Venturized. November 23d, 2022
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Interesting news
📢 Twitter may be in big trouble when it comes to generating advertising revenue: GroupM, the world’s biggest ad company — and Twitter’s biggest spender — is reportedly telling its clients that buying ads on the platform is “high-risk,” according to Platformer and Digiday.
📢 Nike is opening an online store, and trading platform for virtual sneakers as management pumps investment into the metaverse. The world’s largest sportswear company will release its own goods on the .Swoosh platform, and users will be able to collect and show off their items on it.
📢 Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of Theranos, has officially been sentenced to 11.25 years in prison for fraud. The sentencing comes months after Holmes was found guilty on four of 11 counts related to defrauding investors. Theranos COO and Homles’ former boyfriend Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani is still awaiting his sentencing after being convicted on 12 out of 12 counts in his own trial.
📢 Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs in what would be the largest job cuts in the company’s history.
📢 MoMA is exhibiting the newest artist, who created an AI trained in 180,000 works, from Warhol to Pac-Man. The colossal installation—a stunning 24- by 24-foot digital display that fills the entire MoMA lobby — renders an infinite animated flow of images, each of them dreamed up as you watch by an AI model fed by the museum’s entire collection of artwork. Check it out here.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 MotherDuck, a San Francisco startup founded this year focused on commercializing open source packages using DuckDB, a lightweight database platform, raised a $35M Series A round at a $175M valuation. Andreessen Horowitz was the deal lead; Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, and previous investor Redpoint Ventures also participated. MotherDuck’s service, powered by DuckDB, allows practitioners to start answering questions from data faster than most existing tooling. It uses local computing resources in concert with the cloud, driving data analytics and other data-heavy workloads.
🚀 Speak, a startup that allows language learners to have open-ended conversations with an AI tutor while receiving feedback on pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary raised a $27M Series B round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram, and Founders Fund also pitching in. Speak was founded in 2016 by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, both of whom had an acute interest in AI from an early age. Hsu has a health background, having completed a neuroscience Ph.D. at Stanford before joining Zwick to co-launch Speak. Zwick came from the edtech industry — he sold his first startup, the flashcard app Flashcards+, to Chegg in 2013 after dropping out of Harvard.
🚀 EngFlow, a startup that says it helps its enterprise customers more efficiently build and test their source code, raised an $18M Series A round from Tiger Global, Firstminute Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. EngFlow describes itself as a “build acceleration company” that helps its enterprise customers build and test their source code more efficiently, with support for Bazel, Chromium, and the Android Platform.
🚀 SigmaOS, a startup that has developed a browser designed to enhance productivity, raised a $4M seed round led by LocalGlobe, including Y Combinator, 7percent Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, Shine VC, TrueSight Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Venture Together. The browser looks different from Chrome and Safari as it stores tabs in a vertical format. When users set up SigmaOS, it will ask them to create a new workspace or choose a template workspace like writing, analytics, work chat, dev tools, and reading. Workspaces — which are like tab groups or tab folders — are at the core of SigmaOS’s experience.
🚀 Sematic, a startup whose mission is to provide development teams with the easiest way to prototype, automate, and activate end-to-end machine learning pipelines, raised a $3M seed round led by Race Capital, with Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Leonis Capital, and Pioneer Fund also chipping in. The Sematic founding team spent the last four years building ML Infrastructure for Cruise, the first robotaxi company to offer a commercial service, where the team bridged the gap between the complexity of large-scale cloud infrastructure and the expectations of a growing ML workforce.
Exits:
🔥 Evernote, the note-taking and task management app founded over 20 years ago, has been acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons. In a post on Evernote’s newsroom, Evernote CEO Ian Small said that Bending Spoons will take ownership of Evernote in a transaction expected to close in early 2023.
Promising technology
👾 Intel's new deepfake detector can spot a real or fake video based on blood flow in video pixels. Intel’s "FakeCatcher" detects deepfake media with a 96% accuracy rate in real-time by "assessing what makes us human – 'blood flow' in the pixels of a video," according to a press release. Intel says its technology can identify changes in our veins' color when blood circulates through the body. Signals of blood flow are then collected from the face and translated by algorithms to discern if a video is real or a deepfake.
👾 Notion is adding AI to automatically write blog posts, job descriptions, and poetry. The company is starting to test a new feature called Notion AI, which Notion CEO Ivan Zhao says could ultimately change the way people use the app — and do their jobs. With Notion AI, all the user has to do is tell the app what he or she wants (a blog post, a recruiting email template, a list of great business books to read), and the app actually creates the content right in front of the user’s eyes.
Insightful data
Tesla stock has dropped 51% since April 4, when Elon Musk revealed he had bought a stake in Twitter.
