Apple releases the “Best-Performing” Open-Source AI Models & a16z Led $175 Million In Defense Tech Compan

☕Hey there, Welcome to today's quick rundown in the Venture Daily Digest Newsletter. We've got the scoop on startup fundraising, VC funds, and some cool tech – all in just 5 minutes!

Top News

Apple's research team has released open DCLM models on Hugging Face, featuring 7 billion and 1.4 billion parameters, outperforming Mistral and approaching the performance of Llama 3 and other leading models. The larger 7B model achieved a 6.6 percentage point improvement on the MMLU benchmark compared to previous state-of-the-art models while using 40% less compute for training, matching closely with top models like Google's Gemma and Microsoft's Phi-3.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led a $175M Series B funding round for Saronic, an Austin-based defense tech company, valuing it at $1 billion.

Other Major News

• Join Free webinar featuring Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and Sparktoro sharing insights from his entrepreneurial journey. Sign Up For Free….

• Google explores Gemini AI smart glasses partnership with Ray-Ban's parent company. (Scroll To Tech News)

• Indian ed-tech giant Byju's faces total shutdown if insolvency proceeds, CEO says. (Scroll To Bankruptcy News)

• What Investors Look for in Your Startup's Financial Model During Fundraising? (Scroll To Featured Article)

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Startup Funding Updates

CultureAI, a London, UK-based provider of a human risk management platform, raised $10M in Series A funding. The round was led by Mercia Ventures and Smedvig Ventures, with participation Passion Capital and Senovo. More Here

Antheia, a Menlo Park, CA-based pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturer, raised $17M in funding. The funding included a non-dilutive two-year project agreement up to $11M through the BioMaP Consortium and additional investment from In-Q-Tel, Inc. (IQT), Echo Investment Capital (Echo), and several existing investors, including Viking Global Investors. More Here

GRO Biosciences, a Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company leveraging synthetic biology, raised $60.3M in Series B funding. The round, which brought the total amount to more than $90M, was led by Atlas Venture and Access Biotechnology. More Here

Aereo, a Bengaluru, India-based drone-based business intelligence provider, raised $15M in Series B funding. The round was led by 360 ONE Asset, with participation from StartupXseed Ventures and Navam Capital. More Here

Truvius, a Boston, MA-based company empowering systematic investing for digital assets, raised $3.2M in Funding. The round was led by Galaxy Ventures, with participation from New Form Capital, Chainview Capital, and strategic angel investors across traditional investment management and crypto trading firms. More Here

Rona Therapeutics, a Shanghai, China-based clinical stage platform company which specializes in nucleic acid drug research and development, raised $35M in Series A+ funding. The round was led by LongRiver Investments with participation from new and existing global investment funds. More Here

Juno, a San Diego, CA-based company dedicated to provide child disability insurance, raised $8.5M in Series funding. The round, which brought the total amount to $12.5M, was led by Spero Ventures with participation from Floating Point, Newark Ventures, and WVV Capital. More Here

Arrcus, a San Jose, CA-based hyperscale networking software company, raised $30M in funding. The round was led by Prosperity7 Ventures, NVIDIA, Lightspeed, Hitachi Ventures, Liberty Global, Clear Ventures, and General Catalyst. More Here

Venture Capital Updates

Menlo Ventures and Anthropic have partnered to launch the $100 million Anthology Fund, aimed at investing in early-stage AI companies. The initiative will provide funding starting at $100,000 and $25,000 in Anthropic model credits to selected startups. Menlo Ventures, which recently led a $750+ million funding round in Anthropic, sees this as an opportunity to identify promising AI startups and potentially back them in future rounds.

Featured Article

What Investors Look for in Your Startup's Financial Model During Fundraising?

When you learn about entrepreneurship in school you’re taught to have a clear, strong business plan and financial model when you start, and to use that as a way to communicate the path your business will take.

The real world is much messier. Any plan you had when you started gets changed quickly. Every day or even hour of your time that you devote to your startup needs to be spent getting it off the ground. The same is true for a financial model. Your projections will be wildly wrong.

Not only that, but the levers you have at your disposal in the model may not end up being what you think they’ll be — the entire business may change, and you likely don’t know enough yet at the pre-seed stage to be sure.

