Venturized. January 30th, 2023
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Interesting news
📢 Precision Neuroscience - co-founded by Benjamin Rapoport, who also co-founded Elon Musk’s Neuralink - is creating a brain implant thinner than human hair. The device is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface, and it’s a brain implant that aims to help patients with paralysis operate digital devices using only neural signals. This means patients with severe degenerative diseases like ALS will regain their ability to communicate with loved ones by moving cursors, typing, and even accessing social media with their minds.
📢 Salesforce is now facing the very real threat of activist shareholders overthrowing its board and forcing the sale of mega-acquisitions like Slack and Tableau. Also, the activist investor Elliott Management Corp. is preparing to nominate a slate of directors at Salesforce, according to the WSJ, which calls it a "sign that a battle may be looming for board seats at the business-software maker."
📢 SoftBank — which at one point took part in $30B worth of financing rounds in more than 90 startups in a single quarter — participated in just eight investment rounds totaling $2.1B in the three months ending in December.
📢 France plans to invest €500M in Deeptech startups by 2030. This move is an integral part of “France 2030,” an investment plan launched in October 2021 to revive France’s industrial economy and to create future technological champions in strategic sectors such as semiconductors, robotics, electric vehicles, nuclear, and renewable energy sources.
📢 Fintech giant Ant Group’s valuation was trimmed again by Fidelity Investments, more than two years after the Chinese government torpedoed its record IPO in October 2020. Boston-based Fidelity cut its estimate for Ant by about 9% to about $63.8B as of the end of November from the end of May, according to Bloomberg calculations based on filings. That’s down from $235B just before Ant’s IPO was halted in November 2020.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 PayEm, a startup that developed a reimbursement and spend management platform, raised a $20M Series A round and secured a $200M credit line. Investors included Viola Credit, Mitsubishi Financial Group, Collaborative Fund, Pitango First, NFX, LocalGlobe, and Glilot+. PayEm offers procurement tools and workflows for expense approval automation, accounts payable automation, purchase order creation, expense reimbursement, and credit card management. Its “record-to-report” platform captures employee spending requests, involving relevant stakeholders for approval based on the data collected and providing budgeting capabilities for budget overseers. PayEm now has “hundreds” of customers and fast-growing revenue (up 550% over the last year).
🚀 Kittl, a startup that offers browser-based graphic design tools to create logos, labels, and postcards à la Canva, raised an $11.6M Series A round led by Left Lane Capital and joined by Speedinvest. Kittl allows users to create professional-grade designs fast and easily by removing the barrier of a tough learning curve. Their features are designed to make complex design processes simple and accessible with a few clicks, while competitors either focus on basic tools that only allow a small range of creative freedom, or they take a lot of training and practice to get good at.
🚀 Supernormal, a generative AI note-taking platform that promises to deliver detailed meeting notes to users without them lifting a finger, has raised $10M in seed funding led by Balderton Capital. Previous investor EQT Ventures participated in the round, joined by Acequia Capital and byFounders. Supernormal hopes to demonstrate the value of generative AI with its tech, which creates meeting notes by integrating with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other conferencing platforms.
🚀 Accord, a collaboration platform designed to support business-to-business sales, has raised $10M in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Y Combinator. CEO Ross Rich - former partnerships lead at Stripe - says that the new funds bring Accord’s total funding to $17M. “Typically, sales teams hack together a mix of Google Docs, Sheets, shared Slack channels, and other general project management tools to accomplish sales process management,” co-founder Ross Rich said. “However, adoption is incredibly low, and none of those tools are integrated into the CRM software, so you can’t build prescriptive workflows, and all of the customer-engagement data is lost.” Accord does what disparate apps cannot: offer the ability to collaborate around and share sales milestones, next steps, and resources with all stakeholders.
🚀 Sandbar, a startup that sells anti-money laundering, fraud, and counter-terrorism risk detection software, raised a $4.8M seed round. Investor Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures were the co-leads. “By offering an API-based plug-and-play solution for financial products and services, Sandbar reduces the need for time-consuming and expensive engineering resources,” the release said, adding that it consolidates multiple compliance products to save companies time and money.
Exits:
🔥 Strava, the activity tracking and social community platform that says it is used by more than 100 million people globally, has acquired Fatmap, a company that’s building a high-resolution 3D global map platform for the great outdoors.
🔥 Dell is making an acquisition to beef up its cloud services business, buying Cloudify, an Israeli startup that has built a platform for cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation. Cloudify’s tools are used by cloud architects and DevOps engineers to manage containers, workloads, and more across hybrid environments.
Promising technology
👾 A step forward from ChatGPT - Anthropic, the startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees that have raised over $700M in funding to date, has developed an AI system similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that appears to improve upon the original in key ways. Called Claude, Anthropic’s system is accessible through a Slack integration as part of a closed beta and aims to provide a “principle-based” approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions, letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles as a guide. But, of course, Claude is not without its own limitations: for example, asking the system questions in base 64 bypasses its built-in filters for harmful content. Users report it is worse at math than ChatGPT, and doesn’t solve the problem of writing factually wrong statements.
👾 Banks enter “the wallet race” - Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and four other banks are working on a new product that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants’ online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards and managed by Early Warning Services LLC, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle. One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators (such as PayPal and Apple) and to cut down on fraud (customers using their wallet wouldn’t have to type in their card numbers, which can raise the risk of fraud and rejected payments that result in lost sales)
Insightful data
A secondary market slide - For startups that rode the tech boom to soaring valuations, few things are harder to swallow than the dreaded down round. The amount of money invested in private companies in the first nine months of 2022 dropped 33% from the same period in 2021, and by the end of November, investors were getting shares of closely held companies in the secondary market at a record 50.5% median discount off the price set in the most recent funding round.
