Venturized. May 22nd, 2023
OpenAI will be deployed to iOS, first acquisition of X Corp (Twitter's parent company), Google's tool to spot fake AI images, and many more.
Interesting news
📢 Last week, OpenAI announced the launch of an official iOS app that allows users to access its popular AI chatbot on the go, months after the App Store was filled with dubious, unofficial services. The new ChatGPT app will be free to use, free from ads, and will allow for voice input via Whisper, the company says, but will initially be limited to US users at launch.
📢 WhatsApp announced that it’s introducing a new “Chat Lock” feature designed to give users an additional layer of security for their most intimate conversations. The feature lets you “lock” a chat, which takes that thread out of the inbox and puts it behind its own folder that can only be accessed with your device password or biometric, like a fingerprint.
📢 The open-source AI boom. New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers and app developers can study, build on, and modify—are dropping like candy from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper versions of the best-in-class AI models created by the big firms that (almost) match them in performance—and they’re shared for free.
📢 Revolut hit by departures of CFO and UK banking chief. Revolut has lost its UK banking chief executive and group chief financial officer, the latest departures from the London-based fintech whose culture has drawn scrutiny from regulators even as it seeks a banking license in its home market.
📢 Apple has restricted the use of ChatGPT and other external AI tools for some employees as it develops its own similar technology, according to the WSJ.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Together, a startup that is developing open-source generative AI models and services to “help organizations incorporate AI into their production applications,” raised a $20M seed round led by Lux Capital, with Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, A Capital, Robot Ventures, Common Metal, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and SCB 10x also piling on.
Together is the brainchild of Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re and Percy Liang. Prakash previously founded the social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired by Apple, where he later became a senior director. Zhang is an associate professor of computer science at ETH Zurich, currently on sabbatical and leading research in “decentralized” AI. As for Re, he’s co-founded various startups, including SambaNova, which builds hardware and integrated systems for AI. And Liang, a computer science professor at Stanford, directs the university’s Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM).
🚀 Union.ai, a startup whose open-source tool helps teams automate their machine learning processes, raised a $19.1M Series A round. NEA and Nava Ventures co-led the deal.
At the core of Union is Flyte, an open-source tool for building production-grade workflow automation platforms with a focus on data, machine learning, and analytics stacks. The idea behind the platform was to build a single platform that teams can then use to create their ETL pipelines and analytics workflows, as well as their machine learning pipelines. And while there are other projects on the market that offer similar orchestration capabilities, the idea here is to build a tool that is specifically built for the needs of ML teams.
🚀 Stacklok, a startup that is building tools and services to help organizations secure their software supply chains, raised a $17.5M Series A round from Madrona and Accel.
Sigstore is part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). With software supply chain security being a priority across software ecosystems, a tool like Sigstore that helps developers sign and verify their own project and the libraries they use it’s become a core tool for building more secure software.
🚀 Deblock, a startup founded by four former execs from Revolut and Ledger, has quietly raised a €12M seed round from 20VC, Headline, Hoxton Ventures, Kima Ventures, and Kraken Ventures.
Deblock is building a non-custodial crypto wallet and off-ramping banking service, which allows people to access, store, deposit, exchange and cash out cryptocurrencies. Being non-custodial means that customers have full control over their crypto holdings; they hold a private "key" and control transactions themselves.
🚀 Orbital Witness, a six-year-old London startup that is developing software to automate the paperwork involved in property transactions, raised a $9.3M Series A round led by Parker89, with LocalGlobe, Outward VC, Seedcamp, Portfolio Ventures, and Realty Corp. also piling on.
Orbital Witness is building the technology that will automate and replace the legacy paperwork-heavy ‘diligence’ process that is the source of endless hold-ups, unplanned costs, uncertainty, and stress on property transactions.
Exits:
🔥 Elon Musk’s X Corp., the parent company of Twitter, has made its first acquisition: a tech talent recruiting service called Laskie, according to Bloomberg. It’s unclear how Musk plans to integrate Laskie into his holding company. As of Monday, its website displayed a message that “the Laskie platform is no longer available.”
🔥 Database software provider Snowflake has been in advanced talks to acquire Neeva, a search startup founded by former top Google ad tech executive Sridhar Ramaswamy, according to The Information. Buying Neeva could help Snowflake offer artificial intelligence software that helps companies search for information in internal documents and data.
Promising technology
👾 Google develops a tool to spot fake AI images. Users of Google's image search will now be able to see “additional context” alongside generated pictures, including details on when the image first appeared on Google and any related news stories. The tool, named About This Image, is intended to surface news stories about fake images that have been subsequently debunked.
👾 “Hear yourself” feature delivered by Apple. As part of its preview of iOS 17, Apple has announced a pair of new features called Live Speech and Personal Voice. First, users can type what they want to say and have it spoken out. Second, it is a way for people at risk of losing their ability to speak to create and save a voice that sounds like them.
Insightful data
A consistent media presence is not a must for top-level VCs.
90% of Midal List investors have a LinkedIn profile, but fewer than half post regularly on the platform.
Twitter is also used inconsistently by the Midas List cohort: almost half of the investors on the list were not active on Twitter, and the top 10 of the list were among the least active groups. 21 Midas investors post daily, 4 of whom are posting multiple times a day.
Meme of the week
