Venturized. July 17, 2023
Ripple victory, new version of Anthropic's Claude, Jirav Series B, new art generator from META, unicorn birthrate bounce, and many more
Interesting news
📢 Ripple Victorious. Ripple won in its enforcement case with the SEC stemming from its sale of more than $1.4B XRP tokens. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres found that Ripple Labs’ didn’t violate investor protection laws and that XRP, a token developed to facilitate cross-border payments, isn’t a security.
📢 Up to £75B extra in UK startup investment. UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced plans to unlock £50B from private pension funds and a further £25B from local government pension schemes by 2030 to invest in high-growth UK companies.
📢 TV shopping is here. Roku is partnering with Shopify to allow users to purchase products from Shopify merchants through their TVs. Viewers will be able to interact with a Roku Action Ad for a Shopify merchant by using their TV remote.
📢 Unstoppable Amazon. Amazon announced that the first 24 hours of its Prime Day event marked the “single largest sales day in company history” and that the two-day event was the “biggest Prime Day ever.” Across both days, consumers in the U.S. spent $12.7B, according to Adobe Analytics data (6.1% growth YoY). Amazon’s annual Prime Day event took place on July 11 and 12 this year.
📢 Celsius CEO & key deputy arrested. Bankrupt crypto exchange Celsius' former CEO and a key deputy were arrested on fraud charges. Celsius was engaged in two separate but related investment scams. The first was to get customers to deposit cryptocurrencies with Celsius by promising them 'safe’ yields as high as 17%, which they would then turn around and lend to crypto hedge funds. The second was its token CEL, a way for investors to ‘bet’ on the company.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Jirav, a startup developing financial planning software for businesses, raises a $20M Series B round led by Cota Capital with participation from Born Capital, Alumni Ventures, Information Venture Partners, and Bluefish Ventures.
Co-Founder Martin Zych told TechCrunch in an email interview: “The breaking point for me came after a company I was working for finally had a large enough budget to spend on a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution. It cost us nearly $100,000, and took six months to implement and get to parity with our existing Excel model. I knew there needed to be a faster and more cost-effective solution for finance professionals.” Zych’s solution was Jirav, which offers a library of prebuilt FP&A solutions for specific industries, including financial models, KPIs, reports, and dashboards.
🚀 Spline, a no-code design tool for creating 3D assets, raised $15M in a seed round led by Gradient Ventures with participation from First Round Capital, NXTP, Chapter One, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Y Combinator, Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin and Backend Capital.
Spline lets users create 3D objects, edit materials, add interactivity (including game controls) and animations, and export them — all from a web browser, either from scratch or pre-made objects. The platform’s collaboration features let users work together to fine-tune and comment on assets and create real-time physics simulations and interactions between those assets.
🚀 Ivy, an API for instant bank payments, has secured €7M in a seed investment round led by European VC Creandum.
Payment and transaction fees can accrue because of card networks, gateways and wallets that are all involved in today’s online transactions. Ivy’s solution is to allow merchants to accept instant bank payments literally at the checkout. That means the “middle-men” transaction fees can be substantially reduced, and the transaction speed increased, claims the startup.
🚀 Fairlyne, a Resale-as-a-Service platform for the travel industry, raised a $3M seed round led by Speedinvest, with participation from Evolem, Kima Ventures, FJ Lab, and several angel investors.
Using Fairlyne’s white label product, travel brands and operators can now add resale to their distribution, maximizing customer satisfaction by giving them more flexibility whilst generating additional profitability by providing a second opportunity for nonrefundable tickets.
🚀 Statement, a startup that has built a comparison site for small businesses to find card payment providers to suit their needs and budget - based on previous merchant statements, has raised a £1.5M pre-seed funding round, led by Northzone and includes Notion Capital, Triple Point and TinyVC, with angel investment including Charlie Songhurst, Chris Adelsbach, and Chris Mairs.
Apparently, 92% of SMB merchants have stuck with their card payments provider for over a year, and 66% of merchants don’t know the fees they are paying on transactions – Statement wants to change those stats.
Exits:
🔥 Indian food delivery giant Swiggy acquires LYNK in retail distribution push. LYNK is a retail logistics startup with a network of over 100,000 stores. After the acquisition, LYNK will help Swiggy expand into the retail distribution market, serving store operators.
🔥 London fintech Monzo is preparing a bid to merge with its Nordic rival Lunar as it turbocharges its European expansion. Lunar, a digital bank with over 650K users across Denmark, Sweden and Norway, hit a valuation of $2.2B after a fresh funding round last year.
Promising technology
👾 A new art generation model from META. Meta announced CM3Leon, an AI model that the company claims achieves state-of-the-art performance for text-to-image generation. CM3Leon is also distinguished by being one of the first image generators capable of generating captions for images, laying the groundwork for more capable image-understanding models going forward.
👾 Anthropic introduced the latest version of its chatbot, Claude. The startup announced that the beta version of Claude 2 has lengthier responses and “improved performance” compared to the first iteration of the chatbot, which was released in March. It claims Claude 2 scored better in a bar exam — 76.5% on the multiple-choice section, compared to Claude 1.3’s 73% — and above the 90th percentile on the reading and writing portion of the GRE.
Insightful data
Bounce back. Quarterly new unicorn births rebounded from a 6-year low to hit 18 in Q2’23. The US is home to half of the quarter’s new unicorns, and Asia follows with 5. The top new unicorn by valuation was US-based cloud computing provider CoreWeave ($2.2B).
Meme of the week
