Instagram Co-founder Joined Anthropic & Real Estate Tycoon, McCourt Bids For TikTok US

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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 -

• Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin participated in Polymarket's $70M funding round, led by Founders Fund.

• Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, has joined Anthropic as the company's first Chief Product Officer.

• Billionaire businessman and real estate mogul Frank McCourt putting together a consortium to purchase TikTok's U.S. business.

• Neuralink's initial human trial faced an issue with ultra-thin wires retracting from the subject's brain, affecting signal reading. The U.S. FDA, overseeing trial safety, was aware of this potential issue from animal testing.

• US Lawmakers seek $32 billion to keep American AI ahead of China

• Featured Article : Y-Combinator's Framework: How Much Traction Is Needed To Raise Funding?

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STARTUP FUNDING UPDATES

Fay, a San Francisco-based startup that connects registered dietitians with insurance providers and patients, has emerged from stealth after raising $25 million from General Catalyst, Forerunner Ventures, 1984, and the founders of Grow Therapy and Maven Clinic. More Here

Polymarket, a NYC-based prediction market, raised $70M in funding. The round was led by Founders Fund and existing investors 1confirmation and ParaFi, with participation from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Dragonfly and Eventbrite’s co-founder Kevin Hartz, as well as a $25M Series A led by General Catalyst, with participation from Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Polychain and other leading investors. More Here

Layer, a San Francisco-based startup, offers embedded accounting tools for platforms serving small and medium-sized businesses, aiming to replace legacy software like QuickBooks. The company has raised a $2.3 million pre-seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures, with participation from executives at Square, Plaid, Unit, and Check. More Here

Firmus, a Miami, FL-based company which specialises in preconstruction AI design review and risk analysis, raised an undisclosed amount in funding. The round was led by Navitas Capital with participation from Heartland Ventures, PiLabs, and Unorthodox Ventures. More Here

ULEMCo, a Liverpool, UK-based company that converts commercial vehicles to run on hydrogen fuel, raised over £5M in funding. The round was led by Mercia Ventures, which was investing from its own funds and the first Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF), and backed by existing investors Equity Gap, the North West Fund and Scottish Enterprise. More Here

Metaplane, a Boston, MA-based data observability platform, received an investment from Snowflake Ventures. This brought Metaplane’s total investment to just over $23M raised within the past 2 years, with additional investor participation from Khosla Ventures, Flybridge, Y Combinator, Stage 2 Capital, B37, and SNR. More Here

Orange Charger, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of EV charging solutions, launched $6.5m in seed funding. The round, which brought Orange’s total funds raised to $8.8m, was led by Munich Re Ventures and Climactic, with participation from Baukunst, Lincoln Properties Ventures, Crow Holdings, and Space Cadet Ventures. More Here

Haven, a NYC-based provider of enhanced accounting solutions, raised an undisclosed amount in Pre-Seed funding. Backers included Anthony Pompliano aka Pomp, Charlie Feng, Hari Raghavan, Eric Bahn, and more than 40 others. More Here

Alkira, a San Jose, CA-based company which on-demand network infrastructure as-a-service company, raised $100M in Series C funding. The round, which brought the total amount to $176M, was led by Tiger Global Management, a leading global investment firm, with participation from Dallas Venture Capital, Geodesic Capital and NextEquity Partners, existing investors, including, Kleiner Perkins, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Sequoia Capital. More Here

PayHOA, a Kentucky-based startup offering software for self-managed homeowner associations (HOAs), raised a $27.5 million Series A round led by Elephant Ventures. The profitable startup provides a SaaS platform acting as a central hub for HOA finances, maintenance, and community communication, serving over 652,000 users across 30-40% of self-managed HOAs. More Here

Weka, a Campbell, CA-based AI-native data platform company, raised $140M in Series E funding, at a $1.6M valuation. The round was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Generation Investment Management, NVIDIA, Atreides Management, 10D, Hitachi Ventures, Ibex Investors, Key1 Capital, Lumir Ventures, MoreTech Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures. More Here

Cover Genius, a NYC-based insurtech company for embedded protection, raised $80M in Series E funding. The round was led by Spark Capital with support from existing investors, including Dawn Capital, King River Capital and G Squared. More Here

cylib, an Aachen, Germany-based sustainable end-to-end battery recycling firm, raised €55M in Series A funding. The round was led by World Fund, and Porsche Ventures, with participation from Bosch Ventures, DeepTech & Climate Fonds, NRW.Venture, Vsquared Ventures, Speedinvest, 10x Founders and business angels. More Here

Relocalize, a Montreal, Quebec, Canada-based cleantech startup, raised $5.8M in Seed funding. Backers included Desjardins Capital, i4 Capital, Waterpoint Lane, and RGS Ice. More Here

AgriDex, a London, UK-based blockchain-based, software as a service (SaaS) solution for the agricultural industry, raised $5m in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Endeavour Ventures, with participation from African Crops Limited, Oldenburg Vineyards and Hank Oberoi. More Here

