VC Daily Digest - 15/09/2023

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📢 Top Venture Capital News

Former DCG, Blockchain Capital investors launch $20M early-stage fund at crypto advisory firm Reverie: After a couple years of dabbling in angel investments, crypto advisory firm Reverie is now bringing a bigger checkbook to bear. The firm is launching a flagship $20 million fund to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage crypto companies, its co-founder Larry Sukernik exclusively told TechCrunch. The fund, anchored by two U.S.-based institutional investors that Sukernik declined to name, follows two years of relatively smaller investments in about 40 companies, including decentralized exchange Osmosis, blockchain scaling-focused Sovereign Labs and Solana-focused crypto marketplace Orca. More Here

UK deep tech gets another boost with new $100M SCVC fund out of Bristol: Europe has far too few VCs created by former founders, or “operators” as the industry often likes to call them. Yes, Atomico has Niklas Zennström. Firstminute Capital has Brent Hoberman. More recently Plural was created by Taavet Hinrikus (ex-Wise), Sten Tamkivi (ex-Teleport) and Ian Hogarth (ex-Songkick). But that “operator-turned-VC” list quickly runs out across the European tech scene. But now that story switches to Bristol, England. More Here

The 7 best ways to lose money as an angel investor: Angels should have the same depth of understanding of the markets they invest in as the people who are working in the field, with fiduciary responsibilities to the people whose money they are investing. Angels have a broader set of reasons for investing, too: Maybe they want to help a friend out, or they care about a particular problem, or perhaps — as is sometimes the case — they are looking for an infinite pit to pour a not insignificant amount of money into without any chance of success at all. More Here

8 Latin American VCs share why they’re brimming with optimism about the region’s startups: It would be foolish to dismiss Latin America as a has-been after the past couple years of economic turmoil. Granted, the region is no longer minting unicorns at the pace it used to, but fewer SoftBank-backed high spenders in the region is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when there are so many cash-efficient startups willing to challenge incumbents. More often than not, Latin America’s most interesting disruptors tackle problems related to fintech. More Here

📢 Top Startups News

Armed with First Republic alums, Citizens Bank unveils new startup-focused private bank: When Silicon Valley Bank imploded in March, Sam Heshmati wasn’t naive enough to think that First Republic Bank — where he had worked for more than a decade and helped launch their startup practice — wouldn’t be affected. He recalls watching everything unfold at his former employer with both sadness and surprise. “When SVB went into receivership, it was a very sad day for all of us. I had spent eight years in total there. I knew a lot of people there, and just felt really, really bad,” Heshmati told TechCrunch in an interview. “Plus, SBV did a lot for the ecosystem.” More Here

Your B2B leads are going to waste: Right now there are possibly thousands upon thousands of leads sitting in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool and collecting dust. This is the reality for many business-to-business (B2B) startups as they focus on the next set of shiny leads that come through the pipeline. Your B2B leads will go to waste unless you begin to create lapsed buckets and develop a strategy to attack them head-on. At my own startup, we leave no stone unturned and make sure that each lead that comes through the pipeline, even if it arrived 300 days prior, is still being contacted. More Here

📢 Featured: Today’s Featured Tweet

Elon Musk: Advice For First-Time Founders

Recently we shared a tweet on - musk’s advice for the first time founders. At early stage, most of the founders forget to differentiate their product’s market which lead to failure of product because of not align strategies to the market. Have a Look! 👇

📢 Top AI News

Inside the Senate’s Private AI Meeting With Tech’s Billionaire Elites: US SENATORS ARE proving slow studies when it comes to the generative artificial intelligence tools that are poised to upend life as we know it. But they’ll be tested soon—and the rest of us through them—if their new private tutors are to be trusted. In a historic first, yesterday upwards of 60 senators sat like school children—not allowed to speak or even raise their hands—in a private briefing where some 20 Silicon Valley CEOs, ethicists, academics, and consumer advocates prophesied about AI’s potential to upend, heal, or even erase life as we knew it. More Here

Microsoft open sources EvoDiff, a novel protein-generating AI: Proteins, the natural molecules that carry out key cellular functions within the body, are the building blocks of all diseases. Characterizing proteins can reveal the mechanisms of a disease, including ways to slow it or potentially reverse it, while creating proteins can lead to entirely new classes of drugs and therapeutics. But the current process for designing proteins in the lab is costly — both from a computational and human resource standpoint. It entails coming up with a protein structure that could plausibly perform a specific task inside the body. More Here

