Venturized. November 28th, 2022
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Interesting news
📢 Sifted discovered the primary reason Getir is acquiring Gorillas – and it’s company’s real estate. Why so? In the Netherlands, three cities — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht — have put a one-year ban on opening new dark stores. Meanwhile, France is currently attempting to make them harder to establish in city centers.
📢 Ethereum and Bitcoin are being shorted in record numbers. More institutional investors than ever are betting on the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies going down, according to a report from CoinShares. Short inflows represented 75% of the total inflows — the largest on record.
📢 Tiger Global Management marked down the value of its private funds by almost a quarter this year, contributing to a $42B decline in assets, one of the industry’s biggest ever. Stripe, Instacart, and now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX are among the companies Tiger Global marked down.
📢 Amazon plans to spend more than $1B a year to produce movies that it will release in theaters, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, the largest commitment to cinemas by an internet company. Cinema companies are happy - stocks of AMC, IMAX, and others jumped by 5-7% after the news.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Cobee, a startup that says its online platform automates and simplifies employee benefits management, has raised €40M in Series B funding co-led by Octopus Ventures and Notion Capital, with participation from previous backers Balderton Capital, Speedinvest, and Dila Capital. The company now operates in Spain and Portugal, having N26, Ogilvy, Booking, and Workday among clients, and plans to use the funding to enter other Spanish-speaking countries. Itxaso Del Palacio, Partner at Notion, noted: “What’s unique about Cobee, compared to other players in this space, is their flexible platform, capable of being adapted to different company types and different countries with little friction.”
🚀 Taktile, a software platform that says it allows businesses to build, run and evaluate automated decision flows quicker, has raised $20M in Series A funding co-led by Index Ventures and Tiger Global, bringing the startup’s total raised to $24.7M. Taktile offers a no-code interface that allows nontechnical employees to build, adjust and evaluate decision flows. One of the co-founders gave an example: Say a bank wanted to tweak its lending criteria by moving the minimum age to apply for an account from 25 to 21. Taktile would let the head of credit at the bank back-test the change and analyze its impact before actually implementing it.
🚀 Fizz, a social media platform exclusively available to college students, has raised $12M in Series A funding led by NEA with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Rocketship VC, Owl Ventures, Smash Ventures, and New Horizon. Fizz says it has reached 95% penetration among iPhone users (it doesn’t have an Android app yet) on campuses like Stanford, Dartmouth, Pepperdine, and Bethune-Cookman — but the download numbers might be a bit inflated since Fizz employs tactics like offering free donuts in exchange for downloads, which is standard among college-founded apps.
🚀 Diffblue, a startup based in Oxford, UK, that uses AI to automatically generate code to test software platforms, raised an $8M round led by Albion VC, with IP Group, Parkwalk, Hostplus, Oxford Technology, and Innovations EIS Fund also chipping in. The new capabilities in Diffblue Cover give enterprises running Java a unique way to leverage the business value of unit testing by allowing them to: autonomously write and maintain unit test suites for entire applications; automatically refactor Java code to improve testability; help development managers understand test coverage and code risk across their organization, and more.
🚀 Popup, a startup that is building a no-code platform for the creation, management, and hosting of online stores, raised a $3.5M pre-seed round led by Accel; it was joined by Seedcamp and 20VC. The company was founded by two former Shopify employees, and besides that, Holmes and Grassi had started a dropshipping company, Viceroy Group, and had bootstrapped that into an eight-figure company before starting Popup, so this isn’t their first foray into venture capital.
Exits:
🔥 Mark Cuban-backed streaming app Fireside, which offers podcasters and other creators a way to host interactive, live shows with audience engagement, will soon expand to the TV’s big screen. The company acquired the open streaming TV platform Stremium, allowing Fireside’s shows to become available to a range of connected TV devices, including Amazon Fire TV, Roku, smart TVs, and others.
Promising technology
👾 Binance launches a proof-of-reserves system for BTC holdings a couple of weeks after FTX collapse. The company is starting with BTC holdings using a Merkle tree to include all individual user accounts and generate a cryptographic seal. Thanks to the Merkle tree, individual users can use the root hash to check whether their accounts are included in the snapshot of user balances. Binance promises to release similar proof-of-reserve information for ETH, USDT, USDC, BUSD, and BNB later on.
👾 OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data. The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot to craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
Insightful data
Black Friday broke $9B in sales for the first time, with online sales of $9.12B, according to figures from Adobe Analytics. This is a record figure for the day, and up 2.3% on sales figures a year ago. Some more numbers for the day:
A record 48% of all e-commerce sales on Black Friday were made on smartphones (versus 44% in 2021)
BNPL orders shot up 78%, and they are up 81% by sales figures compared to the same day a week ago
