Venturized. February 13th, 2023
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Interesting news
📢 Microsoft and partner OpenAI unveiled a new internet search engine and web browser that is "based on a widely rumored OpenAI creation called GPT-4," posits the New York Times. “This technology will reshape pretty much every software category that we know,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Bing’s app downloads jumped 10x after the AI news broke.
📢 Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in turn right on the next day, announced that Google would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard as it races to respond to ChatGPT, which has wowed the world since it was unveiled at the end of November. The search giant said a group of “trusted testers” would be able to access the tech before it becomes “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”
📢 Actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures is discussing raising a fund dedicated to artificial intelligence investments, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Sound Ventures may target around $200M for the vehicle.
📢 Pipe, an alternative financing platform that was last privately valued by investors at $2B, has announced its new chief executive after months since the founding team's departure. Luke Voiles is joining Pipe after working as the general manager of Square Banking at Block, formerly Square. He was also the CEO and president of QuickBooks Capital.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Macro, a startup whose custom PDF editor leverages AI to pull out key terms, sections, and equations in order to make documents interactive and hyperlinked, raised a $9.3M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Craft, BoxGroup, 3kVC, and Cooley. “We believe that there’s a significant amount of room for improvement in open source formats like PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX and email,” Founder Jacob Beckerman told TechCrunch. “The nice thing about these formats is that they’re standards. Nobody owns them. And they’re extensible, which means you can actually modify and build on the standard. So instead of writing proprietary formats from scratch, and instead of ignoring the network effects these formats already have, we’re extending and building on top.”
🚀 Follow, a startup that has built a social investment platform that enables users to subscribe to a creator’s financial feed and set up an investment portfolio that mimics that particular person’s investment strategy, raised a $9M round from Atomic, Uncork Capital, and Vera Equity. Follow users pay a monthly subscription set by the Leaders, which currently ranges from $1.99 to $19.99, and then benefit from exclusive content and the execution of their favorite influencer’s investment portfolio trades within their own Follow Registered Investment Advisor investment accounts using its feature called SuperFollow. From then on, the portfolio syncs in seconds whenever there is new movement from the influencer. The company will make money from those subscriptions, but Follow’s CEO said the majority of the revenue would go to the creator.
🚀 Levels, a startup whose app aims to provide real-time feedback on how food affects one's health, raised a $7M Series A extension round. TriplePoint Capital and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Trust Ventures, and Shrug Capital all anted up. The company’s product help users see how food affects their health, empowering them with the tools needed to achieve health goals and improve their healthspan. By leveraging data shared by members from biosensors like continuous glucose monitors (CGM), Levels provides real-time feedback on how diet and lifestyle choices impact metabolic health.
🚀 Frond, a startup that offers a tool for building communities online centered around posts, raised a $3.3M led by Cherry Ventures, with Figma founder Dylan Field, Dropbox founder Arash Ferdowsi, and Lattice founder Jack Altman also anteing up. At the helm are Matt Blackshaw, founder of Sold, and Jan Senderek, who founded Loom – both companies were sold to Dropbox. On Frond, users have individual channels for different topics, but instead of using Discord- or Slack-like chat features, you create a post (photos, videos, links, or long-form writing), like in a Facebook group. Conversations on chat-based platforms can very quickly become hard to follow — some communities might thrive within the chaos, but others need something more focused without making it too intimidating to post. Frond seeks to fill that in-between space.
🚀 Snapser, a startup that has built a customizable backend engine for game developers, raised a $2.6M seed round. Andreessen Horowitz was the deal lead. The Snapser engine is a plug-and-play backend solution that gives developers “the ability to fully build their gaming experiences while using their own code, data, servers, cloud solutions and “Snap” them into our custom backend.” Such a solution, it claims, would make game development cheaper and more efficient.
Exits:
🔥 Amazon is in talks to acquire Indian video streaming giant MX Player from Times Internet, Manish from TechCrunch India reports. He writes that the video app is “popular for supporting a wide range of video formats and reliability on low-cost Android smartphones, has expanded to the original content in recent years, and has amassed more than 300M users globally.”
🔥 IBM acquires GraphQL startup StepZen to step up its game in API management. StepZen is a GraphQL startup that provides tools for those working in hybrid cloud environments to build and scale GraphQL deployments to pull data from disparate sources. (GraphQL was developed internally at Facebook to help developers with API management before getting rolled out as an open-source query language in 2015).
Promising technology
👾 A step to video generation - Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has released an AI model that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. In a demo reel posted on its website, Runway shows how its software, called Gen-1, can turn clips of people on the street into claymation puppets or books stacked on a table into a cityscape at night. Unlike Meta and Google, Runway has built its model with customers in mind. “This is one of the first models to be developed really closely with a community of video makers,” says Co-Founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. “It comes with years of insight about how filmmakers and VFX editors actually work on post-production.”
👾 Chat GPT joins a "cloud battlefield" - There will be two types of tech companies moving forward - those that can afford to train and run their own foundation models and those that do not, with the latter needing to pay a foundation model tax to the former. The AI Cloud business will be a key battleground for the future of cloud platforms and will give opportunities for competitors to overtake incumbents. For example, there’s a high probability that Azure, with Microsoft’s experience and integration with OpenAI, will overtake the others with its AI Cloud offerings (the company has already released OpenAI's models on Azure, well ahead of its competitors in Amazon and Google). As these models get more capable, they will take over more and more tasks that were done by traditional software, meaning more and more software will be optimizable by merely optimizing the performance of neural networks
Insightful data
Marketplace industry drop - VC funding for marketplaces in 2022 was down 50% year-over-year, returning to pre-pandemic numbers, with $74B raised. B2B companies saw a stronger investor demand, with B2B VC funding dropping only 33% while the B2C stream fell 57% YoY, showing investors’ reluctance to this vertical. Additionally, there are only 41 new marketplace unicorns were created in 2022, the lowest number since 2016.
Meme of the week
