Labs, Mantis VC, and XBTO Humla Ventures also participated. The company provides financial data aggregation and enrichment across its Connect, Fiscal, and Invoice Stamping API integrations. Some of Syncfy's customers include large banks and enterprise software companies such as BBVA and Intuit, as well as fast-growing startups, including fintech unicorn Clara.
🚀 The Mirror, a startup developing a platform for indie game developers and 3D modelers to speed up the rollout of common features such as multiplayer networking, raised $2.3M in a pre-seed round led by Founders Fund. The platform will arm developers of all skill levels — from no-code to advanced — with easy-to-use tools to solve common problems. Mirror’s ready-to-use features include multiplayer networking, real-time collaboration, a physics sandbox, and support for community-based user-generated content.
Exits:
🔥 Intuit has agreed to acquire SeedFi, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based credit-building platform. Intuit says that by combining SeedFi’s Credit Builder technology with Credit Karma’s long-standing relationships with credit bureaus and others in the ecosystem, it will be able to move with greater speed and scale to help members.
🔥 Consolidation in the fast-delivery sector continues. Getir has closed its acquisition of German rival Gorillas in a deal that values the combined group at $10B, the FT reported. The deal values Gorillas at $1.2B, down from the $3B valuation its private investors assigned it in September 2021.
Promising technology
👾 DeepMind created an AI tool that can help generate rough film and stage scripts. Alphabet's DeepMind has built an AI tool Dramatron, a so-called "co-writing" tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions, and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script.
👾 DeepMind (yep, again) and University College London fine-tune a 70B parameter language model to generate statements agreeable to humans with diverse opinions. The team’s top model achieves a more than 65% preference rate compared to the best human-generated opinions.
Insightful data
Startups across Europe are on track to raise $85B in funding this year — a drop of $15B on 2021 levels when funding passed $100B. The figures come from London VC firm Atomico’s annual State of European Tech report.
Meme of the week
👀
