VC Daily Digest - 05/12/2023

📮Today’s Major News

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• Tech funds adopt private equity strategies in race to return cash to investors launching continuation funds.

• Mistral AI & CoreWeave combinedly raised >$1B.

• Spotify Lay Off 17% of staffs to focus on profitability & growth!

• Featured Article: 'You Can’t Raised Funding Without Using Old Sales-Marketing Funnel’

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💰 Massive Fundings Updates

CoreWeave, a provider of the GPU cloud computing that has become a critical part of generative AI, has closed a $642 million secondary sale led by Fidelity. This minority stake sale brought the company's valuation to $7 billion. Jane Street, JP Morgan, Zoom Ventures and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also participated. Chip giant Nvidia has provided the chips CoreWeave uses for its data centers. More Here

Mistral AI - French artificial intelligence startup - specializes in open-source software for chatbots and generative AI tools, leveraging the experience of its founders in working on large language models similar to those developed by OpenAI. It has raise about €450 million ($487 million) in its latest funding round. The round includes investments from prominent companies such as Nvidia and Salesforce, and is expected to value Mistral AI at around $2 billion, making it a strong competitor to OpenAI. The funding round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz. Mistral AI will receive over €325 million ($352 million) in equity from investors. More Here

AssemblyAI, a self-styled “applied AI” venture that researches, trains and deploys AI models for developers and product teams to integrate into their apps and services. Accel led a $50 million round in AssemblyAI with participation from former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block, GitHub ex-CEO Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross, Insight Partners and Y Combinator. AssemblyAI’s total capital raised now stands at $115 million. More Here

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC), a start-up based in the UK focused on quantum compute-as-a-service (QCaaS), announced a US$100 million funding round led the SBI Investment, a Japanese VC fund. New investors in the round have been confirmed in addition to existing investors, Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), Lansdowne Partners, and OTIF, acted by manager Oxford Investment Consultants (OIC). More Here

Gravel, Jakarta-based startup aims to change that by making it easier to find workers and other construction professionals. It has raised $14 million. Investors include New Enterprise Associate (NEA), Marvell Technology Group co-founder Weili Tai, Cadence Design System executive chairman Lip-Bu Tan, SMDV, East Ventures and other strategic investors. More Here

Velt, a US based startup aims to provide a toolkit that allows any developer to add collaborative features to their app in less than 30 minutes. The startup has raised $2.77 million in seed funding Investors in Velt’s seed round, include YC, Spider Capital, Amino Capital, First Row Partners and angel investors from Google, Stripe, SAP and others. More Here

Up Catalyst, A startup, based in Tallinn, Estonia make battery graphite from carbon dioxide. It has raised a €4 million seed round. The round was led by Extantia, with participation from Estonia’s state fund, SmartCap, and existing investors Sunly, Little Green Fund, Scottish Baltic Invest and UniTartu Ventures. More Here

Kahuna Workforce Solutions, a nine-year-old Houston startup that provides skills training for frontline workers in energy, manufacturing, and healthcare, raised a $21 million Series B round. Resolve Growth Partners led the transaction. More Here

ArmorCode, a cybersecurity platform that gathers vulnerability data from connected apps and software infrastructure, consolidating the data into a single location and standardizing it for analysis, has raised $40 million in a Series B round led by HighlandX with participation from NGP Capital, Ballistic Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Cervin. More Here

Culmination Bio, a 23-year-old company that licenses access to a data lake covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and biospecimen data, raised a $10 million round from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures. More Here

Joon, a four-year-old Seattle startup that conduct tele-therapy sessions with patients 13- to 24-years old who need help with issues such as anxiety, depression, disordered eating, sexual and gender identity, and academic problems, raised a $6 million round from previous investors PSL Ventures and Route 66 Ventures. More Here

🚀 Venture Capital Highlights

Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including New Enterprise Associates and Insight Partners, are establishing "continuation funds" to navigate the challenge of returning money to investors due to prolonged investment periods in tech start-ups. These secondary investment vehicles allow VCs to extend the timeline on assets in old funds, addressing liquidity issues and facilitating exits for limited partners. The move follows a funding surge in tech start-ups during the pandemic, causing many to stay private longer amid economic uncertainty. The use of continuation funds has become more prevalent, with secondary funds raising $64 billion in 2023 to acquire stakes in portfolio companies. More Here

Intuitive Surgical's venture capital arm, Intuitive Ventures, has closed its second fund, Fund II, with $150 million, aimed at supporting startups focused on advancing minimally invasive healthcare technologies. The fund will prioritize companies enhancing access to care, precision diagnostics, interventional technologies, and secure digital ecosystems for health data utilization. Additionally, leadership changes include Murielle Thinard McLane taking over as Managing Partner, succeeding Oliver Keown, who has founded a stealth startup, Cleo Surgical. More Here

Indian Angel Network's closed it's second fund called alpha fund with $42.6M funding to invest in Indian pre-seed startups. Through this fund they aims to invest in 100 early stage startups in manufacturing, hardware, agriculature, electtric vehivle, claen energy and others. More Here

📬 Featured: Today’s Featured Article

'You Can’t Raised Funding Without Using Old Sales-Marketing Funnel’

Fundraising is a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them.

