Venturized. July 26, 2023
Michael Moritz has left Sequoia Capital, Loupedeck acquisition by Logitech, VanMoof's bankruptcy, Wix's AI-driven website builder, and more
Interesting news
📢 Michael Moritz, the journalist-turned-VC who has long been one of the most prominent and respected investors at Sequoia Capital, has left the firm after 38 years to “deepen his advisory relationship” with Sequoia Heritage, the wealth management unit he spun up in 2010 with colleague Doug Leone and on whose board he has sat for years.
📢 Spotify plans to raise its monthly subscription price in the US by $1, an expected change by the audio giant as it pushes to become consistently profitable.
📢 Apple is quietly working on AI tools that could challenge those of OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google and others, but the company has yet to devise a clear strategy for releasing the technology to consumers.
📢 Google is testing a product that uses AI to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp.
📢 Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick has passed away at age 59. Described by The New York Times in 1995 as “the nation’s most wanted computer outlaw,”. He was sought for gaining illegal access to about 20,000 credit card numbers, including some belonging to Silicon Valley moguls, causing millions of dollars in damage to corporate computer operations, and stealing software used for maintaining the privacy of wireless calls and handling billing information.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Runway, a startup that provides financial planning tools for startups, raised a $27.5M round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Elad Gil and Jason Tan.
Runway, which connects to existing accounting tools, data warehouses and human resources information systems, allows customers to write formulas and create models that can be incorporated into business plans and scenarios (e.g. a pay bump, hiring new people or increasing marketing spend). With the reporting component, users can build dashboards with live charts, tables, text, and even video and content from the web.
🚀 Whop, a startup that is building a marketplace for people to sell access to digital products like deals on food and travel, raised a $17M Series A. Investors included Insight Partners, Zinal Growth, Peter Thiel, and The Chainsmokers.
Given the countless goods and services marketplaces out there, one might wonder what makes Whop. The founder claims that Whop is differentiated by its selling experience and product discovery engine. Sellers on Whop get a dashboard with promotion and customer relationship management tools as well as analytics for business insights. As for buyers, they’re treated to a recommendation algorithm, visualizations for discovering new products and a portal for managing their purchases.
🚀 Anduin, a startup that digitizes processes for private market investors, raised a $15.6M Series B round. The lead was 8VC, with GC1 Ventures and existing investors also participating.
The company has been diligently closing the infrastructure gap between GPs and LPs, providing superior investor experiences and enabling GPs to onboard a significant number of investors more efficiently.
🚀 GGWP, a startup that has built an AI-based platform for moderating community behavior in multiplayer games, raised a $10M round from Samsung Ventures and SK Telecom Ventures.
It focuses on using AI to scan text chat in multiplayer games for toxic behavior and then notifying community moderators when it finds a need for action, such as banning players.
🚀 Gushwork.ai, a startup that provides a curated marketplace featuring offshore workers trained in using various AI applications, raised a $2.1M pre-seed round. Lightspeed was the deal lead, while B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital, and Beenext also took part.
Alongside offering part-time access to offshore talent, Gushwork.ai trains and equips its workforce with AI tools to make them fit for many workflows that were previously considered creative and not merely process-oriented to a large extent.
Exits:
🔥 Logitech has acquired Loupedeck, the company behind the self-titled editing console beloved by streamers and creative professionals. The sum is undisclosed.
🔥 VanMoof, the Netherlands-based maker of sleek e-bikes that attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from VCs, has officially been declared bankrupt.
Promising technology
👾 Wix’s new tool can create entire websites from prompts. The company’s new AI Site Generator tool will let Wix users describe their intent and generate a website complete with a homepage, inner pages, text and images, and business-specific sections for events, bookings, and more.
👾 An advanced version of ChatGPT can analyze images and is already helping the blind. But its ability to put a name to a face – essentially to potentially become a powerful surveillance technology that spits out information about individuals and not just objects – is one reason the public doesn’t have access to it.
Insightful data
LinkedIn data shows that the number of founders choosing to remain in stealth is up 42% in the past six months, and has doubled since last year.
Meme of the week
ChatGPT can now remember who you are and what you want.
