Venturized. December 28th, 2022
Powered by Roosh
Interesting news
📢 FTX story continues: FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried is back in the US, released on $250M bail. SBF, whose net worth had been calculated to be in the billions until recently, will live in San Francisco with his parents while wearing an electronic monitoring device. Sam is scheduled to appear in person at his next hearing on the afternoon of January 3rd.
📢 After years of pushing back against a lawsuit, Meta has agreed to a $725M settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica harvesting data from Facebook users.
📢 Twitter now displays stock and cryptocurrency prices directly in search results. To do this, users have just to type the dollar symbol followed by the relevant ticker symbol, e.g., $GOOG or $ETH, in the search bar, and Twitter will display the current price.
📢 Kickstarter shut down the campaign for AI porn group Unstable Diffusion. The group trying to monetize AI porn generation, Unstable Diffusion, raised more than $56,000 on Kickstarter from 867 backers. After this situation, Kickstarted reconsidered its policy for AI-based projects. Right now, the platform says it is considering how projects interface with copyrighted material, especially when artists’ work appears in an algorithm’s training data without consent.
📢 TikTok is making its algorithm more transparent with the launch of a new feature that allows users to see why a particular video was recommended to them in their “For You” feed.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Deep Voodoo, the professional deepfake studio for creators behind Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5” video, raised $20M from Connect Ventures, and the company has begun offering its tech to others in the business. Team members of the project are not newbies to the industry, as Trey Parker and Matt Stone were creators of South Park and various other media over the years.
🚀 Mangomint, a SaaS tool that strives to streamline the booking experience for the beauty industry, which includes everything from spas and massage parlors to piercing and tattoo studios, raised a $13M Series A round, which was led by OpenView Venture Partners. The company recently surpassed 200,000 monthly appointments across more than 1,000 locations in Canada and the US, while its growth is happening in tandem with the post-COVID labor shortage across developed economies.
🚀 Revel, an NFT or “social collectibles” platform (a cross between Instagram and Robinhood), raised $7.8M in seed financing led by Dragonfly Capital. The platform leverages “social game economics” through game design and simple rules to manage economic concepts like supply and demand, as well as inflation, among other things, the CEO said.
🚀 Vint, an investment platform that enables investors to buy shares of wine and spirit collections, raised a $5M seed fundraising round led by Montage Ventures. Since its launch one and a half years ago by the CEO Nick King and his co-founder, Patrick Sanders, Vint has made 50 “offerings,” which are analogous to a crowdfunding campaign. A recent offering that sold out on Vint was for a Macallan 78-Year-Old Collection whisky bottle worth $130,000.
Exits:
🔥 Binance US acquires bankrupt crypto exchange Voyager’s assets for $1B. The previous FTX-Voyager acquisition deal failed as a result of FTX’s collapse and Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest.
🔥 Indian Reliance Strategic Business Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries, has acquired a 23.3% stake in Exyn for $25M. Exyn’s robots are able to autonomously navigate in previously inaccessible environments without a prior map, existing infrastructure (GPS, communications, etc.), or an operator in the loop. Reliance, which operates India’s largest retail chain as well as the top telecom operator in the nation, said it would find synergies with the startup on the Indian conglomerate’s initiatives surrounding drone, industrial safety, security, and robotics areas.
Promising technology
👾 OpenAI releases Point-E, an AI that generates 3D models. According to a paper published alongside the code base, Point-E can produce 3D models in one to two minutes on a single Nvidia V100 GPU. Point-E doesn’t create 3D objects in the traditional sense. Rather, it generates point clouds or discrete sets of data points in space that represent a 3D shape — hence the cheeky abbreviation. (The “E” in Point-E is short for “efficiency” because it’s ostensibly faster than previous 3D object generation approaches.) Point clouds are easier to synthesize from a computational standpoint, but they don’t capture an object’s fine-grained shape or texture — a key limitation of Point-E currently.
Insightful data
Payments have come out on top as the best-funded fintech subsector in 2022 in Europe. Investors are a fan of the fact that no matter what’s happening in the economy, people are still going to be using cash.