As a founder, you need to understand that - “An investors job is to deploy capital and make a return. If you truly believe that you, your company and your products are exceptional and your company will be valuable then you’re actually doing them a FAVOR. Read More Here👇

💡 Startups Snap: The Latest Buzz

Meta's Instagram Threads is surpassing X (formerly Twitter) in new downloads, with a surge from 350,000 to 620,000 daily downloads since late November. Threads' growth is driven internationally, notably in India, while X's rebranding has led to a decline in new downloads, even as it retains a larger user base with over 500 million monthly active users compared to Threads' under 100 million. Despite X facing advertiser exits and uncertainties, it remains a platform where news frequently breaks, distinguishing itself from Threads. More Here

Genetic testing company 23andMe revealed a data breach affecting 6.9 million customers, with hackers accessing personal data and ancestry information. The breach impacted 5.5 million users who opted into the DNA Relatives feature, exposing names, birth years, DNA shared percentages, and more. The company initially disclosed the breach in October, attributing it to password reuse, and the compromised DNA Relatives feature magnified the number of affected individuals. More Here

Startup Acquisition

Allen Career Institute has acquired Doubtnut in a deal that values the young edtech at $10 million, for the once fast-growing learning app. Seven-year-old Doubtnut, whose learning app helps students solve math and science problems by taking photos of them, raised more than $52 million. In mid-2020, Indian edtech giant Byju’s attempted to acquire Doubtnut, valuing the young startup at as much as $150 million. More Here

Whoop, a Boston-based wearable tech unicorn, is making changes to its leadership team following its recent acquisition of local startup AnyQuestion. AnyQuestion, a portfolio company of Boston-based Pillar VC, is a social video app that lets members ask questions and get answers from experts in areas like photography, nutrition and physical therapy. More Here

Layoffs

Spotify's decision to lay off 17% of its staff stems from a desire to boost its price-sales ratio and garner more investor respect, despite positive financials. The company aims to enhance profitability through cost cuts, facing challenges in accelerating revenue growth and improving revenue quality in the highly competitive music streaming industry. The move reflects Spotify's strategic shift to optimize its economics and appeal to investors by prioritizing operating efficiencies. More Here

Milan-based creative app studio Bending Spoons has laid off the entire staff of Filmic, the maker of popular video and photo editing apps, following its acquisition in July. All 22 original Filmic team members left in November, with Bending Spoons integrating Filmic into its platform and forming a dedicated team for its development. Bending Spoons has a history of restructuring its acquisitions, as seen with the recent overhaul of Evernote's free tier and staff layoffs. More Here

Twilio, whose software enables developers to add voice, text, chat, video, and email into their applications, is cutting 5% of its headcount. More Here

People

Mark Zuckerberg is selling Meta stock for the first time in two years after the social media giant rapidly rebounded from a tumultuous 2022. The Meta co-founder’s trust as well as entities for his charitable and political giving unloaded about 682,000 shares worth almost $185 million in November through trading plans, with the latest disclosed. More Here

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🤖 The Latest In Emerging Tech: AI

Elon Musk told OpenAI to move faster right before he left the company in 2018: Elon Musk reportedly urged OpenAI to accelerate its progress before leaving the company in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with Tesla. Musk's call for speed met resistance from a researcher, leading to him calling the individual a "jackass," despite Musk advocating a cautious approach to AI innovation. Musk has since founded his AI startup, xAI, and introduced its Chat-GPT rival, Grok. More Here

Google Cloud's CEO, Thomas Kurian, envisions AI Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as the future, where partners transform businesses using generative AI. With a focus on AI life-cycle management, partners are shifting from traditional cloud spending discussions to solving business challenges, leading to substantial revenue growth and transformative outcomes for customers across various industries. Google Cloud plans to double its incentives for partners driving GenAI deployments, emphasizing the pivotal role of AI expertise in reshaping customer experiences and business processes. More Here

🗞️ Today’s Must Read On: Startup, Technology & VC

• Elad Gill On How To Identify Emerging Markets Read More (Startups)

• Don't Send All 'Your Data To Investors' Too Early In The Process: The Counter-Intuitive Fund-Raising Advice Read More (Startups & fundraising)

• Where Do The Great Startup Ideas Come From — Stripe & Airbnb Case? Read More (Startups )

• Early-stage Startup Valuations For Q3 of 2023 Read More (Venture Capital)

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✍️Written By Sahil R | Venture Crew Team

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