Venturized. November 10th, 2022
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Interesting news
📢 OpenAI, the lab behind AI systems like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, launched a new program to provide early-stage AI startups with capital and access to OpenAI tech and resources. Called Converge, the cohort will be financed by the OpenAI Startup Fund. The $100M entrepreneurial tranche was announced last May and was backed by Microsoft and other partners.
📢 Amazon Prime is expanding - Prime now comes with a full music catalog of 100 million songs and ad-free podcasts. The changes follow Amazon’s move to raise the annual price of its Prime free shipping program earlier this year from $119 to $139, raising concerns that Prime membership is becoming too expensive
📢 Nvidia launched its own generative AI model. eDiffi model relies on an ensemble of expert denoisers specialized in denoising different intervals of the generative process (and the company says it is better than DALL-E)
📢 Tesla aims to start mass production of its Cybertruck at the end of 2023, two years after the initial target for the long-awaited pickup truck Chief Executive Elon Musk unveiled in 2019.
📢 Twitter is reportedly working on an OnlyFans-style feature that would allow creators to charge for video content, though some employees say it's a high risk, particularly given that, according to the Washington Post, the company "appears to be aiming to rush out the feature, referred to as Paywalled Video, with a target of one to two weeks before launch."
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Smartex, a Portugal-based startup that uses machine vision to identify fabric defects and make manufacturing processes more efficient, raised a $24.7M round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Build Collective (Tony Fadell's group), with additional capital provided by H&M Group, DCVC, HAX, Spider Capital, Momenta Ventures, Bombyx Capital Partners, and Fashion for Good. Smartex has developed machine-vision-driven software that makes fabric production more efficient by identifying defects, which primarily can be used to stop manufacturing if something is going wrong, preventing waste.
🚀 Loop, a startup founded by Uber alums using natural language processing and computer vision to digitize workflows and reconcile payments for freight bills, just disclosed to TechCrunch that it last year raised $6M in a seed round co-led by Susa Ventures and 8VC (Uber billionaires Garrett Camp and Ryan Graves also participated). The company separately raised $30M in Series A funding this year led by Founders Fund. The company’s technology “accommodates the lack of standardization and can extract data from a variety of document types and data sources to validate invoice accuracy, so that invoices and payments can be cleared in close to real-time,” or even to real time, depending on when the user wants to release their funds.
🚀 Rewind, a startup whose software records how a user interacts with his or her computer to create a searchable record aimed at helping remember things said in a meeting, for example, has raised $10M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company was founded by Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely. Siroker said that the startup “uses APIs to determine the specific app that is in focus at any given time” and then creates a timeline of that behavior. It also uses an API to allow deep linking to websites so people can open in Chrome directly from search results.
🚀 Courtyard, a startup that creates NFTs out of collectibles like rare sneakers to provide digital proof of ownership, raised a $7M seed round led by New Enterprise Associates, with Y Combinator, OpenSea Ventures, VaynerFund, Brink’s, and Cherry Ventures also pitching in. When a customer purchases a physical asset through Courtyard, they receive an NFT complete with a custom 3D rendering of the asset to display in the digital world. The corresponding physical asset gets authenticated, insured, and stored in a Brink's-operated vault.
🚀 AiPrise, a six-month-old KYC orchestration platform, has raised $2M in seed investment funding. The round was led by Y Combinator and Okta Ventures, with participation from Restive Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, TwentyTwo Ventures, and Wedbush Ventures. Already live in 56 countries around the world, AiPrise allows its customers to onboard users with local KYC methods following the compliance & data residency requirements of each country. The no-code solution cuts down time to launch in each new geography from months to just 4-5 days.
Exits:
🔥 Remix, a two-year-old startup developing an open-source web framework similar to Next.js, has been acquired by Shopify, the companies announced in a joint statement. Remix had raised $3 million in seed capital from OSS Capital and angel investors Naval Ravikant, Ram Shriram, and Sahil Lavingia.
🔥 Netflix has acquired Spry Fox, an independent gaming studio focused on cozy games, the streaming giant announced on Monday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The games studio is known for popular titles like “Triple Town,” “Alphabear” and “Cozy Grove.” Spry Fox is now Netflix’s sixth in-house games studio.
Promising technology
👾 A new AI built by Anthropic AI technical staffer Karina Nguyen and called Inter Alia acts as a search engine for fashion products. It can understand abstract asks — "outfit for when we colonize Mars," "crashing ocean waves" or "morning sunrise in Montana" — and more literal requests — "what to wear to Texas," "living on a ranch," or "busy Paris street outfit."
👾 New research demonstrated at Google’s AI event in New York City proposes the notion of letting robotic systems effectively write their own code. The concept is designed to save human developers the hassle of having to go in and reprogram things as new information arises. Read more here.
Insightful data
Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over. The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number.
