Venturized. January 10th, 2023
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Interesting news
📢 Microsoft is preparing to add OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to its Bing search engine in a bid to lure users from rival Google.
📢 OpenAI, the research lab behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot, is in talks to sell existing shares in a tender offer that would value the company at around $29B, according to the WSJ, making it one of the most valuable US startups on paper "despite generating little revenue."
📢 Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market.
📢 Tech giants massive layoffs: Marc Benioff said that Salesforce hired too many people through the pandemic during the boom times, and now the Salesforce is cutting roughly 10% of its workforce, impacting more than 7,000 employees. Amazon has some news as well - in its most recent cost-cutting measure, Amazon internally announced plans to lay off around 18,000 people.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Product Science, a startup that develops mobile app performance monitoring tools, raised an $18M round. Investors included Slow Ventures, Coatue, K5 Global, Mantis Ventures, Peter Fenton, and Jerry Murdock. Product Science’s platform analyzes app code to find flaws in the execution, aiming to minimize perceptible crashes, freezes and errors. Founders say one company, Saturn, used Product Science’s platform to reduce their app’s start time from 4 seconds to 0.7 seconds.
🚀 Quris, a startup whose platform aims to simulate a human body’s reaction to drugs without relying on animal testing, raised a $9M seed round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2; GlenRock Capital, iAngels, Welltech Ventures, and Richter Group also contributed. The company is pioneering clinical trials on chips – testing thousands of novel drug candidates on miniaturized “patients-on-a-chip”. Its automated, self-training AI platform accurately predicts clinical safety and efficacy for novel drugs faster and more cost effectively
🚀 Snaptrude, a startup that is attempting to disrupt Autodesk in the building design space, raised a $6.6M seed round. Accel and Foundamental VC co-led the deal. Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO, said “the market is dominated by companies like Autodesk, software built largely in the 90s. So, the software stack is very old.” Snaptrude works on a browser and offers collaboration for designing buildings in 3D as naturally as using Google Docs. It also comes with the ability to generate real-time data to inform about the impact of changing construction size on cost, climate and energy utilization.
🚀 SurrealDB, a startup that provides cloud-based database services, raised a $6M seed round led by FirstMark Capital. Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, Co-Founder and CEO, says with SurrealDB the goal was to improve the app development process by reducing the need to build back-end APIs and database layers or use a cloud data platform or single data model. To this end, SurrealDB supports real-time queries, security permissions for multiuser access and “performant” analytical workloads.
🚀 Poly, a generative AI company for design assets, late last month raised $4M in seed funding led by Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, and NextView Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, and other strategic angels. Founded by Stanford design and AI alumni Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young, the company is building Generative AI tools for designers to create customizable, and HD design assets (textures, illustrations, icons, sound effects, etc.).
Exits:
🔥 Johnson & Johnson's consumer health unit Kenvue filed for an IPO. The business behind Band-Aid bandages and Tylenol medicines generated net sales of $15.1B in 2021, up from $14.5B in 2020, according to an SEC filing.
🔥 Bitcoin miner Argo Blockchain will avoid filing for bankruptcy protection after it agreed to sell its Helios mining facility in Texas to Galaxy Digital for $65M. The miner will also get a new $35M loan from the crypto-focused financial-services firm.
Promising technology
👾 Quantum computing scalability is set to jump with the debut of a new IBM processor - IBM is expected to debut its Heron processor in 2023, which will have 133 qubits (the processing units of quantum computers) of the highest quality. Crucially, each chip will be able to connect directly to other Heron processors, heralding a shift from single quantum computing chips toward “modular” quantum computers built from multiple processors connected together — a move that is expected to help quantum computers scale up significantly.
👾 Apple is about to enter a mixed reality race - 2023 might finally see Apple launch its long-awaited mixed reality headset. That’s according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and previously reported by Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The device could be revealed ahead of this year’s WWDC, ready to ship this fall. There’s no guarantee that Apple will actually hit this internal deadline, but its announcement still seems closer than ever. That brings the company to the AR/VR race which is already participated by Meta and Google.
Insightful data
Crypto asset funds, including Grayscale, clocked the worst year since 2018, with inflows reportedly plummeting 95%. Funds tracked by CoinShares netted a total of just $433M in 2022 compared to a massive $9.1B in the previous year, a decline of 95%.