Arcium, a Bern, Switzerland-based on-chain confidential computing project, raised $5.5m in funding. The round, which brought total capital raised to $9m, was led by Greenfield Capital with participation from Coinbase, Heartcore Capital, Longhash VC, L2 Iterative Ventures, Staking Facilities, Smape Capital and Everstake, and angel investors Anatoly Yakovenko and Keone Han. More Here

Arch Labs, a Bitcoin-native application platform, raised $7m in seed funding. The round was led by Multicoin Capital with participation from OKX Ventures, Portal Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, CMS Holdings, and Tangent. More Here

enspired, a Vienna, Austria-based AI-based power trading company, secured €25.5m in Series B funding. The round was led by Zouk Capital with participation from PUSH VC, Banpu NEXT, Vopak Ventures, Presidio Ventures, Emerald Technology Ventures, Helen Ventures, 360 Capital, and EnBW New Ventures. More Here

Elevate K-12, a Chicago, IL-based company that provides synchronous LIVE teaching for K-12 classrooms in the United States, raised $25M in Growth financing from Trinity capital. More Here

Restaurant365, an Irvine, CA-based provider of a restaurant enterprise management platform, raised $175M in funding. The round was led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from current investors, including KKR and L Catterton. More Here

Incredible, a London, UK-based provider of an automated mobile platform to manage debt, raised $1M in Pre-Seed funding. Backers included Mark Ransford, Atomico angels Joe Cross (ex-Wise), Russell Smith (ex-Monzo) and Michael Tefula, A16z scout Keith Grose (ex-Plaid), and ex-TechCrunch journalist Steve O’Hear. Techstars and Angel Invest Ventures also invested. More Here

Elegen, a San Carlos, CA-based company which specialises in DNA synthesis and production, raised $35M in Series B funding. The round was led by Triatomic Capital with participation from GSK and John Ballantyne, co-founder of Aldevron. Current investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Bio + Health), KdT Ventures, 8VC, Digitalis Ventures, ACVC Partners, Alix Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and Agilent Technologies, also participated. More Here

Malted AI, an Edinburgh, Scotland, UK-based AI firm helping enterprises to build AI models, raised £6M in funding. The round was led by Hoxton Ventures and joined by Creator Fund and angel investors. More Here

Annuity.com, a NYC-based fintech and financial media company, raised $15.7M in Seed funding from undisclosed investors. More Here

Aerial, a Seattle, WA-based provider of an AI-empowered unstructured business data platform, raised $2M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Fuse, with participation from Pack Ventures. Previous investors included Madrona Venture Group’s Pioneer Fund. More Here

Nabla Bio, a Cambridge, MA-based company developing AI and wet-lab technologies, raised $26M in Series A funding. The round was led by Radical Ventures with participation from all existing investors, and strategic collaborations with AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb Company and Takeda. More Here

Chapter, a NYC-based medicare navigation platform, raised $50M in Series C funding. The round was led by XYZ Venture Capital with participation from existing investors Narya Capital, Addition, Susa Ventures, and Maverick Ventures. More Here

LanceDB is an open source database software created by the co-creator of Python's Pandas library, designed to support multimodal AI models that train on images, videos and text. The startup raised $8 million in seed funding led by CRV, Essence VC and Swift Ventures. More Here

VENTURE CAPITAL UPDATES

Shilling, A Portuguese venture firm has launched a €50 million "Opportunity Fund" to invest in growth-stage startups, both from its own portfolio and new companies. The fund aims to address the gap in funding for growth-stage startups in Portugal, which has a vibrant startup ecosystem but one of the lowest VC investment-to-GDP ratios in Europe. Over 90% of the €50 million target was raised at the first close, and the fund has already invested in Shilling portfolio company Coverflex. More Here

FEATURED ARTICLE

Circle’s Founder, Sid Yadav’s Views on Startup Valuation

Sid grew his startup Circle (an all-in-one community platform) from 0 to $20m+ ARR in 4 years. The last financing was at a $250m valuation a year ago and has nearly doubled all metrics in the past year. He shared that a lot of people often ask him how much Circle is worth today.

After talking to some of the world’s most successful founders and digesting countless material about startup valuations, here’s what Sid thinks about startup valuation:

“A valuation is a number an investor or acquirer comes up with based on analyzing your discounted future cashflows, while the price is a number buyers and sellers agree to act on.

Your price is not necessarily your valuation, since the former is influenced by market dynamics — demand and supply.

If you’re a private company, the valuation is what you want to pay attention to, since the only way for you to gauge the true price would be to have buyers and sellers transacting in the public market.

I like to put myself in the shoes of a potential investor or acquirer.

When they value Circle, they’ll typically look at:

• the size of our business today

• the growth rate

• our market size way out in the future

• our ability to serve that market with valuable products

• our ability to capture and sustain some of that value for ourselves

• macro trends with inflation and interest rates

It’s too late to change #1 and we don’t control #6, but #2-5 are completely in our control. No excuses. That’s the theory. Here’s a more concrete answer:

A quick heuristic investors use to value fast-growing SaaS companies is a multiple on ARR (annual recurring revenue).