OpenAI to open its first EU office as it readies for regulatory hurdles: OpenAI is set to open its first office in the European Union (EU) and make several strategic hires, as the company prepares for regulatory headwinds. The ChatGPT-maker says that it plans to open its third office, after San Francisco and London, which it announced in June, in Ireland, which has emerged as almost a second home for countless U.S. tech companies seeking to foster closer ties with European lawmakers and customers — while paying a more favorable rate of tax, too. More Here

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📢 Top Startup’s Fundraising News

Databricks raises $500M more, boosting valuation to $43B despite late-stage gloom: Data analytics and AI software maker Databricks has raised a Series I round worth more than $500 million, earning a valuation of $43 billion. This round sticks out, particularly as many late-stage startups are seeing their valuations being slashed amid a wider funding slowdown. Databricks last raised $1.6 billion in August of 2021 at a post-money valuation of $38 billion, and seeing the company add $5 billion to its price tag is proof that wider trends do not affect everyone equally, if they do at all. More Here

Mecho Autotech raises $2.4M, ventures into wholesale spare parts distribution: Mecho Autotech, a startup offering automotive spare parts, vehicle repairs and maintenance services, has raised a $2.4 million pre-Series A round. The firm targets the Nigerian market, where 90% of the country’s more than 12 million registered cars (mainly used) require regular maintenance to avoid recurring breakdowns. Its primary business connects vehicle owners (individuals and fleet owners) with workshops that handle vehicle repairs and maintenance. More Here

Stealth startup Favs raises ~$1M for its close-friends-only social network: Over the years, social media has moved further and further away from its original value proposition of being a network where you could keep up with close friends and family in a private space. Instead, today’s apps are entertainment giants, filled with creator content, multimedia and brand advertisements. A new social network, Favs, emerging from stealth next January, wants to bring social networking back to its roots by building an app that helps people maintain strong and meaningful connections with one another. More Here

Swan secures $40 million to bring embedded banking to Europe: For the past few years, everybody working in fintech has been talking about embedded finance. It’s supposed to be the next revolution in financial services — bringing financial services to other products and services so that these services are as seamless as possible for the end users. That’s why it’s interesting to see that Swan, a French startup working on embedded banking, has managed to raise a $40 million Series B funding round (€37 million). More Here

LastMile AI closes $10M seed round to ‘operationalize’ AI models: LastMile AI, a platform designed to help software engineers develop and integrate generative AI models into their apps, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. AME Cloud Ventures, Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, 10x Founders and Exceptional Capital also participated in the round, which LastMile co-founder and CEO Sarmad Qadri says will be put toward building out the startup’s products and services and expanding its seven-person team. More Here

Defense AI startup Helsing breaks the record for European AI, raising a $223M Series B: Helsing, a “Defense AI” startup backed by Spotify founder Daniel Ek which had previously raised €102.5 million, has today pulled in another €209 million ($223 million) in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst. Swedish heavy industry and defense group Saab is joining as a strategic investor, deepening what was previously an existing partnership. The investment could potentially make Helsing the largest European AI company and also the largest European defense tech unicorn. More Here

Pixis, an AI-powered full-stack marketing platform, raises $85M: Pixis, an AI-powered platform for brands to monitor and orchestrate their marketing campaigns, today announced that it raised $85 million in a Series C1 round led by Touring Capital with participation from Grupo Carso, General Atlantic, Celesta Capital and Chiratae Ventures. The funding brings Pixis’ total raised to $209 million, and comes at a time when marketers are showing an increasingly acute interest in the potential for AI to enhance their in-house ad efforts. More Here

Patronus AI conjures up an LLM evaluation tool for regulated industries raised $3M: It turns out that when you put together two AI experts, both of whom formerly worked at Meta researching responsible AI, magic happens. The founders of Patronus AI came together last March to build a solution to evaluate and test large language models with an eye towards regulated industries where there is little tolerance for errors. While making their product generally available, and also announcing a $3 million seed round. More Here

🗞️ Interesting Today’s Read On: Startups & Venture Capital

• 📪Hidden Trap Of Convertible Note and Liquidation Preference Multiples Read More

• 📜 Decoding Startup Valuations with the Venture Capital (VC) Valuation Method Read More

• 📪 The Game-Changing Clause For Entrepreneur. Read More

• 📑 Is the "1% Market Fallacy" Holding Your Startup Back? Read Here

• 📰 Why Your Startup Idea Isn’t Big Enough for Some VCs? Read More

• 📮Visualizing Funding Runway & Burn Rate Read More

• 🗃️ Decoding Term Sheet: Liquidation Preference | Participation & Non-Participation Rights Read Here

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✍️Written By Sahil R | Venture Crew Team

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