Venturized. February 21st, 2023

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Feb 21, 2023

Interesting news

📢 Susan Wojcicki is resigning from her role as CEO of YouTube, trading her role as one of the most prominent women in tech to focus on her "family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about," she told employees in a letter. Susan famously rented out her Silicon Valley garage to Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and joined the company as its 16th employee a year later.

📢 TikTok is planning to let creators charge for content. Creators may soon be able to charge fans $1 — or more — to view their videos, a source familiar with the matter told The Information. The paywall is one of many features TikTok may introduce to its platform in an attempt to attract new users.

📢 Online fashion group Shein - which is backed by Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management and General Atlantic, among others - projects its revenue will more than double to nearly $60B by 2025, up from $22.7B last year, as the Chinese company seeks to convince investors that it is on course for a blockbuster IPO this year.

📢 Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi now giving rides to employees on public roads in California. The tests are currently limited to shuttling Zoox employees on a one-mile public route between two office buildings at the company’s headquarters in Foster City, California, at speeds up to 35 miles an hour. PS: Amazon acquired the 9-year-old startup in 2020 and, at the time shared few details about how it planned to use the company’s technology.

📢 “Is the shine wearing off BeReal?”, TechCrunch asks.
Data out this week from Apptopia indicates that BeReal may have already peaked. The app is estimated to have hit 20M daily active users in October 2022, but that’s since dropped to 10.4M. In addition, its monthly downloads fell from 12M in September 2022 to 3.3M in January.

Notable deals

Venture capital:

🚀 Brigad, a French startup operating a marketplace for restaurants, caterers, private clinics, retirement homes and hospitals so that they can find freelancers for short-term missions, has raised $30M in equity funding, along with $5M in debt. Balderton Capital is leading the round, with Wendel Group, Serena Capital and Square Capital also participating. The startup originally started with the hospitality industry in France so that restaurants could fill gaps in the schedule with extra waiters, chefs or bartenders. A couple of years ago, it expanded to a second industry with care workers. There are 10,000 organizations that have used Brigad in the past. On average, they offer one mission per week. When they post a work opportunity, Brigad automatically forwards this offer to roughly two dozen people.

🚀 Caldera, a startup that aims to simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains so that builders can create layer-2 blockchains in the span of hours, as opposed to months or years, raised $9M across two rounds led by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Neo, 1kx, and Ethereal Ventures. Caldera aims to gain users who have a strong understanding of writing smart contracts but don’t have time to expand that knowledge multiple layers deeper, co-founder Matt Katz added. Teams building DeFi gaming, consumer applications, music NFTs, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and institutional use cases have all shown “sustained interest” in using the product, Katz said.

🚀 Stelo Labs, a startup whose open source extension helps users protect their crypto wallets from scams and phishing attacks, raised a $6M round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company was co-founded by Ben Scharfstein, CEO, and Aman Dhesi, CTO. Both have backgrounds in product management — Scharfstein worked at Google, and Dhesi held roles at Facebook, DoorDash and Square. Stelo Labs focuses on helping prevent malicious transactions, phishing and social engineering for Ethereum-based users, Dhesi said.

🚀 Sikoia, a startup that aims to help businesses make better decisions by uniting data and analytics that are already available to them, raised a $6M seed round led by MassMutual Ventures, with Coalition Capital, Earlybird, and Seedcamp also participating. By unifying third-party data and APIs and combining automated workflows with a series of detailed analytics, Sikoia promises faster decision-making capabilities, increased efficiency, and reduced regulatory risk.

🚀 Thatch, a startup that aims to simplify health benefits for startups and their employees, raised a $5.6M seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and GV, with additional participation from Lux Capital, Quiet Capital, Not Boring Capital, and BrightEdge. “Healthcare is the second biggest cost after salaries. So we spent a ton of money on it, and it’s something that’s extremely time-consuming,” co-founder Chris Ellis told TechCrunch. “But despite the fact that we spent all this time and all this money, the experience for our team still wasn’t great.” Thatch says it is “on a mission to help businesses give great healthcare to their employees in under five minutes.”

Exits:

🔥 Microsoft has confirmed that it’s finally killing off Yammer, the enterprise social network it procured more than a decade ago for $1.2B. Yammer was founded nearly 14 years ago in San Francisco, with co-founder David Sacks formally launching the startup at a TechCrunch startup event.

Promising technology

👾 Roblox accelerates - Roblox is testing a tool that could accelerate the process of building and altering in-game objects by getting artificial intelligence to write the code. The tool lets anyone playing Roblox create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars; change the appearance and behavior of those things; and give them new interactive properties by typing what they want to achieve in natural language rather than complex code. Roblox says the code-making AI it uses relies on a combination of in-house technology and capabilities from outside sources, although it is not disclosing where from. Currently the company is only training its AI using game content that is in the public domain.
👾 Otter.ai launches OtterPilot, its new AI meeting assistant - After each meeting, OtterPilot will automatically send an AI-generated summary of key meeting topics to those invited to the meeting or directly to an Otter group. Automated summaries are shared via email, with hyperlinks to key moments. The new meeting assistant can also automatically capture images of slides shared during virtual meetings – it automatically captures a slide presentation and inserts it into the meeting notes.

Insightful data

A face of European VC - The names of the VCs that have backed the most European unicorns won’t come as a surprise: Accel, Index Ventures, Eurazeo and SoftBank have each invested in more than 24 unicorns on the continent. Topping the list, Accel has backed 29 European unicorns. Only nine other investors, including the likes of Tiger Global Management and Tencent, have closed deals with 20 or more unicorns. Accel is also the investor that’s been involved in the most deals with unicorn companies, Sifted analysis found — it’s invested in companies that eventually earned a $1B tag a whopping 82 times.

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