Venturized. June 20th, 2023

Nvidia GPUs are new oil, Alphabet cautioning employees on AI chatbots, new Payrails round, and music-generator from Meta.

Jun 20, 2023

Interesting news

📢 Nvidia GPUs are so hard to get that rich venture capitalists are buying them for the startups they invest in. Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, and Daniel Gross, who has backed GitHub, Uber, and a host of other successful startups, have purchased thousands of GPUs and set up their own AI cloud service. Called Andromeda Cluster, the system has 2,512 H100 GPUs and is capable of training a 65B parameter AI model in about 10 days, the VCs said.

📢 Shopify ditched its Amazon-like delivery dreams. Shopify announced the sale of its delivery operation. It was an abrupt reversal of a strategy to compete with Amazon, which it had spent four years and billions of dollars developing.

📢 Intel is in talks with SoftBank Group's Arm to be an anchor investor in the chipmaker's IPO, Reuters reported. Arm plans to sell its shares on Nasdaq later this year, seeking to raise $8B to $10B.

📢 Alphabet is cautioning employees about how they use chatbots, including its own Bard, at the same time as it markets the program around the world, Reuters reported. Per its sources, Alphabet has also advised employees not to enter its confidential materials into AI chatbots, citing a long-standing policy on safeguarding information.

📢 Calpers, the biggest public pension scheme in the US, is planning a multibillion-dollar push into international venture capital as the $442B fund hunts for higher returns. Calpers could put as much as $5 billion in new money into venture capital

Notable deals

Venture capital:

🚀 Payrails, a startup that has developed a framework to build and operate more stable enterprise payment services, raised $14.4M in a seed extension funding round led by EQT Ventures with participation from General Catalyst and a16z.

Enterprises and marketplaces that need to take and make payments across multiple geographies and products have typically relied on mix-and-match bags of third-party services patched together by teams of engineers with some of their own code. Payrails helps to avoid these complexities by providing their payment platform.

🚀 Glyphic AI, an "AI copilot" for sales teams founded by two DeepMind alums, has raised $5.5M in pre-seed funding led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Creator Fund.

Glyphic AI automates manual processes and provides previously inaccessible insights, helping businesses optimize revenue strategies and increase conversion rates.

🚀 Apron, a startup that provides a supplier payments platform for small businesses, has raised $5.5M in funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with angel support from the founders of Melio and Klarna.

Apron integrates with existing workflows and connects to the software users already use. There’s no wallet. Payments go straight from one bank account to another without stopping off on the way, which means no top-ups and no extra reconciliations.

🚀 Refuel.ai, a platform that automates dataset creation and labeling for every business and use-case using LLMs, has raised $5.2M in seed funding led by General Catalyst and XYZ Ventures.

The offerings come as an answer to the data challenges that slow down AI development, keeping enterprises from embedding the next-gen technology into their products and business functions.

🚀 BoomFi, a crypto payments platform, raised $3.8M in seed funding led by White Star Capital, with participation from Passion Capital, Blockchain Founders Fund, Kraken Ventures, Mantle Network, and numerous others.

BoomFi offers merchants a simple and fast onboarding process, with no-code pay links to get going in minutes, low-code integrations, and fully customizable API options.

Exits:

🔥 Wargraphs, a one-man-band startup behind a popular companion app for League of Legends called Porofessor, which helps players track and improve their playing stats, is getting acquired for up to €50M. MOBA Networks, a company founded out of Sweden that buys, grows, and runs online gaming communities, is buying the startup and its existing products.

🔥 Fanatics is expanding its reach in Latin America. The digital sports platform and licensed sports merchandise company week completed its acquisition of Fexpro, a Panama-based wholesaler of licensed sports and branded apparel in Latin America.

Promising technology

👾 AI, meet cloud. Salesforce is launching a new suite of products aimed at bolstering its position in the ultra-competitive AI space. Called AI Cloud, the suite, which includes tools designed to deliver “enterprise-ready” AI, is Salesforce’s latest cross-disciplinary attempt to augment its product portfolio with AI capabilities.

👾 Meta makes a music generator. Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator — and, unlike Google, open-sourced it. Called MusicGen, Meta’s music-generating tool can turn a text description into about 12 seconds of audio.

Insightful data

Back on the track. New public market data indicates that software and cloud stocks are rising to their highest points so far this year. Moreover, the underlying revenue multiples at public companies are expanding as well, especially in the faster-growing subset of software companies.

Here’s a look at the Bessemer Cloud Index’s performance this year:

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