Venturized. March 15th, 2023
Call of Duty on Roblox, more layoffs at Meta, USDC exposure to SVB, and more stories on ChatGPT
Interesting news
📢 Someone made a ‘Call Of Duty’ clone in Roblox. Frontlines is a Call Of Duty clone. Users have an arsenal of modern military weapons to unlock and engage enemy teams in fierce multiplayer matches. The most interesting part – it’s also made using Roblox, a gaming ecosystem where creators can build games and players can play a wide array of user-generated content, but the platform has never seen a game of such quality in its ecosystem.
📢 The tech cut continues. Meta is planning a fresh round of layoffs and will cut thousands of employees after having previously reduced its headcount by 13% in November. The company has also been working to flatten its organization, giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams it deems nonessential.
📢 Stability AI plans to raise at $4B valuation. With artificial intelligence booming, one key player in the fast-growing space is talking to investors about raising more money after just reaching unicorn status in a funding round late last year. The parent company of Stable Diffusion, an AI tool for making digital images, is seeking to raise money at a valuation of about $4B.
📢 Last week USD Coin, the stablecoin issued by Circle Internet Financial, fell sharply below its intended 1-1 dollar peg to as low as 90 cents as investors reacted to its exposure to Silicon Valley Bank, where about $3.3B of a reported $40B in reserves that back the outfit's stablecoin are stuck at the moment.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Believer Entertainment, a new gaming studio, raised a $55M Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Andreessen Horowitz, Bitkraft Ventures, Riot Games, 1Up Ventures, Cleveland Avenue. Believer is led by CEO Michael Chow, a former vice president of Riot Games, and Steven Snow, the company’s chief product officer and a founding member of Riot. The funding will primarily be used to hire staff to develop the company’s new gaming venture with an open-world, as Believer likes this space.
🚀 Vantage, a startup that helps businesses better understand their cloud infrastructure spend and automate their savings, has raised a $21M Series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, which led its seed round, as well as Harpoon Ventures, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince and VC Glenn Solomon. Vantage co-founder and CEO Ben Schaechter told TechCrunch the company now helps its more than 300 customers manage more than $1B in annual cloud costs. These customers now include the likes of Square, NASA, BuzzFeed, PBS, Ripple, PlanetScale, and Barstool Sports and they connect a total of over 10,000 infrastructure accounts to Vantage at this point.
🚀 Violet, a startup behind recently launched Mauve - the world’s first compliant decentralized exchange for both DeFi and traditional finance, raised $15M. Investors included BlueYard Capital, Balderton Capital, Ethereal Ventures, FinTech Collective, Brevan Howard, and Coinbase Ventures. Co-Founder Markus Maier explains, "Mauve is a direct response to the FTX fallout, which has significantly eroded trust in crypto globally by misappropriating funds. The future is dependent on the continued adoption of non-custodial crypto exchanges. Mauve empowers its users to trade without surrendering custody of their assets. This means no one can access, much less steal, any retail or institutional investor’s funds, helping to restore confidence among market participants."
🚀 Monnai, which says it helps its financial customers navigate regulatory landscapes and battle fraud, raised a $6.5M Series A round led by Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors, including Better Tomorrow Ventures, 500 Global, and Emphasis Ventures. Monnai’s platform integrates multiple data sources from around the world to help its own customers navigate regulatory landscapes and battle fraud. Its adaptive infrastructure delivers four decision-making modules — customer view, trust, and fraud risk, AI-driven decisioning for credit risk, and collections optimization — through a single API.
Exits:
🔥 WeightWatchers is buying a two-year-old digital health company Sequence, marking the diet company’s move into the hot market for diabetes and obesity drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy. Sequence is a subscription service that offers telehealth visits with doctors who can prescribe drugs. WW is paying $106M for the startup.
🔥 Meta Platforms is reportedly planning to divest itself of Kustomer, a business-software company it bought last year in a deal that valued the company at $1B, as it looks to refocus on its core business.
Promising technology
👾 AI Raido. Futuri has launched RadioGPT, the world's first-ever radio platform powered by artificial intelligence. RadioGPT uses Futuri's TopicPulse technology to scan online news sources and social media to identify topics and trends in local markets. The platform then creates scripts for radio broadcasts — which are delivered on air by AI-generated personalities — using the same GPT-3 technology implemented by ChatGPT. Futuri's technology can automate other processes as well, including creating website blogs, social media posts, short-form videos, and converting on-air content into podcasts.
👾 One more ChatGPT. A collaboration between LAION, Ontocord, and Together announced OpenChatKit - it’s a ChatGPT-like dialogue language model that is fully open-sourced, with full access to code, model weights, and training data. The released OpenChatKit model can perform natural-language reasoning tasks, answer questions about documents with retrieval, and browse the web much like BingChat. The model has 20 billion parameters and is trained on 43 million instructions with 100% carbon negative compute. The release also comes with fine-tuning guides that allow users to easily fine-tune the model for their own applications. It’s unlikely that OpenChatKit performs as well as ChatGPT or BingChat, given that it is only 20 billion parameters big, but for many applications, smaller models are just fine.
Insightful data
A core of the VC labor market. Last year, junior and mid-level positions dominated the VC hiring market globally, though that also reflects that many partner roles aren’t advertised. A scroll down LinkedIn reveals the trend is continuing in Europe; as of Thursday, approximately 1,000 jobs for entry-level VC roles are being advertised on the platform from top firms such as Atlantic Labs, Point Nine, and Speedinvest.
