Venturized. July 5th, 2023
Restriction of US-made chips export to China, Apple's $3 trillion market size, DeepMind's intriguing announcement, and more.
Interesting news
📢 The Biden administration is considering new restrictions on exports of AI chips to China. According to the WSJ, the Commerce Department could move as soon as early next month to stop the shipments of chips made by Nvidia and other chip makers to customers in China and other countries of concern without first obtaining a license.
📢 DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, tells Wired that the company's next algorithm - a system called Gemini will eclipse ChatGTP. Hassabis says the process will take a number of months and could cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, notes Wired, Gemini could play a major role in Google’s response to the competitive threat posed by ChatGPT and other generative AI technology.
📢 Asset management giant Fidelity Investments is again trying to launch a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. Capital markets will be tokenized from both sides. Incumbents will turn existing assets into tokens on things that look like a database but interoperate externally.
📢 Apple saw its market cap climb past $3 trillion last week – making it the first company to hit that jaw-dropping milestone.
📢 European VCs and tech firms sign open letter warning against over-regulation of AI in draft EU laws. Executives from 150 businesses, including Germany’s Siemens and France’s Airbus, highlighted the risks of tight regulation, saying the rules could threaten the ability of European companies to compete in AI, while also failing to deal with the potential challenges.
The open letter states that AI offers the “chance to rejoin the technological avant-garde” but that current regulatory proposals at the EU level could tip over into stifling the opportunities.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Slang.ai, a startup that has developed an AI-powered phone answering product for the restaurant industry, raised a $20M Series A round led by Homebrew, with additional participation from Stage 2 Capital, Wing VC, Underscore VC, Active Capital, and Collide Capital.
“Everyone is frustrated with the experience of calling a business,” explained Alex Sambvani, Slang.ai CEO and cofounder. “No one likes waiting on hold with a retailer to check on an order status or calling their local restaurant to make a last-minute reservation and having their call go straight to voicemail. It doesn’t have to be this way. AI has the potential to fix this broken experience, and Slang AI is bringing AI to the phone.”
🚀 Dexory, a startup that serves warehouses with real-time inventory management data using AI software and autonomous robots, raised a $19M Series A round. Atomico was the deal lead, while Lakestar, Maersk, Kindred Capital, and Capnamic also contributed.
On the hardware side, the company develops robots replete with sensors and cameras to capture data as they traverse a particular warehouse, taking continuous photos of racks as they move at something akin to normal walking speed. Dexory then uses computer vision and machine learning to process the captured data while tying it to the physical location of the stock but inside a digital twin — that is, a complete virtual equivalent of its real-world counterpart.
🚀 Speakeasy, an API infrastructure company, has raised $7.6M in seed funding led by GV, with participation from earlier backer Quiet Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Flex Capital and StoryHouse Ventures.
Just about every developer wants to create APIs to help other companies connect to their services more easily, but creating and documenting an API is a time-consuming process. Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, wants to make that an easier and more automated set of activities.
🚀 0pass, a startup that aims to make it easier for companies to replace usernames and passwords with biometrics like Touch ID and Face ID, raised a $3.5M seed round led by Initialized Capital with Box Group, 645 Ventures, and Y Combinator also writing checks.
The primary difference between 0pass and other passwordless solutions is that 0pass is able to address passwordless login for all systems under one umbrella rather than just a subset. This means that 0pass is able to handle passwordless login for Windows, Linux, Mac, remote access, and websites — fully within the cloud or completely air-gapped.
🚀 SnapCalorie, a startup whose tech attempts to get an accurate calorie count and macronutrient breakdown of a meal from a single photo taken with a smartphone (its founder previously cofounded Google Lens), has raised $2M in funding from Accel, Index Ventures, Y Combinator, and former CrossFit CEO Eric Roza.
SnapCalorie isn’t the first computer vision-based app for calorie counting. Apps such as Calorie Mama, Lose It, Foodadvisor, and Bite.AI have all attempted the feat — to varying degrees of success. But what makes SnapCalorie different, Norris claims, is its use of depth sensors on supported devices for measuring portion size and a team of human reviewers for “an added layer of quality.”
Exits:
🔥 Finance automation company Ramp has acquired Cohere.io, a startup that built an AI-powered customer support tool, which was previously backed by Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, Soma Capital, Shrug Capital and Chapter One, Zach Perret, Elad Gil, and Naval Ravikant.
🔥 Databricks will pay $1.3B to buy MosaicML, a startup with neural network expertise that has built a platform for organizations to train large language models and deploy generative AI tools.
Promising technology
👾 OpenAI has revealed plans to transform the chatbot into a supersmart personal assistant for work. This assistant would have knowledge about an individual and their workplace, enabling it to perform tasks like drafting emails or documents in the person's style and with up-to-date business information.
👾 Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge. Microsoft introduces new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge, including automatically generated buying guides, AI-generated review summaries, and a price match tool.
Insightful data
Juniper Square surveyed nearly 100 venture fund professionals about their concerns, plans, and focus areas for the rest of the year.
And found that:
63% of VC firms plan to raise capital this year, but most believe the process will be more difficult than before;
Respondents said the most pressing concern from their LPs is around exits. And without a steady liquidity source, LPs will likely be more cautious in backing new VC funds;
40% said they wanted to invest in better LP reporting to facilitate the flow of information between them and their investors.
Meme of the week
