Venturized. February 28th, 2023

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Feb 28, 2023

Interesting news

📢 Shared micromobility giant Lime said it has achieved full-year profitability on both an adjusted and unadjusted EBITDA basis, which would make it an outlier in an industry that has struggled to break even, much less turn a profit, reports TechCrunch.

📢 Spotify launches ‘DJ,’ a new feature offering personalized music with AI-powered commentary. Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature will deliver a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists you like, using what Spotify says is a “stunningly realistic voice.”

📢 Microsoft has started discussing with ad agencies how it plans to make money from its revamped Bing search engine powered by generative artificial intelligence as the tech company seeks to battle Google's dominance. In a meeting with a major ad agency this week, Microsoft showed off a demo of the new Bing and said it plans to allow paid links within responses to search results. Microsoft expects that more human responses from the Bing AI chatbot will generate more users for its search function and, therefore, more advertisers.

📢 The founder of OpenAI – Sam Altman – is "planning for AGI [artificial general intelligence] and beyond." The blog came out on OpenAI’s blog, where Sam describes what could it take to develop AGI and how it can benefit. the society in general.

📢 Fundraising by venture firms hit a nine-year low in the fourth quarter, as the macroeconomic pressures that already weighed on technology startups began to affect the investors who underpin the industry. Venture firms raised $20.6B in new funds in the fourth quarter. That was a 65% drop from the year-earlier quarter and the lowest fourth-quarter amount since 2013, according to data firm Preqin.

Notable deals

Venture capital:

🚀 Here Not There Labs, a developer of a blockchain group messaging app called Towns, has raised $25.5M in funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, joined by earlier backers Benchmark and Framework Ventures. The company was founded by Ben Rubin (he previously founded Houseparty and Meerkat, among other startups). Towns is a protocol and a web-based chat app designed to facilitate self-owned, self-governed online communities.

🚀 Chaos Labs, a blockchain risk analytics firm, has raised $20M in seed funding co-led by PayPal Ventures and Galaxy Digital. Coinbase, Uniswap, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and others also joined the round. Chaos Labs protects crypto protocols against external exploits and risks. The platform does this by offering agent and scenario-based simulations, which helps secure protocols against economic vulnerabilities and market manipulation events.

🚀 Replicate, a startup making it easier for software teams to build AI applications, today exited stealth mode and announced that it had secured $17.8M in funding over two rounds. It received the bulk of the funding, $12.5M, through a Series A investment that included the participation of Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and multiple angel investors. As part of its feature set, Replicate offers a collection of several thousand open-source AI models allowing it to perform various tasks ranging from generating images to translating text. The platform also eases the task of deploying AI models in production, and after packaging a neural network into a container – Replicate can automatically deploy it on a managed cloud environment. The product has attracted users’ attention and has a 149% MoM growth rate since mid-2021.

🚀 BlueCargo, a SaaS platform that aims to optimize logistics in port terminals and reduce late fees for drayage trucking companies and shippers, has raised $11M in funding co-led by Soma Capital and Left Lane Capital. The company optimizes logistics in port terminals and reduces late fees for drayage trucking companies and shippers. BlueCargo aggregates data on a single platform to keep these fees under control. On the one hand, trucking companies can track shipments and follow the statuses of various containers. On the other hand, BlueCargo tracks gate schedules and helps trucking companies secure appointments to pick up and drop off containers.

🚀 Kaito, an AI-powered search engine for crypto, has raised $5.3M in seed funding led by Dragonfly Capital. Participants in the round include Sequoia Capital, Jane Street, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures and Alpha Lab Capital. Founder Yu Hu previously managed a long/short portfolio of European and US equities for Citadel. He started researching crypto and investing in 2017, but in 2021 noticed that information was “so fragmented in crypto.”, “While I had so many amazing tools in traditional finance, there were virtually none in crypto,” he mentioned to TechCrunch. Yu Hu developed Kaito’s MetaSearch to address this issue through a one-click product that enables users to search across the entire social crypto landscape through platforms like Twitter, Discord, governance forums, Mirror, and others

Promising technology

👾 Meta has trained and will release a new large language model to researchers, Mark Zuckerberg announced as the AI race heats up. The model, called LLaMA, is reportedly intended to help scientists and engineers explore applications for AI, such as answering questions and summarizing documents. Meta claims that the second-smallest version of the LLaMA model, LLaMA-13B, performs better than OpenAI’s popular GPT-3 model “on most benchmarks,” while the largest, LLaMA-65B, is “competitive with the best models,” like DeepMind’s Chinchilla70B and Google’s PaLM 540B.
👾 Snap launches A.I. chatbot - Snap announced it’s rolling out an OpenAI-powered chatbot named My AI to its Snapchat+ subscribers. The chatbot can recommend gift ideas, weekend plans, or recipes. In a nod to well-documented incidents with Bing’s OpenAI-based chatbot, Snap warned in a press release that its My AI chatbot “can be tricked into saying just about anything.”

Insightful data

The AI competition is fierce — but Europe isn’t leading the herd - Last year, the continent’s AI startups raised $15B in funding, while the US more than doubled that figure with $33B. Across both 2021 and 2022, most funding into AI startups was allocated to US-based companies. According to Dealroom, the US has also got a great start so far in 2023, dwarfing Europe and China’s collective $1.1B with $13B raised already.