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  • Tencent unveils a Deepseek competitor & General Atlantic, and KKR may acquire TikTok’s US.

Tencent unveils a Deepseek competitor & General Atlantic, and KKR may acquire TikTok’s US.

Venture Daily Digest - 24/03/2025

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Venture Daily Digest
March 24, 2025

Falling asleep too fast is a red flag. If you knock out in under 5 minutes, you’re probably sleep-deprived. Ideally, it should take 10-15 minutes, so if you’re out cold the second your head hits the pillow, your body is basically begging for rest.

📬 What’s in store:

  • Today’s Picks: VC LP decks, SaaS financial model, Jobs’ product tips, AI investor list, vanity metrics, 1000+ Euro VCs, Superhuman’s secret, vibe coding, Replit’s journey, AI agent map, paywall tips, legal docs, fast AI updates.

  • Tencent unveils a Deepseek competitor.

  • Claude’s new web search likely powered by Brave Search.

  • OpenAI study finds links between ChatGPT use and loneliness.

  • Meta earns revenue from Llama AI model hosting despite open-access claims.

  • General Atlantic, and KKR may acquire TikTok’s US.

  • Perplexity proposes buying TikTok, plans to open-source algorithm.

  • VC & Startup Jobs: VC & investors backed startup hiring for remote roles.

⏱️ Read Time: 3 minutes

DAILY PICKS

🗞️ What else is brewing

🤝 A MESSAGE FOR FOUNDERS…

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But don’t worry, We are here to help you to create a pitch deck into a storytelling book within 4-5 days that get investors attention.

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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS

💰 Startup funding updates

Vouchsafe, a London, UK-based provider of an identity verification platform, raised £1M in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) and supported by Biometric Ventures, Fuel Ventures, Seed X Liechtenstein, along with angel investor Andrew Chevis, CEO of CitizenCard.

Reactwise, a London, UK-based company developing software solutions for chemical reactions, raised £2.6M in pre-seed funding. The round was backed by Y Combinator, the UK government, and other venture capitalists and angel investors and included a competitive Innovate UK grant.

BuildOps, a Los Angeles, CA-based provider of a software platform built for modern commercial contractors, raised $127M in Series C funding. The round was led by Meritech Capital Partners with participation from BOND Capital and Schneider Electric’s SE Ventures, Fika Ventures, Next47, StepStone Group, Titanium Ventures, 01A, Founders Fund, B Capital, 137 Ventures, and Liquid2.

Browser Use, a Zurich-based AI infrastructure startup enabling agents to navigate the web more reliably, has raised a $17 million seed round. The round was led by Felicis with participation from Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Cardiac Dimensions, a Kirkland, WA-based company which specializes in minimally invasive treatments for heart failure and functional mitral regurgitation (FMR), raised $53M in Series A funding. The round was led by Ally Bridge Group, with participation from Claret Capital Partners, Cardiac Dimensions investors Hostplus, M.H. Carnegie, Horizon 3 Healthcare, Lumira Ventures, and a confidential strategic investor.

Pluralis Research, a Melbourne, Australia-based AI company developing open-source AI through decentralized training, raised $7.6M in Seed funding The round was led by USV and CoinFund with participation from Topology, Variant, Eden Block, Bodhi Ventures, and angel investors Balaji Srinivasan and Clem Delangue.

AtmoCooling, a Seattle, WA-based climate technology company providing large-scale seawater evaporative cooling to create sustainable agricultural and climate resilience hubs, raised $2.6M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Nucleus Capital and Revent Ventures, with participation from Marble, Unruly, Founders Factory Blue Action, Patrick Tilley, SwiftScale, Bronco Ventures, Hub71, and others.

Rerun, a Stockholm, Sweden-based company building a multimodal data stack for Physical AI, raised $17M in Seed funding. The round was led by Point Nine, with participation from Sunflower Capital and existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp. Angel investors including Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Oliver Cameron (CEO of Odyssey), Wes McKinney (creator of pandas, Apache Arrow and Ibis), Eric Jang (VP of AI at 1X) and Nicolas Dessaigne (General Partner at Y Combinator) also participated.

Dataminr, a NYC-based provider of a real-time AI platform for detecting events, risks and critical information from public data signals, raised $85M In funding. Backers included NightDragon and HSBC.

Inspiren, a NYC-based provider of AI-powered solutions for senior living, raised $35M in Series A funding. The round was led by Avenir with participation from Primary Venture Partners, Story Ventures, Third Prime and Studio VC.

Camber, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a cloud-based computing platform, raised $4M in Seed funding. The round was led by Base10 Partners. The raise followed the $1.5M pre-seed led by PearVC.

