Venturized. March 27th, 2023

Epic's new epic motion-capture animation tech, Do Kwon's arrest, low-cost ChatGPT by Stanford, and more

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Mar 27, 2023

Interesting news

📢 Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs (the one behind $LUNA), has reportedly been arrested in Montenegro, according to a local government official. Kwon has been under investigation for 11 months since the Terra/LUNA collapse, which wiped out about $40B from the cryptocurrency market.

📢 Epic’s new motion-capture animation tech is on fire. Epic's upcoming MetaHuman facial animation tool looks set to revolutionize motion capture. In an impressive demonstration at a last week’s State of Unreal stage presentation, Epic showed off the new machine-learning-powered system, which needed just a few minutes to generate impressively real, uncanny-valley-leaping facial animation from a simple head-on video taken on an iPhone. Just have a look:

📢 In 2018, Elon Musk stepped down from the board of OpenAI, which he helped found (but there is more to say here). Semafor unleashed the secret that Musk "believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google" and that he proposed a solution of taking control over OpenAI. Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal, and Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation.

📢 Shares of the fintech company Block tumbled last week after the activist short seller Hindenburg Research released a report accusing the company of inflating its user numbers and facilitating fraudulent transactions. Hindenberg says in its report that former employees who were interviewed estimated that between 40% and 70% of accounts are “fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”

📢 Stanford copies the ChatGPT AI for less than $600. Stanford's Alpaca AI performs similarly to the astonishing ChatGPT on many tasks – but it's built on an open-source language model and costs less than $600 to train. The team took LLaMA 7B model up and running and asked GPT to take 175 human-written instruction/output pairs and start generating more in the same style and format. This was automated through one of OpenAI's helpfully provided APIs, and in a short time, the team had some 52,000 sample conversations to use in post-training of the LLaMA model. Generating this bulk training data cost less than $500.

📢 Intel Co-Founder and former Chairman Gordon Moore has passed away at the age of 94. Gordon Moore could claim credit for bringing laptop computers to hundreds of millions of people and embedding microprocessors into everything from bathroom scales, toasters, and toy fire engines to cellphones, cars, and jets.

Notable deals

Venture capital:

🚀 Hex, a startup developing a data analytics platform, raised a $28M round led by Sequoia Capital, and joined with Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Snowflake. Hex is a platform for collaborative data science and analytics, and its cloud-based data workspace makes it easy to connect to data, analyze data in a collaborative SQL and Python-powered notebook format, and share work as interactive data apps and stories. The company grew 4x in revenue last year and now has 450 paying customers, including Brex, Notion, Toast, and Chegg.

🚀 Coactive AI, a startup that applies AI to unstructured visual content, raised $14M in a combined seed and series A funding. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, SV Angel, AME Cloud Ventures, Cloud All Star Fund, Next Play Capital, and Exceptional Capital. Coactive is an application that helps data teams work with image and video data without requiring specialized machine-learning skills. It uses pre-trained models to give a rough understanding of visual content and a proprietary active learning system to develop more specialized visual concepts. These concepts are then exposed through standard SQL and API interfaces to power trend analysis, content moderation, search, and other core business functions.

🚀 Turnkey, a startup developing a platform to enable secure custody and trading of digital assets, raised a $7.5M seed round. Variant, Sequoia Capital, and Coinbase Ventures were the co-leads. Turnkey is aiming itself as a developer-first tool that allows users to "generate hundreds of wallets and sign thousands of transactions across any chain, all with flexible, programmable permissions to ensure you only sign what you want." Commenting on the deal, Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said: "We believe Turnkey is building the right foundational infrastructure that could help onboard the next million crypto developers.”

🚀 Tavus, a startup whose tech will give companies the ability to create unique videos tailored to a specific individual based entirely on a single initial recording, raised a $6.1M seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with additional funds provided by Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, and YC Continuity. The company created a platform allowing users to AI-generate multiple personalized videos – widely recognized as an incredibly time-consuming and repetitive process. With its product, Tavus now enters the competition with solutions like Synthesia and Hour One.

🚀 Beam, a startup whose platform is designed to make it easy for contractors to send invoices and pay bills online, raised a $4M seed round led by Accel, with Susa and Wischoff Ventures also participating. Built by an ex-Software Engineer at Stripe, Beam is focused on helping smaller and mid-sized general residential contractors save time — and ultimately money — by giving them a way to “streamline” payments, invoices, and receipts in one place.

Exits:

🔥 JPMorgan says it's acquiring Aumni, an investment analytics platform for private markets that had collectively raised $63M from 20 investors, according to Crunchbase. JPMorgan is paying around $230M for the startup. Founded in 2018 by Tony Lewis, a former corporate lawyer, Aumni is a data platform that helps users analyze and understand their holdings via a simple dashboard.

Promising technology

👾 Bard is here publicly. Google has launched Bard, the search giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Unlike Bing Chat, Bard does not look up search results — all the information it returns is generated by the model itself. But it is still designed to help users brainstorm and answer queries. Bard is built on top of a new version of LaMDA, Google’s flagship large language model, and for now, will act as a sidekick to Google Search, not a replacement.
👾 OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet. OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases. OpenAI launched plugins for ChatGPT, which extend the bot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web. A web-browsing plugin that allows ChatGPT to draw data from around the web to answer the various questions posed to it.

Insightful data

European crypto startups raised record levels of funding in 2022. European VC investment in crypto startups reached an all-time high of $5.7B in 2022, while global and US venture funding in the space contracted last year.

European companies accounted for 20% of total global early-stage crypto startup funding. While Europe holds its weight in early-stage company funding, US companies dominated funding rounds of $100M+.