Venturized. February 7th, 2023
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Interesting news
📢 OpenAI has become a hunting ground for talent, observes The Information. Per its report, "Bigger companies have recruited away former OpenAI employees who’ve worked on those models. More than 20 former OpenAI employees work at Tesla and at least 16 at Google, according to a review of LinkedIn profiles, while Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft each employ a handful of former OpenAI employees.”
There is also a new group, the so-called “mafia”, of former OpenAI employees who launched their own (impressively successful) ventures - see the mapping here.
📢 What a surprise - the Biden administration calls out app stores as anti-competitive. A new report issued by the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said it had investigated the competitive conditions in the mobile app ecosystem and found that it’s “not a level playing field, which is harmful to developers and consumers.”
📢 Financial Times discovered it was Google that invested about $300M in the AI start-up Anthropic (yep, that one founded by earlier mentioned OpenAI mafia), making it the "latest tech giant to throw its money and computing power behind a new generation of companies trying to claim a place in the booming field of generative AI.” Per the FT, the deal involves Google taking a stake of about 10% in the start-up, money that Anthropic will be using in part to cover the cost of the computing resources it uses from Google's cloud computing division.
📢 Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Co-Founders of Instagram, are back. Platformer says that the Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps and that their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends.
📢 Google is testing new AI-powered chat products that are likely to influence a future public product launch. They include a new chatbot and a potential way to integrate it into a search engine.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Select Star, a startup that is developing data discovery, lineage, and governance tools, raised a $15M Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Bowery Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Pebblebed also contributing. The platform analyzes metadata and logs from Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Tableau, Looker, and other popular platforms and then attempts to tag and distill events down into bullet points automatically. Select Star also creates a continuously updated inventory of key data assets, models, and business metrics. Delivering a system of record for all the data across an organization and teams, the platform tries to expose the most significant database-level relationships.
🚀 Beek, a seven-year-old, Mexico City-based Spanish creator audio app, has raised $13M in a Series A round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Figma cofounder Dylan Field among others. Beek started a social network for book fans and now partners with content creators to produce original audible content, offering a higher revenue than other platforms like Spotify. Now Beek boasts a user base of over 3 million registered users and a vast library of over 250,000 audiobooks and 1,000 pieces of exclusive content.
🚀 Jetpack.io, a startup that says it provides easy-to-use "building blocks" for building and scaling sophisticated cloud apps, so developers don’t need to spend extra time building these abstractions, has raised $10M in seed funding from Coatue and GV. Founder Daniel Loreto previously held senior engineering roles at Google, Twitter, Airbnb, and then Virta Health. Loreto said that while he was at Virta, he saw there were open-source tools for deploying infrastructure like Kubernetes and Nix, but there was so much complexity around this tooling that a lot of energy was spent deploying the infrastructure to run the application rather than building the application itself. “So we came to the conclusion that infrastructure should be treated as a product. And that infrastructure should be self-serve and easy to use.”
🚀 Nexus, a startup whose software allows developers to reward content creators that promote games to their audience, raised a $10M round led by Griffin Gaming Partners, with Sony Innovation Fund, Valhalla Ventures, Pace Capital, and S3 Ventures also anteing up. Nexus is an attractive option for studios that do not want to develop this software from scratch. In addition to implementation in-game, the company also manages global payouts, taxes, and analytics for developers. Additionally, Nexus provides support for influencer relations and marketing activations.
🚀 Cleary, a startup that is building intranet tools for SMBs, raised a $4.5M seed round led by Moonshots Capital, with Liberty City Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Seachange Fund, and Quiet Capital also joining in. The company’s founders, Thomas Kunjappu and Ryan O’Donnell, previously ran Twitter’s internal people tools team. In doing so, the founders realized that while companies like Twitter were able to build these bespoke tools for their employees, there were no comparable services on the market for all of the smaller companies that weren’t able to dedicate entire development teams to internal tools.
Exits:
🔥 Marqeta buys fintech Power Finance in a $275M all-cash deal, its first acquisition. Power Finance developed a credit card issuance program, which is designed for companies, brands, and banks to offer embeddable fintech experiences, such as customized credit card programs, targeted promotions, and personalized rewards, into existing mobile and web applications.
🔥 Standard AI, a San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup valued by its investors at $1B, has acquired Skip, a developer of self-checkout kiosks. Standard AI will integrate Skip’s cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) technology with a back-office ecosystem to streamline operations and give greater control over price, discounts, and promotions, the company said.
Promising technology
👾 A step in music composition - Google’s new AI system, MusicLM, can create music in any genre by taking a text description as input and generating a coherent song. It was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music and generated songs with significant complexity. The system can also be instructed via a description of an image or generate audio for a specific type of instrument. Although there have been previous impressive music-generation tools (notably Jukebox by OpenAI), this is a huge advance.
👾 A challenge for image generation - Popular image generation models can be prompted to produce identifiable photos of real people, potentially threatening their privacy, according to new research. The work also shows that these AI systems can be made to regurgitate exact copies of medical images and copyrighted work by artists. It’s a finding that could strengthen the case for artists who are currently suing AI companies for copyright violations. The researchers, from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, ETH Zürich, and Princeton, got their results by prompting Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen with captions for images, such as a person’s name, many times. Then they analyzed whether any of the images they generated matched the original images in the model’s database. The group managed to extract over 100 replicas of images in the AI’s training set. The researchers were only able to extract relatively few exact copies of individuals’ photos from the AI model: just one in a million images were copies, according to Webster, but this is still worrying.
Insightful data
Nordic startups are holding well despite the macro - Nordic startups raised $11.7B in 2022. This figure represents a 36% decrease from the all-time high in 2021 but is still over 50% higher than pre-pandemic numbers. Additionally, Nordic startups have raised $3.4B in early-stage investment in 2022, just a 6% decrease from their peak in 2021. Iceland and Norway, the two smallest Nordic ecosystems by VC funding, were the fastest-growing in early-stage investment.