NEW VCs IN THE MARKET

🏦 Venture Capital updates

Ribbit Capital, a Palo Alto-based fintech-focused venture firm, is raising $500 million for a new fund, Ribbit Capital Y, according to an SEC filing. This follows its $800 million fundraise in 2023 for Ribbit Capital X. The firm, known for backing fintech giants like Nubank, Affirm, and Robinhood, has also invested in Indian startups like CRED, Groww, and PhonePe, as well as crypto firms including Coinbase and Uniswap.

KEY STORIES IN TECH

📜 Latest in tech

Microsoft is exploring a way to credit contributors to AI training data:

  • Microsoft is launching a research project, involving Jaron Lanier, to estimate how individual training examples influence generative AI outputs, aiming to enable data attribution and compensation.

  • The effort follows legal challenges from The New York Times and developers over alleged copyright violations, with Microsoft exploring "training-time provenance" to improve transparency and accountability.

  • While some companies like Bria, Adobe, and Shutterstock offer compensation models, Microsoft’s initiative may serve as a proof of concept or preemptive response to legal and regulatory scrutiny.

Claude’s new web search likely powered by Brave Search:

  • Anthropic’s Claude chatbot recently added web search functionality, and clues suggest Brave Search is the underlying search index powering it.

  • Indicators include “Brave Search” being added to Anthropic’s subprocessor list and the discovery of a “BraveSearchParams” tag in Claude’s search code.

  • Brave also powers Mistral’s Le Chat and joins other AI companies like OpenAI in forming strategic, though often undisclosed, search partnerships.

OpenAI study finds links between ChatGPT use and loneliness:

  • Research by OpenAI and MIT indicates that using ChatGPT for "personal conversations" may be linked to increased loneliness, especially among users who engage emotionally with the chatbot.

  • The negative impacts of these interactions are more pronounced in individuals with a strong tendency toward attachment and those who perceive the AI as a friend.

  • The findings were based on a Randomized Controlled Trial with 1,000 users and an analysis of 40 million interactions, highlighting a niche use case for emotional conversations with ChatGPT.

Tencent unveils a Deepseek competitor:

  • Tencent launched its new 'T1' reasoning model, which uses large-scale reinforcement learning similar to DeepSeek's R1 model, and outperformed it on the MMLU Pro benchmark.

  • The T1 model achieved 91.8 points in the C-Eval suite for Chinese language skills, matching DeepSeek-R1 and surpassing OpenAI's o1, which scored 87.8 in this evaluation.

  • Tencent's T1 offers competitive pricing, charging 1 yuan per million tokens for input and 4 yuan for output, matching DeepSeek-R1's rates during daytime hours.

Meta earns revenue from Llama AI model hosting despite open-access claims:

  • A newly unredacted court filing in Kadrey v. Meta reveals that Meta receives a share of revenue from companies that host and provide access to its open-source Llama AI models, contradicting previous public statements that selling access wasn’t part of its business model.

  • Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously acknowledged potential revenue-sharing deals with major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, noting Meta should earn a portion if others resell services based on Llama.

  • The lawsuit accuses Meta of training Llama on pirated e-books and “seeding” them via torrenting; meanwhile, Meta is ramping up AI investments, with 2025 CapEx projected at $60B–$80B, and is also considering a paid subscription tier for its Meta AI assistant.

LAST COFFEE SIP

☕Other news

General Atlantic, and KKR may acquire TikTok’s US:

  • A White House-led plan could see major U.S. investors in ByteDance, including Susquehanna, General Atlantic, and KKR, acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations to reduce Chinese ownership below 20%.

  • The proposal involves spinning off TikTok into a U.S. entity, with Oracle continuing to manage U.S. user data to address national security concerns.

  • President Trump, who delayed enforcement of a TikTok ban until April 5, said multiple investor groups are exploring deals, including one involving YouTuber Mr. Beast and another led by billionaire Frank McCourt.

Perplexity proposes buying TikTok, plans to open-source algorithm:

  • AI search startup Perplexity has proposed acquiring TikTok’s U.S. operations, pledging to rebuild its algorithm in American data centers with full transparency and open-source access.

  • The plan includes integrating Perplexity’s search capabilities, multilingual translation, video citations, and enhanced personalization using connected user data.

  • Perplexity faces strong competition from Oracle, Microsoft, and other investor groups, as the U.S. TikTok ban deadline looms on April 5.

HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES

💼 Today’s VC & startup job opportunities

  • Manager, Venture Investing - Capital One Venture | USA - Apply Here

  • Investment Manager - Wix Venture | USA - Apply Here

  • Investment Manager - Techstar | USA - Apply Here

  • Venture Capital Associate - Connecticut Innovations | USA - Apply Here

  • Venture Analyst (Internship) Synapto Venture | Singapore - Apply Here

  • Research Intern Abyro Capital | India - Apply Here

  • Venture Partner - Node VC | Remote - Apply Here

  • Associate - Crescent | UAE - Apply Here

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