Microsoft's $7.1 Billion Investment For Data Center & Nvidia Releases Free LLMs That Match GPT-4

In partnership with

Support Us || Advertise || Build Your PitchDeck

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

• Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup once valued at $10 billion, raising about $100 million-$125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion.

• Microsoft plans to invest 6.69 billion euros ($7.16 billion) over the next 10 years to develop new data centers in Spain's Aragon region.

• Nvidia released Nemotron-4 340B, an open-source pipeline for generating synthetic data to train large language models (LLMs) perform better than GPT-4o.

• Indonesia has warned the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that it could face a shutdown.

• Activist investor Starboard Value has acquired a roughly $500 million stake in Autodesk.

• ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, will lay off 450 staff at its Indonesian unit.

• Featured Article : How To Grow Infrequent Products? - ICED Theory Framework.

If you find value in our content, Click here to support our work.

In Partnership With Deal Sheet

With Deal Sheet you get curated, actively investable startup opportunities sent once per week

Every week, Deal Sheet curates the best investment opportunities from the 50 most active Syndicate GPs we know. Then we send them to you in one email.

Learn more

Partnership With Us

Want to get your brand in front of thousands founders, investors, executives, and startup operators? For details on our sponsorships, fill up this quick form and we’ll get in touch.

Startup Funding Updates

Enveda Biosciences, a Boulder, CO-based biotechnology company using AI to translate nature into new medicines, raised a new financing round of $55m to add to its $119m combined Series B and B1. New investors Premji Invest, Lingotto Investment Fund, Microsoft, and The Nature Conservancy participated in the round alongside existing investors Kinnevik, True Ventures, FPV, Level Ventures, and Jazz Venture Partners. More Here

Roamless, a San Francisco, CA-based travel connectivity startup, raised $5m in seed funding. The round was led by Shorooq Partners, with participation from Revo Capital, Paribu Ventures, Finberg, and Deba Ventures. More Here

Radian Arc, a Perth, Australia-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider specializing in cloud gaming and artificial intelligence (AI), raised $9M in Series B funding. The round was led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with participation from AMD Ventures, Boston, and Saffelberg. More Here

Aepnus Technology, an Oakland, CA-based developer of an electrochemical platform to improve circularity and reduce emissions in battery supply chain chemicals, raised $8M in Seed funding. The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures with participation from Voyager Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Impact Science Ventures, Muus Climate Partners and Gravity Climate Fund. More Here

AccountsIQ, a Dublin, Ireland-based provider of a cloud-based accounting platform, raised €60M in Series C funding. Axiom Equity made the investment. More Here

InScope, a San Francisco, CA-based AI powered fintech startup, raised $4.3m in seed funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Vipul Ved Prakash, Jake Heller, Debbie Clifford, Justin Coulombe, and Nadia Asoyan. More Here

Echion Tecnologies, a Sawston, UK-based developer of niobium-based, fast-charging battery materials, raised £29M in Series B funding. The round was led by Volta Energy Technologies with participation from CBMM, BGF and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures. More Here

Nada, a Dallas, TX-based investment tech platform that bridges homeowners and investors through home equity, secured a seed extension funding of undisclosed amount. Backers included repeat investors LiveOak Ventures and 7BC Venture Capital. More Here

Leo Cancer Care, a Horley, UK-based company developing medical devices, raised an undisclosed amount in Series C funding. Backers included McLaren Health Care Corporation, Cone Health, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Macmillan Cancer Support and Aviko Radiopharmaceuticals. More Here

Flo, a Quebec City, Canada-based electric vehicle (EV) charging network operator and smart charging solutions provider, raised $136M in funding. The round was led by Export Development Canada (EDC). More Here

Alzheon, a Farmingham, MA-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, raised $100M in Series E funding. The round was led by Alerce Medical Technology Partners. More Here

InduPro, a Seattle, WA- and Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company developing novel therapeutics for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases, raised $85M in Series A funding. The round was led by The Column Group and Vida Ventures with participation from investors, including MRL Ventures Fund (the therapeutics-focused venture fund of Merck & Co, Inc.), Emerson Collective and Euclidean Capital. More Here

Venture Capital Updates

Index Venture, a global firm is looking to raise $1.5 billion for Index Ventures Growth VII, a fund that would back later-stage private companies, according to people familiar with the situation. That would be less than the amount Index collected in 2021 for its $2 billion sixth late-stage fund. More Here

Featured Article

How To Grow Infrequent Products?

Customers use your product or service at a certain frequency. While Slack and Facebook are daily products, TurboTax, Zillow, and Airbnb could be yearly products.

Growing such products that are infrequently used can be more difficult — it’s much harder to tap into habitual customer behavior and much easier to forget. When the users return for the next usage is often unpredictable.

I like this ICED theory framework by Vivek Kumar, which talks about helping products grow even if they are infrequently used. So sharing a quick summary with you:

1. I - Infrequency & impact on customer recall

Property-buying (Zillow) has a high degree of infrequency VS. travel (Expedia) has a lower degree of infrequency.

Customer’s ability to recall a product decreases over time.

2. C - Control over results & UX

TurboTax allows users to file taxes entirely within the product, providing a complete control VS. Indeed has little control over the job interview process and results (the most critical experience for job seekers).

The higher the degree of control, the easier to win customer loyalty.

