- Venture Daily Digest
- Posts
- VC Daily Digest - 18/10/2023
VC Daily Digest - 18/10/2023
Musk Charging to Use X & VCs Pull Out Of Web Summit Over Israel
Venture Daily Digest
October 18, 2023
📮Today’s Major News
Elon Musk Charging $1To Use X (Twitter)
Y Combinator's Tan, VCs Pull Out of Web Summit Over Israel
Foxconn & Nvidia building AI Factories
Featured Article: On the Life & Death of Y Combinator Startups
🤝 Partner With US!
Get Your Startup Message In Front of 14,000+ Founders, Investors & Working Professional. Let’s Work Together!
💰 Massive Fundings Updates
Nirvana Insurance — an insurance startup taking a new approach to insurance products for commercial fleets using artificial intelligence, telematics, internet-of-things technology. The startup has raised an all-equity Series B of $57 million. Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the round, with General Catalyst and Valor Equity Partners also participating.
Nova Credit, aims help immigrants overcome the obstacles of applying for things like apartments or loans with no credit history in the U.S. It has raised $45 million in Series C funding. Canapi Ventures led the round, which included participation from existing backers Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Index Ventures and Y Combinator, as well as new investors such as Avid Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Harmonic Capital, Radiate Capital and Socium Ventures (Cox Enterprises).
ScyllaDB, a startup developing database tech for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, announced that it raised $43 million in a funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures with participation from AB Private Credit Investors, AllianceBernstein, TLV partners, Magma Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
Fingerprint, a device intelligence API, helps developers build security solutions using information from hardware accessing a website. The primary goal is to help prevent fraud. The Chicago-based company announced a $33 million Series C investment led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures.
Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to attempt to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by DCVC, with participation from Comcast, Ex/ante, Parameter Ventures and Nat Friedman’s AI Grant.
Riffusion that could generate music using not audio but images of audio.Forsgren and Martiros decided to commercialize Riffusion, which is now being advised by the musical duo The Chainsmokers and has closed a $4 million seed round led by Greycroft with participation from South Park Commons and Sky9.
Zelus Analytics, a company started by a former baseball analytics executive, wants to help teams across sports gather the myriad data and put it to work. The company announced a $3.6 million investment, which includes money from existing investor RedBird Capital, along with participation from Gametime Capital, Teamworthy Ventures, 35V and Billy Beane.
Salted, SF based company that builds quick-serve restaurant brands, secured $14 million in Series B funding. Creadev, which led the company’s Series A investment in 2021, is back to lead this new round. The firm is joined by Proof Ventures and B. Riley Financial.
Creative Force, A Denmark based company providing an AI-powered content operations workflow for large e-commerce retailers and brands, secured $8.9 million in Series A funding, on a post-money valuation of $56 million, from Export and Investment Fund of Denmark and Hearst Ventures.
New York-based Leucine raised a $7 million Series A led by strategic investor Ecolab Inc. Participants include returning investors like Pravega Ventures, Axilor Ventures, Techstars and angel investors. Leucine wants to make the compliance process more efficient with its compliance cloud platform for the pharmaceutical industry. It automatically creates digital manufacturing records and uses AI to identify the root cause of deviations.
🤝 Advertise in The Venture Crew’s Newsletters
Want to promote your startup to my community of 14,000+ entrepreneurs and investors? Reply “advertise” and I’ll share my media kit.
