Venturized. January 16th, 2023
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Interesting news
📢 Despite its promising stake in OpenAI, Tiger Global is having trouble raising its latest venture fund, according to a report in Semafor. Investors are reportedly turned off not just by the firm's performance (the portfolio was internally marked down 24% last year) but a lawsuit from a former employee alleging that Tiger has a toxic culture.
📢 Twitter’s ad business is not recovering. Clients of WPP-owned GroupM, the world’s largest ad-buying firm, have cut their spending on Twitter by between 40% and 50% since Elon Musk took control of the company in late October.
📢 Another fake: JPMorgan is suing the leaders of Frank, a financial-aid business it bought for $175M in 2021, alleging they duped the bank by making up millions of fake student accounts to show it had a growing business. According to the bank's lawsuit, co-founder Charlie Javice approached JPMorgan in the summer of 2021 about a potential acquisition, claiming Frank had 4.25 million users; in reality, says the suit, the startup had fewer than 300,000 real users.
📢 OpenAI signaled it’ll soon begin charging for ChatGPT. A “pro” version will include no “blackout” (i.e. unavailability) windows, no throttling, and an unlimited number of messages with ChatGPT — “at least 2x the regular daily limit.”
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Mondu, a one-year-old Berlin startup that operates a buy-now-pay-later service for B2B providers, raised a $13M Series A extension round, increasing the size of the round to $56M. The lead investor was Valar Ventures, with FinTech Collective also joining in. As a refresher, the BNPL for B2B provider made a splash on the scene in October of 2021 with a $14M seed round. Since then, the company has snagged former Klarna, VMware, and Grover execs for its top-management positions, bagged $43M in the first portion of its Series A round, and brought home €20M in a debt financing round last October.
🚀 Digitail, a startup that automates the administrative tasks of veterinarians, raised an $11M Series A round led by Atomico, with Gradient, by Founders, and Partech also chipping in. Pet ownership has increased (56 to 70% U.S. household penetration in the last 35 years). To meet demand, a vet currently needs to see more than 32 patients a day, and by 2030, the US will need nearly 41,000 additional veterinarians, on current trends. Digitail assists vets in this journey with the SaaS solution that combines a management platform, a “pet parent” app for pet owners, and a Data Hub providing medical and business insights to veterinarians. It claims veterinarians are able to see 2x as many patients using the software.
🚀 Metaplane, a data observability startup, has raised $8.4M in seed funding from backers like Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, and Flybridge Capital Partners. A data observability startup founded by MIT graduate Kevin Hu, former HubSpot engineer Peter Casinelli and ex-Appcues developer Guru Mahendran in 2020. The three co-founders originally launched Metaplane as a “customer success” product that analyzed a company’s data to prevent churn. After going through Y Combinator, and with the pandemic hitting, Metaplane pivoted but continued to build data analytics-focused tools.
🚀 Seek AI, a startup that has developed a natural language interface allowing non-technical team members to create their own data queries, raised a $6M seed round co-led by Conviction Partners and Battery Ventures, with former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia also joining in. CEO Sarah Nagy commented: “I founded Seek last year after working as a quant and data scientist for more than a decade. I wanted to solve a pain point that I experienced over and over again throughout my career. I’ve often found myself feeling like a ‘human computer’ to translate between my less technical colleagues and the data they needed.”
🚀 C14, a startup that has developed what it believes to be a particularly seamless fiat-to-crypto payment flow for developers to embed in their applications, raised a $2.5M in a round led by General Catalyst. C14 believes that simplified crypto/fiat access is the top problem facing developers as well as consumers today. Current crypto ramps are clunky, and the market is rather large, and C14 aims to solve this problem with its fiat-to-crypto payment flow, which is described as a “seamless, ecommerce-like payments widget that can be embedded in websites and dApps across partner blockchain ecosystems.”
Exits:
🔥 In December, Microsoft acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit (DPU), for around $190M. Last week, Microsoft confirmed the acquisition. Fungible is a startup making a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit (DPU), that managed to raise over $300M in venture capital prior to the Microsoft acquisition from investors including SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.
🔥 WeDoctor, a 12-year-old, China-based online healthcare platform that's backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital China, among others, plans to file for an IPO by the end of April, the "latest sign of increased capital activity from China’s internet companies as regulators soften their stance."
Promising technology
👾 Voice deepfakes by VALL-E - VALL-E is a “neural codec language model” that uses a different approach to rendering voices than many before it. Its larger training corpus and some new methods allow it to create “high-quality personalized speech” using just three seconds of audio from a target speaker. But VALL-E is more iterative than breakthrough, and the capabilities aren’t as new as you might think. Voice replication has been a subject of intense research for years, and the results have been good enough to power plenty of startups, like WellSaid, Papercup, and Respeecher. The benefits of this technology are potentially huge — think about people who lose the ability to speak due to an illness or accident. These things happen quickly enough that they don’t have time to record an hour of speech to train a model.
👾 Nvidia Broadcast can now deepfake your eyes to make you look at the camera - Nvidia has released an interesting new feature for use with its graphics cards that can make it look as though you’re looking into your camera when your eyes are actually pointed elsewhere. Nvidia has been leaning heavily into this sort of AI generation in recent years — a major selling point of its graphics cards is DLSS, a feature that uses machine learning to intelligently upscale images, adding information that’s not there when you go to a lower (but easier to run) resolution. The latest version generates and inserts entirely new frames into gameplay, like how Broadcast generates and adds a new pair of eyes to the face.
Insightful data
The private credit industry is growing - outside of traditional bond markets, buzz is building in the $1.4T private credit industry. Investors have eagerly poured money into the space for years, and even as default rates begin to edge higher, Private funds raised around $224B last year, after raising $218B in 2021.
