Venturized. May 15th, 2023
Oracle and Microsoft cloud agreement, Spotify abused by GenAI, new Twitter's CEO, Rewind.ai's hyped fundraising
Interesting news
📢 Uber has launched flight bookings to its UK app as part of the ride-booking giant’s push to become a travel “super app," allowing customers to book a complete journey across multiple forms of transport. The company last month announced its plans to integrate with services offering trains, buses, planes, and car rentals in the UK.
📢 Oracle and Microsoft recently discussed an unusual agreement to rent servers from each other if either company runs out of computing power for cloud customers that use large-scale artificial intelligence, according to The Information. A deal would help the two rival cloud providers meet surging demand for servers that can run AI software, which has caused a shortage.
📢 Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs from AI music start-up Boomy, ramping up policing of its platform amid complaints of fraud across streaming services.
📢 Elon Musk has found a new CEO for Twitter and announced she would be starting in about six weeks (later, it became known the position goes to a former NBCUniversal advertising veteran Linda Yaccarino). Musk also wrote he will “transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & [systems operations]."
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Rewind.ai, a startup cofounded by the co-founder and former CEO of Optimizely whose tech runs in the background, recording everything a user does, clicks on, or views, compressing it so the user can later search through their own history, has raised $12M in fresh funding led by NEA.
CEO Dan Siroker skipped the traditional fundraising process and tried something unorthodox. On April 14, he shared a link to an online form and asked investors to state “the highest amount you’re comfortable” paying between $200M and $1B. On May 9, Siroker told prospective investors in an email that NEA had committed $12M and would lead the round at a $350M valuation, or 4.5 times the $75M valuation Andreessen Horowitz agreed to in a funding round last year.
🚀 Cable, a startup whose platform provides automated assurance and risk assessment for banks and fintechs, raised an $11M Series A round co-led by Stage 2 Capital and Jump Capital, with CRV also contributing.
Cable’s platform provides automated assurance and risk assessment, complementary to many of the financial crime vendors. It enables banks and fintechs to monitor all of their accounts — not just a fraction as before — to know, in real-time, if they are compliant with regulations and if their failure controls are working as expected to combat breaches.
🚀 Essential AI, an AI startup founded by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, ex-Google researchers who authored the groundbreaking paper that paved the way for the generative AI boom, has raised $8M from Thrive Capital.
Essential AI aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system that has powered generative AI applications such as ChatGPT.
🚀 PermitFlow, which aims to streamline the construction permit application and management process for developers and general contractors, raised a $5.5M seed round. Initialized Capital was the deal lead.
PermitFlow was in beta testing in 2021 and 2022 before launching a little over a year ago. It now works with dozens of customers in California, Texas, and Florida and has supported permitting over $600M of project value and over 2,000 units of housing, from single-family homes to multifamily complexes.
🚀 Orby AI, a startup that seeks to help businesses identify repetitive work steps and automatically generate code that automates these tasks, raised a $4.5M seed round. The syndicate included Pear VC, NEA, and Wing VC.
The company offers an end-to-end “see, learn, and automate” experience. It works on user tasks, identifies repetitive work steps, and automatically generates code that automates these tasks. Plus, Orby continuously learns from human feedback, getting smarter over time with no coding involved.
Exits:
🔥 Oura, the maker of sleep-tracking wearables, is acquiring Proxy, a digital identity signal startup, in an all-equity deal valued at $165M. Proxy has been working in stealth mode on biometric systems that work with smartphones and wearables. Its digital identity signal technology, which is stored on and emitted from mobile devices, is intended to replace keys, cards, badges, or other apps.
🔥 Australian EdTech Go1 snaps up speed reading app Blinkist to expand in enterprise learning. The two platforms will continue to operate separately, but over time the plan is for more integration and cross-selling between the two, the companies said.
Promising technology
👾 LinkedIn AI. LinkedIn is experimenting with a new generative AI feature for job hunters. The company is testing a new feature that will generate brief, cover letter-like messages candidates can send to hiring managers on the platform. The feature is starting to roll out now for the site's premium subscribers.
👾 One more way to streamline coding. AI startup Hugging Face and ServiceNow Researcр (its R&D division) have released StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems along the lines of GitHub’s Copilot. StarCoder is licensed for royalty-free use by anyone and was trained in over 80 programming languages.
Insightful data
European VC is melting. In Q1 2023, $80B was invested in European startups, down 64% from 2022. Among them, late-stage companies took the hardest hit, with funding plummeting by 71% to $40B, while funding in breakout and seed stages fell 51% and 32% to $26B and $15B, respectively.
Meme of the week
