Venturized. December 6th, 2022
Powered by Roosh
Interesting news
📢 BlockFi has filed for bankruptcy, the latest crypto firm to collapse in the wake of crypto exchange FTX’s rapid downfall.
📢 Apple announced this year's list of App Store award winners. The social network app BeReal won the app of the year award for iPhone, while the notetaking app GoodNotes 5 won for best iPad app.
📢 Elon Musk’s brain-implant startup Neuralink should be ready to test its technology on humans in six months, he said during a live-streamed update. During a question-and-answer session, the company said it was working to address concerns from the FDA regarding overheating of the device and also toxic chemicals seeping into the brain from the implant, both of which could cause damage.
📢 Stripe is going to offer a new product that makes it easier to hold cryptocurrencies without signing up for a cryptocurrency exchange. The company’s new fiat-to-crypto widget can be embedded in any crypto product so that users can enter their card information and acquire crypto that can be used in another web3 product.
📢 Lensa AI sprung up overnight last week with its viral “magic avatars”. The feature launched in late November boosted the app to the #1 spot on the iOS App Store’s competitive “Photo & Video” charts. The feature developed by Lensa AI works by inviting users to upload 10-20 photos of themselves, and then using the open-source Stable Diffusion model, the app processes your photos to generate avatars of you that look like they were created by a digital artist.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Fleek, a startup that says it is building an interface and protocol layer to make web3 services such as storage, hosting, and billing accessible to anyone, raised a $25M Series A round led by Polychain Capital, with Protocol Labs, Arweave, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO, and Argonautic Ventures also anteing up. Fleek hosts about 50,000 apps on its platform today, mainly within the Ethereum ecosystem but also among other protocols. To date, all Fleek products are built on crypto protocols like Ethereum, Filecoin, Internet Computer, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Textile.
🚀 Pearpop, a startup that allows creators and brands to buy collaborations with celebrities, raised an $18M Series A round at a $300M valuation. Investors included Sound Ventures, Seven Seven Six, Blockchange Ventures, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, and C2 Ventures. Pearpop allows creators and brands to buy collaborations with celebrities like Madonna and creators like Sommer Ray. These celebrities and influencers can sell the chance to collaborate with them on TikTok. Pearpop has attracted numerous brands, including Amazon, Netflix, Chipotle, Rakuten, Universal Pictures, Sonos, and Beyond Meat, as well as celebrities like Doja Cat, The Weeknd, Madonna, Shawn Mendez, and Post Malone.
🚀 Roboto Games, a startup whose new game studio aims to bridge web2 game experiences with web3 in-game elements, raised a $15M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Animoca Brands also pitching in. The team is primarily focused on the development of a survival/crafting massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that’s codenamed Foragers and Fighters, with plans to launch an initial playable version of the game in the first quarter of 2023.
🚀 Amie, a startup that has created a calendar built around improving productivity, raised a $7M seed round led by Spark Capital, with Creandum, Guillermo Rauch, Hanno Renner, and Quick Coffee Ventures also anteing up. Amie competes with a new wave of calendar startups, including Vimcal, Magical, Fantastical, Cron, and Rise. The app combines the user’s calendar with todos. By default, the user’s unscheduled todos appear in the left-side column next to the calendar. Users can drag tasks from the sidebar and drop them in the calendar at a specific date and time.
🚀 Nucleo, a startup that is developing a blockchain-based privacy infrastructure for companies interested in moving to web3, raised a $4M seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto and 6th Man Ventures, with additional funds provided by Aztec Network, Aleo, and Espresso Systems. Created in November 2021 after the loss of the ConstitutionDAO, co-founders Matthew Wyatt and Luke Newman saw a lack of infrastructure for organizations to use in the burgeoning privacy networks. Leveraging advanced multi-signature and zero-knowledge cryptography, Nucleo provides the privacy infrastructure for any organization to take advantage of improved capital allocation, formation, and distributed ownership by going Web3-native.
Exits:
🔥 LedgerX, one of the few solvent pieces of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crumbled FTX empire, is for sale and attracting interest from would-be buyers, including crypto giants Blockchain.com and Gemini.
🔥 Mozilla acquires Active Replica, a Vancouver-based startup developing a “web-based metaverse”. According to Mozilla SVP Imo Udom, Active Replica will support Mozilla’s ongoing work with Hubs, the latter’s VR chatroom service, and an open-source project.
Promising technology
👾 Researchers from Nvidia announced Magic3D, an AI model that can generate 3D models from text descriptions. After entering a prompt such as, "A blue poison-dart frog sitting on a water lily," Magic3D generates a 3D mesh model, complete with colored texture, in about 40 minutes. With modifications, the resulting model can be used in video games or CGI art scenes.
👾 Microsoft has registered a new patent on the use of AI-generated music/soundtracks/audio in an extensive range of media, including movies, video games, live recordings, and related fields. According to the patent, this new technology will help the system generate audio in real-time according to the situation, or more simply, it will help generate dynamic/adaptive audio. It is interesting as this technology will set apart the experience for every individual based on their choices and situation in a video game.
Insightful data
Out of over 300 VC-backed unicorns in Europe and Israel, 203 have seen their employees create 1,018 new startups between them, according to a new report by global VC firm Accel and intelligence platform Dealroom.