Investors all know this. They see tons of startups and have many first-hand data points showing that everything can change and often does.

What they don’t know is if YOU know that.

Investors are looking to de-risk the idea of investing in you. Startups are inherently so risky that they look for ways to think of your startup as less risky than others. One of those ways is to assess your founder mindset — how much do you “get” what being a founder will really be like?

The thinking there is that the more you “get” it the more you’ll be able to anticipate challenges and be emotionally steady when things get rocky.

This is a very common place where first-time founders and founders who don’t have a strong network fail to build trust with an investor. That might not be fair, but it’s true. Two of those signals for how well someone is ready to be a venture-backed founder are:

How well do they know how to prioritize their time? - Whether they realize everything will change from their “plan” or not. Presenting investors with detailed financial projections at the pre-seed stage fails both of those tests.

Download the Excel Sheet Template here.

Ok… So Why is a Financial Model Useful?

VCs who want to see a model use it as a proxy for understanding whether a founder can correctly break down the incentives and value levers in a problem space.

VCs want to trust that if the business needs to change, the founder will be able to quickly figure out how to evaluate new opportunities and position their product for success in a new market. It's just a different way of de-risking an investment opportunity.

The simple takeaway is that each investor is different in what traits they value and how they reach conviction. So Know your investor - talk to their backed founders, and read their content. Think about the type of investor you want as a partner based on their evaluation approach.

Previously we have shared this in our Venture Curator Newsletter.

Startup’s Latest Buzz

Acquisition & Going Public

Dechra Pharmaceuticals Limited, a Northwich, Cheshire, UK-based provider of a veterinary pharmaceuticals business, acquired Invetx Inc., a Boston, MA-base company which specializes in protein-based therapeutics for animal health, for up to $520M. More Here

Convergint, a Schaumburg, IL-based company which specializes in service-based systems integration, acquired Helinick, a Romania-based integrator that specializes in the design and implementation of electronic security, fire safety, communications, and building management systems. More Here

LifeLoop, a Denver, CO-based provider of a resident and staff experience solution for senior living, acquired Linked Senior, a Washington, DC-based evidence-based resident engagement platform supporting person-centered care. More Here

Layoffs & Bankruptcy

Byju's, once India's biggest startup, faces insolvency proceedings over a $19 million debt to the cricket board. CEO Raveendran warns of potential service shutdown and mass employee exits in a court filing. The ed-tech giant, valued at $22 billion at its peak, has suffered recent setbacks including job cuts and investor accusations of governance lapses. More Here

Startups & People

Alphabet is reportedly in talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23 billion, potentially marking Alphabet's largest acquisition to date. This deal could revitalize the startup M&A market and positively impact venture fundraising. It might also prompt VCs to start writing checks again, especially for early-stage companies. However, the deal's future remains uncertain, with potential antitrust challenges and the possibility it may not materialize at all.

Silicon Valley's presence was prominent at the Republican National Convention, with tech elites like David Sacks and Peter Thiel's protégés showing support for Trump. The tech industry's embrace of Trump is marked by contradictions, as his past policies haven't always aligned with tech interests. Some view this support as a strategic move against Biden's regulatory stance on tech. The alliance between Silicon Valley and Trump appears to be an imperfect yet potentially lucrative match, requiring both sides to overlook certain ideological differences.

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Latest In Emerging Tech

A recent CrowdStrike outage affected around 8.5 million Windows devices globally, causing widespread disruption to critical services despite impacting less than 1% of Windows machines. Microsoft's David Weston revealed these numbers, noting the broad economic and societal impacts due to CrowdStrike's use by enterprises running critical services.

Google is in discussions with EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban, to develop AI-powered Gemini smart glasses and integrate their Gemini AI assistant. EssilorLuxottica is also collaborating with Meta on the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and Meta may acquire a minority stake in EssilorLuxottica, which could affect Google's plans. Google's Gemini smart glasses are expected to feature a microphone, speaker, and camera without displays, aligning with the prototypes shown at I/O 2024 for Project Astra.

Meta has been fined $220 million by Nigeria’s competition watchdog.The watchdog says that Meta violated upon local consumer protection and data privacy laws, reports Reuters. The company has 60 days to pay the fine, according to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s order.

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