🚀 Venture Capital Highlights
Y Combinator's Tan, VCs Pull Out of Web Summit Over Israel: Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, Sequoia Capital’s Ravi Gupta and several other prominent venture capitalists cancelled plans to attend Web Summit, the biggest technology conference in Europe, following comments by the event’s chief executive officer that slammed western support for Israel after the Hamas attacks. More Here
Latin America’s Q3 2023 venture results show glimmers of light: Latin American startups raised $2.5 billion in the third quarter of 2023. Equity funding made up $1.5 billion of that total — that’s notable because Sling pointed out that overall funding, inclusive of non-equity capital, was down 26% in the year by its calculation, while equity-based fundraising actually ticked up 13% compared to a year earlier. More Here
LeapFrog’s new fund raising $1Billion to double down on financial and healthcare sectors in Africa and Asia. The Emerging Consumer Fund IV is set to hold a final close in February next year having already secured the backing of several institutional investors, including the European Investment Bank (EIB) and World Bank’s IFC, which have committed $60 million and $50 million, respectively. More Here
Hoxton Ventures shoots for the big time, luring Bryan Gartner from Khosla Ventures: Hoxton Ventures has lured Bryan Gartner, formerly of Khosla Ventures, to join as its newest partner. Gartner previously worked on venture growth-stage investments at Khosla. He’ll be refreshing his memory of early-stage investing now that he’s at Hoxton. More Here
📬 Featured: Today’s Featured Article
On the Life & Death of Y Combinator Startups
“~88% of Y-Combinator-backed startups have either shut down or exited.” You read it correctly. You might be thinking that this number could be lower for one of the renowned accelerators, Y-combinator but this is not true.
88% of Y-combinator-backed startups have shut down or exited. Let’s deep dive into this truth. For More - check it out 👇
🤖 The Latest In Emerging Tech: AI
Foxconn and Nvidia are building ‘AI factories’ to accelerate self-driving cars: Nvidia and Foxconn are working together to build so-called “AI factories,” a new class of data centers that promise to provide supercomputing powers to accelerate the development of self-driving cars, autonomous machines and industrial robots. More Here
AI Startups Outpace Tech Funding with $17.9 Billion in Q3 Investments: Silicon Valley is witnessing a significant surge in investments in startups specializing in artificial intelligence (AI), surpassing funding in all other technology sectors. In the third quarter alone, AI companies successfully secured an astounding $17.9 billion, showcasing the remarkable resilience of AI in the face of broader economic uncertainties. More Here
Join 3500+ Avid Readers For Daily Morning Venture Insights, Funding Updates And Startup Stories In Your Inbox. 🚀!
💡 Startups Snap: The Latest Buzz
X starts charging $1 per year fee for new users: X, formerly Twitter, is starting a new experiment to charge a $1 per year fee for “new unverified” users to interact with posts. Users will get to post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark, and quote posts for paying that fee. New free users will just get a read-only account to look at posts and follow accounts. More Here
Invesco raises Swiggy’s valuation to nearly $8 billion: Conditions appear to be shifting favorably for India’s Swiggy. The food delivery startup — backed by SoftBank, Prosus and Accel — saw its paper valuation slashed by more than half this year as investors marked their holdings largely in response to the dwindling market conditions. Invesco, which led Swiggy’s previous round and cut its valuation to less than $5.5 billion, marked up the startup’s valuation to $7.85 billion at July’s closure, according to a newly published disclosure. More Here
Patreon acquires livestream ticketed events startup Moment: Patreon is acquiring Los Angeles-based livestream ticketed event platform Moment. As part of the acquisition, Moment’s employees will join Patreon and work cross-functionally with several teams, including creator and product. The company haven’t disclose the financial terms. More Here
Stack Overflow is struggling: Developer community site Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of its staffStack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar indicated that the company is focusing on its path to profitability. While the post didn’t elaborate on the reason behind the job cuts, it mentioned customers’ budgets shifting elsewhere “due to the macroeconomic pressures.” More Here
🗞️ Today’s Must Read On: Startup, Technology & VC
🚀 Join Our 100+ VC Enthusiast Community: VC Crafters
Building, Learning, Networking, & Landing on VC roles is challenging without the right direction. We're a community for learning, sharing insights, and getting help from others who know the field best.
What Do You Think Of Today's News Updates? 🤓 |
✍️Written By Sahil R | Venture Crew Team
Reply