VC Daily Digest

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📢 Top Venture Capital News

The pre-seed market is recovering, but investors increasingly have the upper hand: The early-stage investing market has been challenging for pre-seed startups in the past 18 months, but recent data from Carta suggests a recovery is underway. Pre-seed startups raised $972 million in Q2, a 17% increase from Q1, but the number of deals closed has declined for the fourth consecutive quarter. As the venture market cools, founders may find investor-friendly terms becoming more common, making it harder to negotiate clean term sheets or aggressive valuations. More Here

The startup landscape has shifted dramatically: Accelerators must adapt or fade away: In the last decade and a half, the VC accelerator industry has emerged as a key player amidst economic turbulence, fueled by a zero-interest landscape in 2020. The cost of starting a tech company has dropped by 99% since 2005, largely due to cloud technologies, no-code tools, and AI, and the rise of digital communities has shifted network effects from physical to digital spaces. However, with the number of accelerators more than doubling since 2014 and rumors of unethical behavior surfacing, founders are questioning the necessity and value of accelerators, leading to an increase in competition with established VC firms and a shift towards a "platform VC" model. More Here

VC Jennifer Stojkovic's post went viral after a founder harassed her in a LinkedIn pitch: 'It's much more common than you think': Navigating retirement finances can be a delicate balance. Determining the right amount to withdraw from your savings is crucial - too little and you may not meet your needs, too much and you risk depleting your funds prematurely. According to a recent report from Edward Jones, there's no one-size-fits-all answer, but they do provide some percentage guidelines to start with. More Here

Series A price correction halts seed-valuation ascent: When valuations of VC-backed companies began to reset downward in 2022, one stage bucked the trend: seed. Investors targeted these companies because they didn't come with the pandemic-era baggage of bloated expenses or a grow-at-all-costs mentality.. More Here

📢 Top Startups News

How Pilea helps founders break down stigma around mental health: Startup founders often invest so much into their companies that the line between personal and professional life blurs, potentially leading to mental health issues. Research suggests that certain mental health characteristics could actually be beneficial for entrepreneurs, but the prevalence of these issues in the startup ecosystem is concerning. Pilea, a company spun out of VC fund Pure Ventures, is addressing this by placing mental health at the forefront, creating a comprehensive health and wellness platform for founders. More Here

Sports tech startups raise US$1.6bn in Q2 as M&As reach US$14.5bn: Second quarter of 2023 has seen a robust fundraising climate, with sports technology firms raising $1.6 billion in private funding and M&As hitting $14.5 billion, according to a report by Drake Star Capital. This figure includes investments in both sports tech and adjacent sectors like broadcasting, betting, and gaming. Early-stage companies attracted over 75% of these private investments, but mid-to-late-stage firms also saw significant funding. More Here

The Professor Who Made $10 Billion By Cutting Google Its First Startup Check: In the realm of hitting the jackpot, being in the right place at the right time and taking a gamble can prove life-changing. One person who embodies this serendipitous combination is Stanford University professor David Cheriton. More Here

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📢 Top AI Startup’s News

Saudi Arabia and UAE Race To Buy Nvidia Chips To Power AI Ambitions: In the race to power their AI ambitions, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are buying up thousands of high-performance Nvidia chips. These chips are crucial for building artificial intelligence software, and this surge in demand is tightening the supply of one of Silicon Valley's most sought-after commodities.Saudi Arabia has reportedly purchased at least 3,000 of Nvidia's H100 chips, a $40,000 processor described as "the world's first computer [chip] designed for generative AI", through the public research institution, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. More Here

Nvidia to Sell 550,000 H100 GPUs for AI in 2023: The generative AI boom is driving sales of servers used for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), and dozens of companies will benefit from it. But one company will likely benefit more than others. Nvidia is estimated to sell over half of a million of its high-end H100 compute GPUs worth tens of billions of dollars in 2023, reports Financial Times. More Here

OpenAI proposes a new way to use GPT-4 for content moderation: OpenAI has developed a method to use its AI model, GPT-4, for content moderation, aiming to reduce the load on human teams. This process, already in use by several customers, involves prompting GPT-4 with a policy and a test set of content examples, refining the policy based on the model's judgments. Despite the potential of AI-powered moderation tools, OpenAI acknowledges the need for careful monitoring and human involvement due to potential biases and errors. More Here

