Venturized. March 6th, 2023
The post featuring Revolut's first year of profit, deficit of $8.9B in FTX, Neuralink failed FDA approval, immense gender gap in Web3 startups, and many more
Interesting news
📢 Revolut reported its first year of profit. Revenues at the neobank nearly tripled, from £220M in 2020 to £636M in 2021. That meant the bank swung to a £39M profit before tax — its first results in the green. Looking ahead to 2023, CFO Mikko Salovaara tells Sifted that the neobank has had “a pretty strong tailwind from the interest rate increases” and that it would continue to invest in global expansion. Revolut will launch in New Zealand in “the next couple of weeks”, he says, with expansion into India, Brazil, and Mexico coming later in the year.
📢 A community-driven AI research group, EleutherAI, is forming a nonprofit foundation. Funded by donations and grants from backers, including AI startups Hugging Face and Stability AI, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Lambda Labs, and Canva, the nonprofit plans to research issues around large language models along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Over the past 18 months, EleutherAI members have co-authored 28 academic papers, trained dozens of models, and released ten codebases.
📢 FTX says it has identified a deficit of $8.9B in customer funds that it can’t account for, the first time the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange has pinned down how much money has gone missing.
📢 U.S. regulators have rejected Elon Musk’s bid to test brain chips in humans, citing safety risks. In early 2022 when the FDA was asked for approval, the agency outlined dozens of issues the company must address before human testing. The agency’s major safety concerns involved the device’s lithium battery; the potential for the implant’s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue.
📢 Long read on the rise of Thrive Capital and Josh Kushner – how media-shy and hyper-ambitious Josh Kushner quietly built his VC empire.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Attio, a startup that has created what it calls a "next-gen" CRM platform, raised a $23.5M Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with previous investors Balderton Capital and Point Nine also contributing. Like most CRMs, Attio’s platform creates a database of contacts and companies that a business regularly interacts with. It allows users to sort, filter and analyze customer records as well as take notes and create workflows, automatically updating details like contact information. Attio has more than 2,000 customers in over 100 countries today.
🚀 Qwak, a startup whose platform helps companies build machine learning applications, raised a $12M Series A1 round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with additional participation from previous investors Leaders Fund, StageOne Ventures, and Amiti. “At Qwak, we believe in a pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to get a fully managed, end-to-end ML platform that streamlines your entire ML pipeline in a very economical way. With Qwak, you can eliminate the need for cross-functional collaboration and the headache of integrating multiple vendors, enabling you to focus on what matters most — building exceptional ML models,” said Co-Founder and CEO Alon Lev.
🚀 Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers, announced that it had raised $6M across two rounds, the most recent round led by Boldstart late last year. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion, or Google Docs. But they also have to check GitHub issues, Intercom messages, and more. “The issue we are trying to solve is an issue that every product manager faces. Product information is scattered across many different products,” Cycle founder and CEO Mehdi Boudoukhane said. In most cases, product management becomes a black box. Cycle has built integrations with popular startup products like HubSpot, Intercom, and Slack, and once everything is in Cycle – product teams can organize feedback so that everything related to one feature is grouped together.
🚀 Zarta, a startup whose platform allows creators to upload videos, set parameters for a free preview, and then charge viewers a small amount to unlock the whole video, raised a $5.7M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company believes that users should be able to preview content before paying for it and that creators know their content best and can decide when the paywall appears. Viewers can watch as many free previews as they want, but if they want to watch an entire video, they have to pay a small amount of money to unlock the full video. As part of the alpha testing, the cost to watch a full video is less than $1. Creators receive 75% of the payment, while Zarta keeps 25% to cover operational costs and processing fees.
🚀 Spade, a startup that cleans and enriches transaction data so that companies can get a full picture of their purchases, raised a $5.5M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with additional participation from Y Combinator, Gradient Ventures, and Dash Fund. Spade’s technology “cleans” the data and enriches it with a proprietary first-party dataset that matches transactions with actual merchant identities, logos, business hours, and spending history so companies can get a full picture of purchases, Co-Founder Oban MacTavish said. With that more enhanced data, Spade customers, which include card issuers, anti-fraud platforms, and neobanks, can do things like implement spending controls and improve fraud prevention models.
Exits:
🔥 Cisco announced that it intends to acquire Valtix, a two-year-old startup that helps companies secure their environments across multiple clouds and that had raised more than $26M from investors.
🔥 Japanese marketing tech firm Geniee, part of the SoftBank Group, acquired AdPushup-operator Zelto for $70M. The acquisition is a remarkable turnaround for Zelto, which faced near-death experiences twice in its journey. In 2014, the startup almost ran out of cash. Later, it scrambled with its product offerings after its marquee service struggled to make inroads, Zelto founder and chief executive Ankit Oberoi told TechCrunch
Promising technology
👾 Nvidia chip powering the race for AI - Powering many AI applications is a roughly $10,000 chip that’s become one of the most critical tools in the artificial intelligence industry: The Nvidia A100. The A100 has become the “workhorse” for artificial intelligence professionals, including a partial list of supercomputers using A100s. Nvidia takes up to 95% of the market for graphics processors that can be used for machine learning. The A100 is ideally suited for machine learning models that power tools like ChatGPT, Bing AI, or Stable Diffusion. Compared to other kinds of software, like serving a webpage, which uses processing power occasionally in bursts for microseconds, machine learning tasks can take up the whole computer’s processing power, sometimes for hours or days. This means companies that find themselves with a hit AI product often need to acquire more GPUs to handle peak periods or improve their models.
👾 OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT - OpenAI, being a business — albeit a capped-profit one — had to monetize ChatGPT somehow, lest investors get antsy. It took a step toward this with the launch of a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, in February. And it made a bigger move by introducing an API that’ll allow any business to build ChatGPT tech into their apps, websites, products, and services. ChatGPT API is powered by the same AI model behind OpenAI’s wildly popular ChatGPT, dubbed “gpt-3.5-turbo.” GPT-3.5 is the most powerful text-generating model OpenAI offers today through its API suite; the “turbo” moniker refers to an optimized, more responsive version of GPT-3.5 that OpenAI’s been quietly testing for ChatGPT. Priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, or about 750 words, the API can drive a range of experiences, including “non-chat” applications.
Insightful data
Web3 gender gap - Only 13% of Web3 founding teams include a woman, according to a new report by BCG X, the tech build and design unit of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and People of Crypto. Among founders, the gap is worse at 7%. Additionally, Web3 startups founded by men raise almost four times more capital than those founded by women.
Meme of the week