Given the day, my valuation of Circle varies between 10x to 25x our ARR.

On most days in the past 12 months, it’s been closer to 25x — because we truly have a lot going for us compared to other startups on our scale. If a major new prospect investor were to evaluate us for a transaction, I’d typically offer to send them all 50 of my monthly investor updates to back this up.

Once in a blue moon, I get as pessimistic and tell myself that Circle is likely worth a lot less than 25x our ARR. But I also remind myself that it’s mostly in my control to act on this. It’s my fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, so we must.

If we aren’t moving fast enough, we can fix those bottlenecks today. If we’re scaling on the wrong foundations, we can pause and reflect on our fundamentals today. If we aren’t thinking big enough about our market opportunity, we can expand our imagination today.

If a key hire isn’t working out, we can make a performance plan for them today.

Valuations are slightly subjective with some objective grounding, entirely dynamic, and always in flux. They’re a guess at what reality could be, and the subject’s lens matters more than people think.

The key is to treat them as not just a number someone else decided for you, but an intuition you act on. And remember the quote: if you don’t deal with reality, reality will deal with you.” Read More Here

WHAT DO YOU THINK? - YESTERDAY’S POLL

STARTUP’S LATEST BUZZ

ACQUISITION & EXITS

Synechron, a NYC-based digital transformation consulting firm focused on financial services and technology organizations, acquired iGreenData, a Melbourne, Australia-based data-centric digital solutions company. More Here

EasyKnock, NYC-based home equity solutions platform, has acquired the assets of home equity investment firm HomePace, based in Park City, UT. More Here

LAYOFFS & BANKRUPTCY

Tesla plans to lay off an additional 601 employees in California as part of global job cuts initiated by CEO Elon Musk to slash 20% of the workforce. The latest round follows previous layoffs in California, Texas, and New York, totaling over 6,000 employees. These job cuts come amid falling sales and intense price competition faced by the electric vehicle maker. More Here

STARTUPS & PEOPLE

Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, has joined Anthropic as the company's first Chief Product Officer. As CPO, he will oversee product engineering, management, and design efforts for Anthropic's AI apps and services. Krieger aims to bring Anthropic's generative AI technology, Claude, to a wider audience and develop enterprise solutions. More Here

Billionaire businessman and real estate mogul Frank McCourt putting together a consortium to purchase TikTok's U.S. business, adding to the number of investors hoping to benefit from a new federal law that requires TikTok's China-based parent company to sell the popular platform or face a ban. More Here

Anton Peraire-Bueno, 24, and James Peraire-Bueno, 28, Two brothers who studied at one of the most prestigious universities in the US have been charged with stealing $25m (£20m) in cryptocurrency in 12 seconds. More Here

LATEST IN EMERGING TECH

Google paused its AI chatbot Gemini's ability to generate images of people in February after users complained of historical inaccuracies and racial biases. Despite promises from Google's leadership that a fix would arrive quickly, Gemini's image generation capabilities for people remain disabled months later.

The root issue lies in the biased datasets used to train image generators, which contain more images of white people and perpetuate negative stereotypes of other races and ethnicities. Google's attempts to correct these biases through hardcoding appear to have backfired, leaving the company struggling to find a reasonable middle ground. More Here

Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, aims to enable paralyzed individuals to control digital devices with their thoughts through brain implants. During the initial human trial, some ultra-thin wires in the implant retracted from the subject's brain, affecting brain signal reading. Neuralink adjusted the algorithm to regain monitoring ability, but redesigning wires may be needed if more retract. The U.S. FDA, overseeing trial safety, was aware of this potential issue from animal testing results. More Here

Microsoft has requested approximately 700 to 800 employees from its China-based cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence operations to consider relocating amidst escalating tensions between the U.S. and China. This move comes as part of Microsoft's response to the strained relations between the two countries. The request for relocation is aimed at employees in the AI team based in China. More Here

A bipartisan Senate working group has issued a "roadmap" recommending $32 billion yearly in federal AI funding across R&D, infrastructure, national security, and other areas. The broad proposals include supporting AI hardware/software development, launching "grand challenges," improving government AI readiness, and evaluating regulatory needs. With elections ahead, enacting substantial legislation appears unlikely in the near-term despite the AI industry's rapid pace. More Here

The top AI announcements from Google I/O: Google is using generative AI to organize entire Search results pages with AI-generated summaries, lists, and suggestions tailored to the query. The company previewed Gemini Live, which allows voice conversations with the Gemini chatbot that can understand and respond to a user's surroundings through their smartphone camera. Google also introduced Veo, a model that can generate 1080p videos up to a minute long from text prompts. Additionally, the Gemini AI will be integrated into Google Photos for natural language search, Gmail for email summarization and drafting, and Android for detecting scam calls and providing audio descriptions for accessibility. More Here

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That’s It For Today! Will Meet You Tomorrow. Happy Thursday!☕

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