A.I. startups are losing their bloom for seed investors, argues one VC: Artificial intelligence startups have clearly been all the rage in 2023. But as the summer nears its end, the A.I. hype may be starting to cool for investors in those earliest-stage companies. A.I. seed companies have “been priced at an extreme premium with multiple term sheets in certain situations, minimal or limited diligence done, and a lot of expectations for what these companies will grow into moving forward,” Meera Clark, a principal at Redpoint Ventures, told me. “I would say over the past couple of months, we've seen...the bloom fall off the rose a little bit, in that we've begun to see large tech catch up, and at an accelerating pace.” More Here

Israeli AI Startup Vesttoo Files for Bankruptcy Following Fraud Allegations: Vesttoo, an Israeli startup that aims to use artificial intelligence in the insurance industry, filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Monday after being accused of acting as a conduit for a multibillion-dollar fraudulent scheme involving faked letters of credit. More Here

The hottest commodity in AI right now isn't ChatGPT — it's the $40,000 chip that has sparked a frenzied spending spree: Move aside, ChatGPT. There's a new hot commodity in AI: a $40,000 workhorse chip that goes by the name of Hopper. Named after pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, it's an ultra-expensive little chip, which is officially called the H100 tensor core GPU and is the hot property of Silicon Valley giant Nvidia. Hopper is sought after by just about everyone in the tech sector. More Here

📢 Top Startup’s Fundraising News

Browse AI helps companies build bots to scrape website data and put it to work raised $2.8M: Browse AI, an early-stage startup, is revolutionizing the way businesses extract data from websites. Their automated solution scrapes information from websites and moves it into a spreadsheet or API for further processing, making it accessible to anyone. This democratization of web data access is proving successful, with 200,000 new users in the last six months, including teams at Amazon, Walmart, Accenture, Google, and McKinsey. More Here

AI Tool For VC associates, Deckmatch raised $1.1M: Deckmatch, an AI-driven tool that matches venture capitalists with relevant pitch decks, has successfully raised €1 million ($1.1 million) to expand its technology. The company aims to streamline the investment process, transforming unstructured data from pitch decks into structured data that aligns with a VC's investment thesis. The goal is to save time, enhance decision-making processes, and ultimately drive more strategic, data-driven investments. More Here

Voiceflow, a platform for building conversational AI experiences, raises $15M: The demand for conversational AI is skyrocketing, with the market projected to reach $47.6 billion by 2033. Voiceflow, a platform for creating conversational AI, recently raised $15 million in funding, underscoring the growing interest in this field. The platform allows teams to design, test and deploy AI agents, offering flexibility and collaboration in creating AI experiences. More Here

Dinari Raises $7.5M for Decentralized Stock Trading Platform: Dinari, which aims to provide access to real-world asset backed tokens, has announced a $7.5 million seed investment ahead of the ex-U.S. launch of its dShare Platform. Investors included SPEILLLP, a member of the Susquehanna International Group of companies, 500 Global and Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase. Other backers in the round included Third Kind Venture Capital, Sancus Ventures and Version One VC. More Here

Atlas Credit Partners provides $100M in financing for AST SpaceMobile: Houston-based Atlas Credit Partners is continuing its investment into technology companies with a sizable credit facility for a West Texas space technology company. The asset management firm said Aug. 15 that it has committed $100 million in strategic financing to Midland, Texas-based AST SpaceMobile Inc. (Nasdaq: ASTS). Approximately $50 million was funded at closing. More Here

Jurny Launches Community Fundraising Round; Raises $2 Million in First Week to Bring AI Into Hospitality: Jurny, the AI-powered property management solution, has opened a community investment round on Wefunder, inviting retail investors to participate. This unique step has already attracted over $2 million in its first week. Jurny's solution streamlines operations and enhances customer experiences in the hospitality industry, offering a centralized dashboard for precise decision-making and training. More Here

Integrate raises $3.4M and wins Space Force contract for management software: Seattle-based Integrate says it has raised $3.4 million in funding and secured a $1.25 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to boost its program management software platform into a higher orbit. The year-old startup has also brought Firefly Aerospace on board as a customer. “It has been a busy and exhilarating month,” John Conafay, CEO and co-founder of Integrate, said today in a news release. More Here

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