Yes, Sam Altman's thing and more
🗞 In the Know
The one everyone knows – OpenAI’s Board pushes out Sam Altman, its high-profile CEO. That’s a portion of some shocking news. In a continuing saga, Microsoft already announced it hired Sam Altman to lead a new advanced AI research team, while the Open AI interim CEO position will be taken by ex-Twitch boss – Emmett Shear.
Bloomberg is reporting that Starlink may spin off from SpaceX and go public as soon as next year, when it could have a whopping $10B in sales.
Amazon is cutting hundreds of Alexa employees, in part due, some say, to the rise of much more capable conversational AI platforms such as ChatGPT. The Alexa voice assistant powers millions of Echo smart speakers and other devices in homes, but Amazon has struggled to broaden the utility of the software beyond relatively basic tasks like checking the weather and playing music.
The percentage of TikTok users who say they get their news from the platform has hit 43%, almost double 2020's figure.
Wise pre-tax profits quadrupled for H1 2023. Money transfer firm Wise has reported a stellar set of results, achieving pre-tax profits of £194.3M for H1 2023, up 280% year-on-year. Wise reported revenue of £498.2M, up 25% year-on-year as active customers increased by over 30%.
What all VCs desire to hear
🏁 VentureVista
Solvimon, a startup that helps businesses implement different pricing methods, such as usage-based pricing, raised a $9.6M round. Northzone was the deal lead.
Co-founded by ex-Adyen VPs Kim Verkooij (CEO) and Etienne Gerts (CTO), a platform designed for medium to large businesses. Solvimon simplifies the implementation of contemporary pricing strategies, including 'usage-based' models where customers pay based on consumption. It also supports hybrid pricing structures, blending usage-based systems with conventional user-based subscription models.Martian, a startup that has designed a tool that lets users automatically switch to the best LLM for a particular job, raised a $9M round from investors including NEA, Prosus Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and General Catalyst.
Martian’s first product is a “model router,” a tool that takes in a prompt intended for a large language model — say GPT-4 — and automatically routes it to the “best” LLM, TechCrunch reports. By default, the model router chooses the LLM with the best uptime, skillset (e.g., math problem solving), and cost-to-performance ratio for the prompt in question.
Aikido Security, a startup whose mission is to help SaaS companies identify critical security breaches and reduce false positives, raised a $5.4M seed round. Notion Capital and Connect Ventures were the co-leads, with Precede Fund also anteing up.
The platform scans the source code and often a wide variety of cloud components involved in SaaS organization operations and ranks vulnerabilities by severity, ensuring critical issues are addressed first and separating them from false positives.Baton, a startup that helps musicians keep track of how their songs are reused or repurposed without their knowledge, raised a $4.2M round led by Bitkraft Ventures, with Techstars, Dorm Room Fund, NYU's Innovation Venture Fund, the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship, Dark Arts, Franklin Templeton, and Harmonic Future also piling on.
Baton aims to provide musicians who have had their songs reused or repurposed without their knowledge with a way to always see what happens to their material, TechCrunch mentions. Whether it’s a finished song, a single sample, or a pack, Baton shows creators who individually have viewed their material, so they’re never in the dark during the collaborative process.HockeyStack, a startup that has built a go-to-market analytics platform for B2B companies, raised a $2.7M seed round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and 645 Ventures.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its product with predictive modeling, forecasting, and machine learning so B2B marketers can measure performance with greater accuracy and predict the future with more precision.
🔥 Exits:
Airbnb has bought GamePlanner.AI for almost $200M. Because it was operating in stealth, little is known about the startup, Fast Company reports. The company was co-founded and led by Adam Cheyer, who cofounded Siri, and Siamak Hodjat, who spearheaded the natural language processing team for Siri at Apple.
“What makes GamePlanner.AI so special is that they combine expertise in AI, design, and community,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in a statement last week. “AI will rapidly alter our world more than any other technology in our lifetime, but we need to ensure that it augments humanity in a positive way. Airbnb is one of the more humanistic companies in technology, and I believe that, together with Adam and his team, we can develop some of the best interfaces and practical applications for AI.”
The MAD Landscape of 2024 by Matt Turck.
💡Innovation Spotlight
Venmo adds a feature to help users manage group expenses. Venmo has launched a feature to make it easier to track, split, and manage multiple or ongoing expenses among groups like friends, family, and roommates. More than 80% of Americans say they've used P2P services for things like paying rent, household costs and travel expenses, according to a LendingTree study.
DeepMind and YouTube released Lyria, a gen-AI model for music, and Dream Track to build AI tunes. Google DeepMind has announced a new music generation model called Lyria that will work in conjunction with YouTube, and two new toolsets it’s describing as “experiments” built on Lyria: Dream Track lets you create music for YouTube Shorts, and Music AI is a set of tools that it says are aimed at helping with the creative process (for example, building a tune out of a snipped that a creator might hum). Alongside these, DeepMind said it’s adapting SynthID — used to mark AI images — to watermark AI music, too.
📈 Insightful Data
Business technology leaders are expecting their cloud spending to grow in 2024, an increase linked in part to the growth of new generative artificial intelligence services.
Gartner said that the global cloud market will reach $678.8B in 2024, a 20.4% increase from $563.6B this year. Cloud infrastructure, or the underlying platform that powers AI, software, and applications, is the segment expected to grow the most, at a rate of 26.6% next year, Gartner said.
Venturized is compiled and written by Ivan Taranenko, Associate at Roosh Ventures.
Roosh Ventures is a Kyiv-based entrepreneurs-led, generalist VC firm investing in Pre-seed to Series A across EU and US markets. Powered by Roosh.
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