Venturized. May 10th, 2023
AI warnings, Slash's series A from NEA, new GitLab features, and many more
Interesting news
📢 ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ leaves Google and warns of danger Ahead. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe are key to their future. However, after leaving Google, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
📢 Apple and Google are teaming up to fight a stalking problem the tech industry created: people using AirTags and other Bluetooth devices to track people without their consent. In a rare moment of cooperation, Apple and Google said they had developed a specification that will help alert people to the fact they’re traveling with one of these devices, regardless of whether they use an iPhone or Android phone.
📢 Slack introduced SlackGPT, its own generative AI built on Slack’s platform, which developers can use to create AI-driven experiences. “For starters, Slack is going to bring AI natively into the user experience with SlackGPT to help customers work faster, communicate better, learn faster, etc. And an example of that is AI-powered conversation summaries and writing assistance for composition that’s going to be directly available in Slack,” Slack SVP of Product Rob Seaman mentioned.
📢 TikTok announced partnerships with big-name publishers, including NBCU, Condé Nast, DotDash Meredith, BuzzFeed, and others, in an effort to pull in more premium ad dollars. The new premium ad product, Pulse Premiere, would allow marketers, for the first time, to position their brand ads directly after TikTok’s publisher and media partners’ content in over a dozen categories, including lifestyle, sports, entertainment, education, and more. Publisher partners would receive a rev share as a result.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Slash, a San Francisco startup that has developed an online bank targeting young entrepreneurs, raised a $19M seed and Series A round led by NEA, with Menlo Ventures, Connect Ventures, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, and Global Founders Capital also contributing.
Slash offers something of a hybrid business/personal banking product that allows users to silo their personal and business funds but manage them from a single dashboard.
🚀 Pietra, a four-year-old New York startup that helps creators build out back ends for launching and scaling product lines, raised a $16 million Series A extension round led by M13, with Founders Fund, TQ Ventures, and Abstract Ventures also taking part.
It is difficult to run a profitable DTC business or e-commerce business competitively. The company guides customers through creating an e-commerce business, giving them access to over 1,000 suppliers for everything from sourcing to order fulfillment.
🚀 Airspeed, a San Francisco startup that helps to foster connections among employees via Slack, raised a $5M seed round co-led by Greylock and Venrock, with additional funds contributed by Salesforce Ventures and Next Play Ventures.
Airspeed enables teams to connect via the Slack app, which allows users to continuously learn about teammates, recognize each other, celebrate milestones, and discover what they have in common.
🚀 Openlayer, a San Francisco startup that creates tools for testing and verifying machine learning models, raised a $4.8M seed round led by Quiet Capital and including Picus Capital, YCombinator, Hack VC, Liquid2 Ventures, Mantis VC, Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger, and Instacart cofounder Max Mullen.
Though there are numerous existing software testing platforms available to developers, most of them are designed for deterministic systems in which a given input will produce an expected output. Openlayer enables teams to improve their models and datasets systematically before they’re shipped out.
🚀 Tristero, a San Francisco crypto startup that is creating software infrastructure to enable the creation of private trading markets or "dark pools," raised a $4.8M seed round. General Catalyst and Steel Perlot were the co-leads.
The company is set to debut a proof of concept to lower costs for cross-chain stablecoin transactions. It enables more efficient markets that put money back in the pockets of builders and investors by designing markets that take into account the invisible costs associated with large trades.
Exits:
🔥 Amazon acquired a small audio-focused AI firm called Snackable.AI in December to bolster user features for its podcasts, reports the New York Post. Mari Joller, the founder and CEO of Snackable, now serves as an AI and machine learning product leader* at Amazon.
🔥 Ten months after spending $2.1B to buy logistics firm Deliverr, mostly in cash, the Canadian e-commerce company Shopify is offloading its entire logistics operation to Flexport for a 13% stake in the company.
Promising technology
👾 GitLab's AI shield. Developer platform GitLab announced a new AI-driven security feature that uses a large language model to explain potential vulnerabilities to developers, with plans to expand this to resolve these vulnerabilities using AI automatically. The new “explain this vulnerability” feature will try to help teams find the best way to fix a vulnerability within the context of the code base.
👾 Ad generation from Amazon. Amazon is building a team to work on artificial intelligence tools that will generate photos and videos for merchants to use in advertising campaigns on its platform. Amazon is trying to build a broader ad business, including through selling spots on its free video-streaming service, Freevee.
Insightful data
The seed funding growth. Seed funding in Europe hit €444M in April, with the UK, France, and Germany again maintaining the podium spots. SaaS and healthtech remain at the top of the funding table for industries with €43M and €38M raised capital, while fintech (€19M funding) was knocked out of the third spot by energy (€34M funding).
Meme of the week
