Venturized. December 20th, 2022
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Interesting news
📢 Apple is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024.
📢 US prosecutors charged FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried with eight counts of fraud and conspiracy in what they called a scheme to defraud his crypto exchange’s customers and his hedge fund’s lenders.
📢 Investors withdrew as much as $3B from Binance on Wednesday last week, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen, as a deluge of negative headlines about the cryptocurrency industry rattled users of the world’s largest exchange.
📢 Meta is testing out a BeReal clone – Instagram just began testing out Candid Stories in South Africa. Candid Stories gives users a daily notification to snap and share two unfiltered photos using the front and back camera lenses—not unlike the prompts sent by BeReal.
📢 GitHub brings free secret scanning to all public repos that will automatically notify users directly about leaked secrets in your source code. Earlier, GitHub only made its secret scanning service available to paying enterprise users who paid for GitHub Advanced Security but starting now, it is making the service available for all public GitHub repos for free.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Sana Labs, a startup that provides an AI-based platform to help people manage information at work and use that data to bolster e-learning within the organization, raised a $34M Series B round led by Menlo Ventures, with EQT Ventures also taking part. The crux of Sana is a platform and AI engine that connects to all of the different apps that an organization uses in the workplace — Salesforce, e-mail, Notion, GitHub, Slack, Trello, Asana, and whatever else users might have to capture, source or store information and communicate with others. All of the data across these apps is ingested and organized automatically by the Sana platform (AI magic) and maintained as the information inside those apps changes or expands. Then, users who want to access information go to Sana and request it in regular “human” language, as everyone might do in a search engine.
🚀 Sweep, a startup that has developed a no-code toolkit for building sales playbooks in Salesforce’s CRM software, raised a $28M round. Previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Partners led the deal. With Sweep, users can create and visualize CRM processes, rules, and automation with drag-and-drop tools while the platform constructs the necessary backend infrastructure in Salesforce. For posterity, Sweep records a log for processes and generates reports for all the elements in a funnel.
🚀 Api.video, a video infrastructure startup, has raised a $12M Series A round led by MMC Ventures, with additional participation from Open Ocean, Blossom Capital, and Financiere Saint James. Using a cloud-based platform api.video saves clients, including Bauer Media Group, Stoner Cats, and BNP Paribas time and cost, and reduces complexity. In realising a single, end-to-end API-based solution, this means that, developers no longer have to manage multiple APIs to handle various, specialised video processes, such as uploading and transcoding.
🚀 Cinder, a startup that aims to streamline the content moderation process for companies, raised a $10M Series A round led by Accel and including Y Combinator. Cinder aims to centralize those policies and the necessary context, enabling straightforward decision-making at scale while still facilitating “dynamic investigations” — the kind of work that a disinformation campaign or a coordinated effort to undermine an election might require. The platform doesn’t do any detection itself, and it doesn’t set the rules; that’s all up to the companies that license its software.
🚀 Nilus, a "no code" financial operations platform, has raised $8.6M in seed funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures, Symbol, and individual investors. A company offers a “plug and play” payments operations platform for finance teams that move significant volumes of dollars. Their goal is to help these teams understand all that underlying data behind the payment activity, so they can have a real-time view of cash, mitigate risk, and always be audit-ready.
🚀 CtrlStack, a startup that helps developers prevent downtime by identifying changes before they impact customers, raised a $5.2M seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Engineering Capital co-led, with Kearny Jackson, Webb Investment Network, and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating. CtrlStack provides change intelligence for DevOps to prevent downtime and identify changes before they impact customers. The platform unifies disconnected data, teams, and tools to connect cause to effect in DevOps. By leveraging those connections, CtrlStack enables automated troubleshooting and serves as the system of record for change management.
Exits:
🔥 Zeekr, the premium electric car brand under China’s Geely, said it has confidentially filed for a US IPO. If it goes through, it’ll be the first major Chinese listing in the country in nearly two years, following China’s effective ban on foreign IPOs.
🔥 Dropbox buys form management platform FormSwift for $95M in cash. FormSwift is a cloud-based platform designed to help businesses build, edit, approve, share and print custom personalized documents, and its product will bolster the former’s existing document storage, signing, and sharing capabilities, including Dropbox Sign, Dropbox Forms, and DocSend.
Promising technology
👾 Stability AI announced it would allow artists to remove their work from the training dataset for an upcoming Stable Diffusion 3.0 release. As a brief recap, Stable Diffusion, an AI image synthesis model, gained its ability to generate images by "learning" from a large dataset of images scraped from the Internet without consulting any rights holders for permission. Some artists are upset about it because Stable Diffusion generates images that can potentially rival human artists in an unlimited quantity.
👾 DoNotPay is launching an AI chatbot that can negotiate bills. “The world’s first robot lawyer” is launching a new AI-powered chatbot based built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 API that can help users negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without having to deal with customer service.
Insightful data
The power of tools built upon AI is described in 1 tweet.