3. E - Engagement: as determined by 3 things:

1.Complexity: the “perceived effort” to use a product

Paying a bill is simple VS. setting up a financial investment plan is more complex.

2. Touch: single vs. constant

Wearing a shiny pair of shoes from Stitch Fix every time is a constant touch (reminder) of the value of the product VS. Looking up reviews from Tripadvisor is a single touch.

3. Predictability of Retention

Filing for taxes is predictable VS. booking hotels and flights are somewhat predicable VS. looking to hire or get hired is less predicable.

4. D - Distinctiveness & impact on recallability

Airbnb has a whooping 67% direct traffic, because people remember its distinct value prop VS. apps rely primarily on search engines and paid ads to grow are not distinctive.

The goal is to move the ICED dimensions from left to right. (Check out the attached document.)

Read detailed article in our Venture Curator newsletter.

Startup’s Latest Buzz

Acquisition & Going Public

Stake, a NYC-based loyalty company for the rental economy, acquired Circa, a NYC-based rent payments company, for $9.5M in cash and stock. More Here

Activist investor Starboard Value has acquired a roughly $500 million stake in Autodesk and is pushing for changes, including improved margins, board changes, and better handling of a recent accounting probe that impacted the stock. More Here

NetSPI, a Minneapolis, MN-based provider of security solutions, acquired Hubble Technology Inc., a Northern Virginia-based provider of a cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) and cybersecurity posture management solution. More Here

Tempus, the genomic testing and data analysis company founded by Eric Lefkofsky, went public on Friday, raising $411 million at a $6 billion valuation despite being unprofitable with a $290 million net loss in 2023. Positioning itself as an AI company by aiming to embed generative AI into its diagnostics tools, Lefkofsky remains the largest shareholder with 30.1% ownership and expects Tempus to be cash flow and EBITDA positive by 2025 as operating losses have shrunk. More Here

Layoffs & Bankruptcy

ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, will lay off 450 staff at its Indonesian unit following its acquisition of a majority stake in local e-commerce firm Tokopedia from GoTo group. The layoffs are a result of combining ByteDance's TikTok operation with Tokopedia. More Here

Startups & People

Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup once valued at $10 billion in 2019, is finalizing a fresh fundraise of about $100 million to $125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion. The struggling startup, unable to raise from institutional investors, has been aggressively pitching high-net-worth individuals and has shelved its IPO plans. More Here

New York Attorney General Letitia James recovered $50 million from Gemini Trust to repay investors defrauded in its Gemini Earn program. Gemini agreed to provide full recoveries to over 230,000 Earn investors and a ban on operating crypto lending programs in New York. This payout is in addition to James' $2 billion settlement with crypto lender Genesis Global Capital, which was tied to the Gemini Earn program. More Here

Indonesia has warned the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that it could face a shutdown if it fails to comply with regulations prohibiting adult content. The country's communications minister, Budi Arie Setiadi, stated that a warning letter has been sent to X regarding this issue, citing Indonesia's strict laws against spreading pornographic material online. More Here

Latest In Emerging Tech

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman informed shareholders about the company's potential restructuring plans. One option under consideration is transitioning to a for-profit benefit corporation, similar to rivals like Anthropic and xAI. However, the discussions are ongoing, and OpenAI affirmed that the nonprofit entity remains central to its mission and will continue to operate. More Here

Microsoft plans to invest 6.69 billion euros ($7.16 billion) over the next 10 years to develop new data centers in Spain's Aragon region, following its competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS) in establishing a cloud computing hub in the area. More Here

Nvidia released Nemotron-4 340B, an open-source pipeline for generating synthetic data to train large language models (LLMs). It includes a base model trained on 9 trillion tokens, an instruction model, and a reward model. The Instruct model performs comparably or better than GPT-4o and GPT-4-1106 in benchmarks. Nvidia aims to drive GPU demand by enabling developers to train domain-specific LLMs using the synthetic data. More Here

Apple recently unveiled its new "Apple Intelligence" icon, a circular shape made up of seven loops, joining the likes of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others who have struggled to create an icon that effectively communicates "AI" to users. Despite companies obsessing over multi-page design treatments, no one has managed to land on a visual concept that unambiguously represents AI's undefined potential - instead using vague, friendly shapes like blobs and candy-colored patterns to avoid appearing threatening or limiting. Until AI's true capabilities become more concrete and defined, we can expect these tech giants to continue using ambiguous, abstract icons that are purposefully open to interpretation rather than definitively conveying what AI is or isn't capable of.

Meta has paused plans to use public content from European users on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI systems, following pushback from regulators concerned about privacy violations under GDPR. More Here

Amazon is committing up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications, with $80 million funding its AWS Generative AI Accelerator program that provides compute credits and resources to help position AWS as an attractive cloud choice for AI startups. More Here

How Can I Help You?

• Build Your Pitch Deck : We write, design and model your pitch deck into a storyteller book within 4-5 days.

• Get Your MVP In 15 Days: Have an Idea? Turn your idea into Reality. Move fast before your competitors.

• Break Into VC: Join Our VC Enthusiast slack Community to learn, network and craft path to venture capital.

How’s Today’s Coffee?

Do you have any news to share about your Startup or VC fund?
Please email us.

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

Support Us || Advertise || Build Your PitchDeck