Adam Neumann Ups His Bid For WeWork & EU Eyes Antitrust Probe into Microsoft-OpenAI Deal

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👋 Hey, Sahil here! Welcome to today's quick rundown in the Venture Daily Digest Newsletter. I've got the scoop on startup fundraising, fresh VC funds, and some cool tech – all in just 5 minutes! Today’s major updates include -

• Adam Neumann's Firm Flow Increases Bid to Over $500M to Repurchase WeWork.

• Lacework, once valued at $8.3 billion, is now in talks to be acquired by Wiz for $150-$200 million.

• Meta released two new AI models, Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B, claiming they outperform other open models on various benchmarks.

• The European Union is considering an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI.

• Featured Article : How to Not Ask VC’s for Money?

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STARTUP FUNDING UPDATES

Cape, a startup based out of Washington, D.C., is building a secure mobile network that aims to protect users' personal data by avoiding storing sensitive information like names, addresses, and Social Security numbers. The company raised $61 million co-led by A-Star and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). More Here

Screen Skinz, a Philadelphia-based startup, produces custom, patent-pending smartphone screen protectors that feature personalized logos or slogans visible when the screen is off. The company recently closed a $1.5 million seed round led by South Loop Ventures and Abo Ventures, with participation from Brent Montgomery (Wheelhouse Entertainment), Wayne Pfeffer and Brendan O'Donnel (former Apple execs), and Michelle Micone (ex-NFL and Hasbro). More Here

Neurenati Therapeutics, a Montreal, Québec, Canada-based biotech company dedicated to developing therapies for rare diseases, raised $1.38M in funding. Quebec Government made the investment via its Impulsion PME program. Angels participated in the second close. More Here

Magnus Metal, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based technology company which specializes in industrial, high volume digital casting for metal alloys, raised $74M in Series B funding. The round was led by Entrée Capital and Target Global with participation from Caterpillar Ventures, Tal Ventures, Deep Insight Ventures, Awz Ventures, Lumir Ventures, Discount Capital, Lip Ventures, Cresson Management, Next Gear Fund and Essentia Venture Capital. More Here

Metsera, a NYC-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, raised $290M in funding. The round was led by ARCH Venture Partners with participation from other healthcare investors including F-Prime Capital, GV, Mubadala Capital, Newpath Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and other undisclosed investors. More Here

GA Drilling, a Houston, TX-based company which specializes in deep geothermal energy, raised $15M in funding. Backers included Nabors, Christian Oldendorff’s new Family Office, alfa8, the previous CEO of private equity firm EQT, Thomas von Koch, newly established geothermal fund Underground Ventures, and Slovakia-based, Neulogy Ventures. More Here

Verne, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of high-density hydrogen storage systems, raised an undisclosed amount in funding. The round, which brought the total amount to $15.5M, was led by Trucks Venture Capital. More Here

SWTCH Energy, a Toronto, Canada-based company providing electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions for multi-tenant buildings across North America, raised $27.2M in Series B funding. The round was led by Blue Earth Capital with participation from Alantra’s Energy Transition Fund, Klima, Active Impact Investments and GIGA Investments Corp. More Here

Calzar, a San Francisco, CA-based company empowering software businesses to sell and grow revenue through cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, and GCP), raised $10M in Series A funding. The round was led by Ridge Ventures and Ensemble VC, with participation from Saurabh Gupta, Managing Partner at DST Global, and existing investors including The General Partnership and Twin Ventures. More Here

dataplor, a Manhattan Beach, CA-based provider of global location intelligence solutions, raised $10.6M in Series A funding. The round was led by Spark Capital with participation from Quest Venture Partners, Acronym Venture Capital, Circadian Ventures, Two Lanterns Venture Partners and APA Venture Partners. More Here

Allen Control Systems, an Austin, TX-based defense technology company, raised $12M in Seed funding. The round was led by Craft Ventures with participation from Forum Ventures and Rally Ventures. More Here

Cognivia, a Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium-based AI company dedicated to innovating pharmaceutical and biotech clinical research, raised €15.5M in funding. Backers included Vesalius Biocapital IV. More Here

Uniqus Consultech, a San Jose, Calif.-based tech-enabled global platform that offers ESG and Accounting & Reporting Consulting, raised $10m in Series B funding. The round was led by Nexus Ventures with participation from Sorin Investments. More Here

Pliant, a Berlin, Germany-based business-to-business (B2B) credit card platform that allows businesses to optimize their payment processes, raised over €18m in Series A extension financing. The round was led by PayPal Ventures. Existing investors SBI Investment, Motive Ventures, and Alstin Capital also participated. More Here

Qoala, a Jakarta, Indonesia-based omnichannel insurtech company, closed its $47m Series C funding. The round was led by PayPal Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from MUFG InnovationPartners, Ohana Holdings and existing investors Flourish Ventures, Eurazeo and AppWorks. More Here

DocsInBox, a Dubai, UAE-based international e-invoicing and procurement company, raised $500K in funding. More Here

Phlo, a Glasgow, UK-based provider of B2B digital pharmacy services, raised additional £9M in growth funding. The round was led by Par Equity. More Here

AgentSmyth, a NYC-based agent technology startup, raised $2.5M in Seed funding. Backers included Michael Rafferty, CEO of Rafferty Holdings and investor in fintech companies, and Craig Milias, former portfolio manager of Platte River Capital. More Here

ClaimScore, a Pompton Lakes, NJ-based provider of AI-based, real-time claim validation software, raised $3.15M in Seed funding. The round was led by ROC Venture Group. More Here

