Venturized. July 10th, 2023

Threads passed 100M sign-ups, TikTok launched music streaming, Neko Health from Daniel Ek raised new round, Lightspeed made first investment in Africa, and more.

Jul 10, 2023

Interesting news

📢 Threads, which was launched last week, passed 100M sign-ups in 5 days. Zuckerberg also tweeted for the first time in more than a decade on Wednesday to celebrate the Twitter knockoff, which is likely to attract a ton of engagement as Twitter flails and other potential successor apps fail to consolidate its users in one place.

📢 TikTok launches a music streaming service in Brazil and Indonesia called ‘TikTok Music’. TikTok Music lets users sync the service to their existing TikTok accounts and listen, download, and share songs. The service includes the catalogs of major record companies, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music.

📢 Worldwide traffic to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s hallmark chatbot, dropped nearly 10% in June, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

📢 How do tech executives utilize ChatGPT? Satya Nadella, whose company – Microsoft – has invested $13B in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, says his favorite use of the technology is to translate the great Persian poets and to understand complex works of philosophy better.

Notable deals

Venture capital:

🚀 Neko Health, the health tech startup co-founded by Spotify co-creator Daniel Ek, has raised €60M in its first external round of funding. The Series A round was led by Lakestar, with participation from Atomico and General Catalyst.

Neko Health exited stealth back in February with the lofty promise of preventative healthcare via full-body scans backed by AI software that helps doctors detect skin conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, among other metabolic syndromes. Each scan apparently takes around 10 minutes and costs €250 and is followed by an in-person consultation where the results are explained.

🚀 Clair, a startup developing a free earned-wage advance offering for frontline workers, has raised $25M in new equity funding led by Thrive Capital with participation from Upfront Ventures and Kairos.

Clair currently works with over 10,000 employers, workforce management systems and payroll and over 50,000 workers. Employees will see Clair through those existing employer systems that allow you to select your schedule separate from your payroll system. They can also download the Clair app and conduct financial activities, including savings, check printing, and the ability to withdraw funds for free through ATMs.

🚀 Kinnu, a startup working to bring Generative AI to learning, raised £5.1M in seed funding led by LocalGlobe and Cavalry Ventures with participation from Spark Capital and Jigsaw.

Kinnu is advancing an AI-powered learning app that works as a game and an online course platform. It offers content distilled and organized into commitment-free ‘pathways’ that users can choose from. Subjects include intermittent fasting, psychology, contemporary art, philosophy, history, and medical breakthroughs.

🚀 Berry Health, a startup that wants to democratize access to healthcare in Africa, starting out with mental health, sexual health, and dermatology, has raised $1.6M pre-seed round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (its first investment in Africa) and General Catalyst.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Berry Health founder Fredua Akosa said the health tech startup is “bringing judgment-free health care in a 21st-century way in a continent where stigma cuts deeper and is affecting so many lives.” The platform plans to charge 299GH ($26) yearly for users to access all its services and $5 per consultation with clinicians (Akosa said this fee is 25% less than existing solutions). Berry Health has signed several doctors and clinicians and intends to emerge out of stealth at the end of next month, according to Akosa.

Exits:

🔥 Subscription and recurring billing platform Billwerk+ acquires competitor plenigo. Founded in 2013, plenigo’s software solution includes subscription sales control, recurring billing, and payment processing control and counts nearly 70 customers, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, SPIEGEL, Heise Medien, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Ebner Media Group.

🔥 DigitalOcean acquires cloud computing startup Paperspace for $111M in cash. DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill says that Paperspace’s infrastructure and tooling, once integrated with DigitalOcean’s products, will enable customers to more easily test, develop and deploy AI applications.

Promising technology

👾 OpenAI made Code Interpreter available. Last week, the company said that it is taking one of its own in-house plug-ins, Code Interpreter, and making it available to all of its ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Code Interpreter “lets ChatGPT run code, optionally with access to files you’ve uploaded,” an OpenAI spokesperson wrote on the company’s continuously updated ChatGPT release notes blog. “You can ask ChatGPT to analyze data, create charts, edit files, perform math, etc.”
👾 An artificial intelligence firm in Spain has unveiled a number of “AI humans” that allow people to modify their voices in video games — in real-time. Voicemod released 20 humanlike characters, ranging from a 20-something woman to an elderly man. The voices are trained on voices from professional human voice actors. Gamers can download the app on their Apple Mac or Windows PC and incorporate Voicemod’s technology as a “virtual microphone” that sits in between the microphone application they’re using to start speaking through the alternative personas. The app is already being used by more than 40M people.

Insightful data

Balderton Capital has launched a Founder Wellbeing and Performance Platform. The platform was created based on research among 230 founders as well as the firm's 20 years of experience investing in Europe’s entrepreneurs. The research made by the firm highlighted some of the key findings:

89% of founders surveyed felt that the startup ecosystem was a naturally competitive and high-pressure environment.
82% believe that working long hours is an inevitable part of being an entrepreneur.
71% say that entrepreneurs are expected to constantly prioritise working over investing time in their own wellbeing.
51% of founders say that investors and board members put pressure on entrepreneurs to always be available.
84% feel there is an expectation that entrepreneurs must always work long hours in order to be successful.
83% of founders feel that, past a point, there are diminishing returns from simply putting in more hours.

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