Venturized. June 26th, 2023
Amazon can't stop expanding, Meta's plans to release Twitter competitor, YouTube testing online-games, beehiiv's answer to Substack, and many more.
Interesting news
📢 OpenAI is reportedly considering launching a marketplace where customers could sell AI models they customize for their own needs to other businesses.
📢 Amazon, keen to avoid being left behind in the hyper-competitive AI race, is launching a new program to invest in startups and organizations focused on generative AI. Called the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, the program will put $100M toward connecting AWS-affiliated data scientists, strategists, engineers, and solutions architects with customers and partners to “accelerate enterprise innovation and success with generative AI.”
📢 Google’s YouTube is testing an online-games offering. Google recently invited employees to begin testing a new YouTube product called Playables, which gives users access to games on mobile devices or desktop computers, according to the email, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
📢 Amazon plans to more than double its investment in India in the next seven years, the e-commerce group said, joining a roster of other high-profile American giants ramping up commitment to the South Asian market after meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week. The e-commerce group has invested about $11B in India to date and plans to pour $15B more by 2030.
📢 Meta is planning to release its Twitter competitor in mid-July and is pitching big-name celebrities to join a platform that will be "sanely" run. Meta is hoping for at least tens of millions of users within the first months of availability.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 ElevenLabs, a startup whose AI platform can turn text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or entirely new voices that mimic the sounds of people of various genders, ages, and ethnicities, raised a $19M Series A round. Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Cue cofounder Daniel Gross co-led the deal, with additional participation from Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, and Deepmind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
ElevenLabs can turn text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or entirely novel “artificial” voices that mimic the sounds of people of various genders, ages, and ethnicities. The company’s AI text-to-speech models are language-agnostic, allowing corporate customers to fine-tune them and build their own proprietary speech models on top.
🚀 Beehiiv, a platform for writing, monetizing, and distributing newsletters, has raised $12.5M in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Social Leverage, Creator Ventures, Blue Wire Capital and Contrarian Thinking Capital.
So, even with a crowded (and growing) field of existing newsletter services that includes not just traditional players like Mailchimp and newer juggernauts like Substack, there is still a big opportunity to come up with innovative approaches to do just that through advertising, paywalls and more (as beehiiv don’t take a 10% cut from writers revenue as Substack does).
🚀 Rever, a reverse logistics startup that aims to automate label generation and refunds for retailers while also providing analytics on customer behavior and purchasing trends, raised a $9.3M round led by GFC and Oscar Pierre.
Rever offers instant cash refunds through a buy now, pay later-type (BNPL) model (Rever finances the transactions), automating the processes of label generation and refunds while providing analytics on customer behavior and purchasing trends.
🚀 Maverick Protocol, a startup that is developing a protocol to address cross-chain liquidity inefficiencies, raised a $9M round led by Founders Fund, with additional investment from Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, and Apollo Crypto.
Maverick Protocol will seek to integrate with new chains while equipping developers with the necessary tools to maximize its infrastructure. In addition, the DeFi platform plans to partner with more projects, thus expanding its ecosystem.
🚀 Hyperline, a startup that handles pricing and billing for software-as-a-service companies, raised a $4.4M seed round led by Index Ventures and including Cocoa.
The company handles all things related to revenue. Users can import their customer data from the database, configure pricing rules, connect the platform with a CRM and leverage popular payment providers, such as Stripe or GoCardless. After that, Hyperline generates invoices directly. It handles different VAT rates — this isn’t a paid add-on like on some platforms. The product then orchestrates payment requests, which means that it can automatically charge a card or a bank account.
Exits:
🔥 Informatica, a publicly traded company whose tools help enterprises to analyze, manage and share data across their organizations, is acquiring Privitar, a UK-based startup that focuses on building and providing data access controls. Privitar was previously backed by Accel, Warburg Pincus, Salesforce, HSBC, and Citigroup.
🔥 Robinhood announced it would acquire no-fee credit card startup X1 for $95M in cash. X1 created a platform that offers a no-fee credit card with rewards on each purchase. It was founded in 2020 and was backed by Soma Capital, Global Founders Capital, and SV Angel.
Promising technology
👾 Otter gets into the chatbot game: Automatic transcription service Otter announced a new AI-powered chatbot that’ll let participants ask questions during and after a meeting and help them collaborate with teammates.
👾 Turning audio into text: Gladia, a French AI startup, has launched a platform that leverages OpenAI’s Whisper transcription model to — via an API — turn any audio into text in near real-time. Gladia promises that it can transcribe an hour of audio for $0.61, with the transcription process taking roughly 60 seconds.
Insightful data
Sequoia Capital has issued Atlas, which stands as its interactive guide to Europe’s technical talent. Some key insights are:
59% of tech companies have some distributed teams, and about half that many — 31% — say they are mostly remote;
73% of recruiters say pay differentials are being eroded between countries;
70% of Europe’s AI engineers have MA or Ph.D. degrees;
London holds the most engineers with AI experience, but Dublin is a talent hotspot.
Meme of the week