Outrun Therapeutics, a Dundee, Scotland, UK-based E3 ligase inhibitor and protein stabilisation developer, raised $10M in Seed funding. Backers included M Ventures and MP Healthcare Venture Management. More Here

LunaJoy Health, a St. Petersburg, FL-based women’s mental health company, raised $4.2M in funding. Backers included Y Combinator, FoundersX Fund, Goodwater Capital, Magic Fund, VentureSouq, Nurture Ventures, and NorthSouth Ventures. More Here

Kontakt.io, a NYC-based provider of an inpatient journey analytics platform, raised $47.5M in funding. The round was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. More Here

inGain, a Riga, Latvia-based fintech company, raised €650K in funding. Backers included Trind VC and Fiedler Capital, as well as from the Latvian Business Angels network and business angels. More Here

Sumday, a Burnie, Tasmania, Australia-based carbon accounting startup, closed a $5.3m seed funding round. The round was led by Sophie Purdom at Planeteer Capital with participation from existing and returning investors Blackbird, Wedgetail, Cameron Adams and Possible Ventures. More Here

Greeneye Technologies, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based AI-enabled precision spraying technology company, raised $20M in funding. The round was led by Deep Insight with participation from Syngenta Group Ventures, JVP, Orbia Ventures, Eyal Waldman, Iron Nation and Amol Deshpande. More Here

Zeko Labs, a San Francisco, CA-based blockchain company focused on developing decentralized finance and software solutions, raised $3M in funding. The round was led by UOB Venture Management, Signum Capital, and YBB Capital. More Here

Usual Labs, a Paris, France-based company developing Usual, an innovative protocol bridging the gap between traditional and decentralized finance through the USD0 stablecoin, raised $7M in funding. The round was led by IOSG Ventures and Kraken Ventures. More Here

VENTURE CAPITAL UPDATES

SpringTide Ventures, a six-year-old healthtech VC firm that focused on investments in health-focused software, hardware, and tech-enabled services, has raised a second fund in the amount of $65 million. More Here

Chevron's venture capital arm has unveiled a new $500 million fund focused on climate-friendly tech. It's the oil and gas company's biggest venture vehicle to date. More Here

FEATURED ARTICLE

How to Not Ask VC’s for Money?

When an investor asks you why you need to raise money, the worst thing you can reply with is that it’s to extend your runway.

Many founders make this mistake...

Remember - Investors care about growth and having a clear set of milestones you think you can hit. They see a lot of opportunities, and the most exciting ones are fires that are already growing that they can throw gasoline on top of.

This is similar to how your customer doesn’t care about your product, they care about the benefit or transformation your product provides for them.

Show them an opportunity that’s growing quickly but could grow faster with some help, rather than one that needs more money to survive a little longer in the hopes of striking gold.

The best way to pitch to investors when they ask, is to say something like -

"We need $3M to accomplish these 3 critical projects we have planned that will take us from X users/revenue to 5x in 18 months.

We need these 4 new positions to pull it off and we already have great candidates for each role that we're in active discussions with."

It's a small detail, but an important one to get right when you're looking investment for your startup.

STARTUP’S LATEST BUZZ

ACQUISITION & EXITS

Lacework, Cloud security startup which was valued at a lofty $8.3 billion post-money in its last $1.3 billion funding round in late 2021, is in talks to be acquired by fellow security firm Wiz for just $150-$200 million. The two companies have already signed a letter of intent, though the deal is not yet finalized. Despite the massive down round valuation, sources say there is little overlap between Lacework and Wiz's offerings, so it would likely be a tech, talent and customer acquisition play for Wiz. More Here

ceτi AI, a leader in decentralized artificial intelligence infrastructure, acquired Canadian company Big Energy Investments Inc., a firm specializing in strategic investment in high-performance computing infrastructure. More Here

Battery Ventures, a Boston, MA-based global, technology-focused investment firm, announced the acquisition of Labguru (BioData Inc.), a Cambridge, MA-based life-science laboratory-data platform, from Holtzbrinck Digital. More Here

LAYOFFS & BANKRUPTCY

Take-Two Interactive, the owner of Rockstar Games, is laying off around 600 employees, or 5% of its workforce, as part of cost-cutting measures. The company has also canceled several unannounced projects, resulting in a $140 million loss, and expects to save $165 million per year through these changes. More Here

STARTUPS & PEOPLE

WeWork Inc founder Adam Neumann has made a fresh push to buy back the shared office space provider, even as it seeks hundreds of millions of dollars to emerge from bankruptcy and avoid a sale. Neumann's real estate firm Flow is prepared to beat any other offer WeWork has received by 10%, with Neumann having submitted a bid of over $500 million last month. WeWork requires around $400 million in fresh funding to emerge viably, and aims to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy by May 31, having negotiated over $8 billion reduction in rent commitments from landlords. More Here

Serve Robotics, a sidewalk robot delivery company backed by Uber and Nvidia, went public on the Nasdaq via a reverse merger, raising around $40 million. It aims to scale its robot fleet from 100 to 2,000 by the end of 2024, targeting $60-$80 million in annual revenue. More Here

Elon Musk keeps falling further down on the list of world's richest as Tesla's stock continues to tank. And Mark Zuckerberg, has passed him to take over the third place spot. More Here

LATEST IN EMERGING TECH

Meta released two new AI models, Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B, claiming they outperform other open models on various benchmarks. The models were trained on a massive 15 trillion token dataset. Meta plans to release even larger multilingual and multimodal Llama 3 models in the future. More Here

The European Union is considering an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, raising concerns about potential distortion or restriction of competition within the EU market. The Commission is currently gathering evidence to determine if an official investigation should be initiated. More Here

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That’s It For Today! Will Meet You Tomorrow. Happy Weekend! 🥂

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