Venturized. October 24th, 2022
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Interesting news
📢 Uber has launched its global advertising unit intending to create a $1B business within the next two years by displaying promotions within its apps, on top of cars and the back of seats. The division is being led by former Amazon advertising executive Mark Grether.
📢 Meta said that it would sell Giphy, the online repository for video clips of pets, facial expressions, and other animated GIFs, a major defeat for the social media giant in a long-running dispute with British antitrust regulators. It is the first time Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has been forced by regulators to sell a part of its business.
📢 If the Twitter deal goes through, Elon Musk will have absolute control over Twitter, per a shareholders’ agreement prepared by Musk’s lawyers. The document reportedly shows that Musk will have “sole discretion” to decide whether to pursue a sale of the company, an IPO, or some other refinancing transaction. He will also have “exclusive authority” to appoint and remove board members.
📢 Cancer vaccines could be accessible to patients within the next decade, the husband and wife team behind one of the most successful Covid jabs has said. German couple Professors Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci – who co-founded BioNTech in Germany in 2008 – say they are hesitant to say they can find a cure for cancer but that they have had "breakthroughs."
📢 Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz was asked at TechCrunch Disrupt about the firm's big, recent check to WeWork founder Adam Neumann, who is building up a residential real estate company with a community component. “I know there’s a lot of stuff written about Neumann and things we did, but we do our own research," said Dixon of the $350M check his firm reportedly provided to Neumann. "We just don’t rely on books and movies for our diligence. We do our own research, and we just came to a different conclusion on a lot of what happened."
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Landis, a startup that helps consumers qualify for mortgages, raised a $40M round led by GV, with Sequoia Capital, Arrive, Second Century Ventures, Operator Partners, Signia Ventures, and Team Builder Ventures also piling on. The company’s model is for their client to have a budget and work with real estate agents to find a home within that budget. Landis then buys the home in an all-cash offer on behalf of the client, who then rents the home from Landis. In July 2021 the company raised $165 million of funding in a mix of equity and debt.
🚀 Shardeum, a layer 1 blockchain co-founded by Nischal Shetty, a Bangalore-based co-founder of WazirX, India's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has raised $18.2M in a seed funding round from more than 50 investors, including Jane Street, Struck Crypto, and the Spartan Group. The company’s name goes from “sharding,” which generally refers to splitting a blockchain’s infrastructure into smaller pieces to improve scalability, a noted problem with the Ethereum blockchain, and to speed up transaction times and lower fees. Shardeum can scale infinitely, expanding transactions per second as demand increases, the founder said.
🚀 Spindl, a startup that has built an attribution platform for web3 projects, raised a $7M round. Dragonfly and Chapter One co-led the deal. Spindl “measures the funnel” of Discord posts, Reddit forums, ad impressions and other blue links that help people navigate the internet; it then pairs this data with on-chain behaviors such as buying, selling and trading to create profiles that help protocols understand where the traffic comes from.
🚀 Kudos, a startup whose free Chrome extension for a digital wallet that holds all of your cards and recommends the card that will provide the best rewards and benefits for each purchase, raised a $7M seed round led by Patron, with additional participation from QED Investors, SciFi VC, SV Angel, Precursor Ventures, Newtype Ventures, and Chingona Ventures. Tikue Anazodo and Ahmad Ismail started the company a few years ago after working together at Google and Affirm. Ismail was a product lead at both of those companies, while Anazodo, also previously a product lead for Affirm, was a product lead for Google Pay, leading the launch of its payment partnership with Shopify and scaling its launch to international markets and to over 300,000 merchants.
🚀 Noala, a London startup that has built a speech and language therapy platform for children, raised a $4M seed round led by LocalGlobe, with Cocoa Ventures also chipping in. In 2021 Noala started as an app that speech and language therapists could use to help run their clinics in the UK and US. Then a few months after launching it released its direct-to-consumer children’s therapy platform in the UK, combining digital activities with weekly sessions led by speech and language professionals. Its platform for children costs £30 a week — which Noala founder Emilie Spire says is about a third of the price of standard speech and language therapy for kids.
Exits:
🔥 Intel is eyeing a significantly lower valuation than previously expected in the IPO of its Mobileye self-driving car unit, according to the WSJ. Mobileye, which was originally expected to land a roughly $50B valuation, is now set to target one that is under $20B and sell a smaller number of shares than originally planned.
🔥 Elon Musk could spin Starlink off from SpaceX and carry out an IPO by 2025, tech analyst firm CCS Insight said in a report. CCS Insight said that Starlink would go public to “raise capital to expand its constellation of satellites” to meet growing demand for its services.
Promising technology
👾 Microsoft is building an AI text-to-image app, Microsoft Designer, that may eventually make it into its Office software. The company is only offering a limited web preview for now, but it plans to release it as a standalone app in the future. A similar app, called Image Creator, will be integrated into Bing.
These are all similar to DALL-E 2, the text-to-image model that started it all built, by OpenAI, in which Microsoft invested a billion dollars back in 2019. The company also has an exclusive license in using OpenAI’s GPT-3, but it’s unclear whether similar licenses apply to DALL-E 2.
👾 Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs have a 20-minute chat in AI-powered podcast. In an entirely AI-generated podcast, podcast.ai has created a full interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs.
Insightful data
According to Unity 2022 Multiplayer Report, more than half the global population (52%) play games, and of those gamers, 77% play multiplayer games.
Few more insights from the report:
Genres popularity: Of that multiplayer-focused audience 32% gamers choose either “Battle royale” genre, or “FPS” (First-person shooter).
Key factors while choosing new game: Two of top-3 factors most important for a player while choosing a new game are social features – the ability to chat with friends in-game and having friends already playing the game.
Monetization expectations: Puzzle, card games, MOBAs, and battle royales lead the way as most likely to have been free-to-play – genres often supported by in app purchases such as boosters, battlepasses, or cosmetic sales.
