Venturized. May 2nd, 2023
Epic lost in court to Apple, Microsoft is not allowed to acquire Activision, First Republic bank acquired, and more
Interesting news
📢 Apple has won its antitrust-focused appeals court battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games over its App Store policies, Techcrunch reports. The ruling is a major setback for Epic Games and other developers who hoped the ruling could set a precedent for further antitrust claims and require Apple to open iOS devices to third-party app stores and payment systems.
📢 British antitrust regulators dealt a major setback to Microsoft’s plans to acquire the video game giant Activision Blizzard for $69B, blocking the proposed deal and handing a notable win to government enforcers around the world who want to rein in Big Tech.
📢 Samsung bans using generative AI tools like ChatGPT after April’s internal data leak. A month after internal, sensitive data from Samsung was accidentally leaked to ChatGPT, Samsung is cracking down on the usage of ChatGPT. The electronics giant is planning a temporary block of the use of generative AI tools on company-owned devices, as well as non-company-owned devices running on internal networks.
📢 OpenAI is planning to launch a ChatGPT subscription product focused on businesses. “ChatGPT Business will follow our API’s data usage policies, which means that end users’ data won’t be used to train our models by default,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We plan to make ChatGPT Business available in the coming months.”
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Bobsled, a startup that is building a cross-cloud data-sharing platform, has raised a $17M Series A round co-led by Greycroft and Madrona Venture Group. This funding follows a $7M seed round led by .406 Ventures.
Bobsled believes that it can be a neural, third-party data-sharing platform that can allow businesses to connect their various data sources in a more native way. The service uses each platform’s sharing protocol and then connects the various sources and helps businesses prepare the datasets for querying them.
🚀 M3ter, a startup that helps businesses optimize their pricing strategies, raised a $14M Series A round led by Notion Capital and including previous investors Insight Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Kindred Capital.
M3ter came out of stealth a little over a year ago — a debut that coincided with the announcement of its seed round — and in that time, it has grown its business by 375%. Its customers and partners these days are typically technology businesses built around API calls, a natural fit for usage-based pricing models.
🚀 Ctrl, a startup that enables companies to update customer information, summarize calls, and fill out templates through uniting different CRM apps, raised a $9M round co-led by LocalGlobe and Earlybird, with Dig Ventures and Jibe Ventures also anteing up.
Ctrl integrates with CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot, works with tools such as G-Suite, Slack, and Jira, and ‘brings all work apps together’ by offering an interface that can provide CRM data and call notes, emails, and insights. It then lets teams update customer information, summarize calls, and fill out templates instantly, helping keep everyone aligned in real-time.
🚀 AirOps, a startup that helps business teams deploy task-specific AI tools within their existing workflows, raised a $7M seed round led by Wing VC; additional investors included Founder Collective, XFund, Village Global, Apollo Projects, and Lachy Groom.
AirOps Apps can be installed and configured in minutes, allowing non-technical teams to automate processes, extract data insights, generate personalized content, and perform natural language processing techniques such as text classification and sentiment analysis.
🚀 Ansa, a startup that builds digital wallet infrastructure for merchants, raised a $5.4M seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Other backers in the round included Box Group, Wischoff Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, The Fintech Fund, and Susa Ventures.
Ansa is building a “wallet-as-a-service,” or embedded customer balance to let any merchant launch a branded flexible payment instrument. The company claims that by using its API-first platform, a merchant can create a wallet “within weeks rather than quarters.”
Exits:
🔥 Oddity, the owner of the cosmetics and beauty products company Il Makiage, has acquired a biotech start-up, Revela, for a reported $76M. Revela specializes in discovering new molecules for the beauty and wellness industries.
🔥The collapse of First Republic Bank. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and California regulators, which announced the deal early on Monday morning, said they were simultaneously closing First Republic and selling off all $93.5B of its deposits and most of its assets to JPMorgan.
Promising technology
👾 Canva from Microsoft. Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, last week was launched in public preview with an expanded set of features. Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics, and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.
👾 AI video-to-video. AI startup Runway has launched its first mobile app on iOS, letting people use the company’s video-to-video generative AI model. Functionally, it works a lot like a style transfer tool (though, unlike style transfer, it generates entirely new videos as an output rather than applying filters). You can upload a video of someone cycling in the park, for example, and apply an aesthetic or theme.
Insightful data
Gen AI boosts worker productivity by 14%. Сustomer service workers at a Fortune 500 software firm who were given access to generative artificial intelligence tools became 14% more productive on average than those who were not, with the least-skilled workers reaping the most benefit.
Meme of the week
