VC Daily Digest - 23/10/2023

📮Today’s Major News

• European venture deal-making shows signs of recovery

• Andre Iguodala is retiring from pro basketball to focus on VC fund

• The fight for venture equality heads to court

• Featured Article: Building MVP Using Y-Combinator Strategy

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💰 Massive Fundings Updates

Tucker Carlson's Last country startup in media industry which aims to expand the long form video created by carlon behind the payment wall raised $15 million through a SAFE note from 1789 Capital, Omeed Malik’s venture fund. Investors more bullish on free speech features of this media startup.

Spain-based Luzia, founded in 2023 by Álvaro Martínez Higes, Javier Andrés and Carlos Pérez, is addressing the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking market for chatbots. It raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Other investors participated, such as Basketball Hall of Famer Pao Gasol, A Capital, Abstract Ventures, FJ Labs, Globo Venture, Mike Santos of Technisys, Sean Ryan of Sean Investments LTD. More Here

Zhipu, a four-year-old Beijing startup that is developing foundational generative AI models à la OpenAI and Anthropic, raised a $340 million round. Investors included Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Group, Xioami, and HongShan. More Here

Hayden AI, a four-year-old San Francisco startup that develops hardware and software to provide governments with bus lane and bus stop enforcement capabilities, raised a $53 million Series B round. Drawdown Fund was the deal lead. More here.

Imbue, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that is developing foundational generative AI models, raised a $12 million Series B extension at a $1+ billion valuation, increasing the total size of the round to $212 million. Investors in this tranche included Eric Schmidt and Amazon's Alexa Fund. More here

SwingVision, a four-year-old startup based in Saratoga, Ca., that has built a tennis coaching and analytics app, raised a $6 million Series A round led by Authentic Ventures. More Here

Harvest Thermal, a startup based in Berkeley, Ca., that is developing a smart panel to help homeowners make their heat pumps operate more efficiently, raised a $4 million round led by Earth Foundry, with MUUS Climate Partners, Starshot Capital, and Portfolia also contributing. The company has raised a total of $11 million. More Here

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🚀 Venture Capital Highlights

European venture deal-making shows signs of recovery: Venture capital data is backward-looking, a trailing indicator at best. European venture capital data is down sharply from prior highs in the third quarter (more here on global numbers). European startups faced a challenging year, raising €43.6 billion ($46 billion) through Q3 2023, down over 49% from the previous year. Despite the downturn, European venture capital showed resilience. More Here

Black founders received 0.13% of capital this Q3: Black founders raised 0.13% of all capital allocated to U.S. startups in Q3, according to Crunchbase. That’s about $39.7 million out of $29.9 billion. This number is a massive year-over-year drop. In Q3 2022, Black founders raised $1 billion out of around $81.7 billion in venture dollars, around 1.2%. Actually, $39.7 million is a massive quarter-over-quarter drop. More Here

The fight for venture equality heads to court: The VC industry is facing a critical moment as it grapples with stagnant funding for all-women founding teams and declining investment in Black founders. Efforts to address these disparities are moving to the policy level, with initiatives like California's SB 54 and proposed legislation in Congress and other states aiming to promote transparency and equity in venture funding. More Here

Newly retired Golden State Warriors star Andre Iguodala is retiring from pro basketball to focus on VC fund: startup investor. He tells Dealbook that he'll run Mosaic, a $200 million venture fund that he just raised with his longtime business partner, Rudy Cline-Thomas to invest in seed- and early-stage teams in enterprise software, fintech health care and sports companies. More Here

📬 Featured: Today’s Featured Article

Building MVP Using Y-Combinator Strategy

When it comes to building a startup, one of the things that comes to a founder’s mind is creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test whether their solution to a particular problem is valid or not. However, one of the common mistakes I observe founders making is forgetting about the "Viable" part and just focusing on the product.

This common mistake is observed in 90% of startup founder and the rest 10% of founders who knows how to build MVP becomes startup like Airbnb, twich & stripe etc. More Here👇

💡 Startups Snap: The Latest Buzz

TAM/SAM/SOM is only for founders who think small: For VCs, market size is crucial, because it becomes a proxy for how big a company could possibly get, which in turn is a measure of how big the return on investment could be. Where that falls apart is if you’re creating whole new markets. In its pre-seed deck back in 2008, Uber, in its wildest dreams, said that the “best case scenario” was to hit $1 billion of revenue per year. Fifteen years later, it’s hilarious how wrong the company turned out to be. More Here

Peak XV’s latest Surge batch is 77% AI and deeptech startups: AI and other deep technologies are the prevailing themes in the new early-stage cohort from Peak XV Partners, as the largest India and Southeast Asia-focused VC fund intensifies its search for opportunities in a sector garnering international frenzy. Ten out of 13 startups in the latest cohort of Surge, Peak XV’s powerfully influential early-stage program, specialize in AI and other deep tech sectors. More Here

Paddy Cosgrave has stepped down as CEO of Web Summit Amid of Controversy: Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder and CEO of Web Summit, has resigned amid controversy over his comments about Israel and Palestine. Cosgrave acknowledged his remarks became a distraction from the event and apologized, leading to his immediate resignation from the tech conference business he co-founded 14 years ago. More Here

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🤖 The Latest In Emerging Tech: AI

Microsoft are all-in on AI: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasizes the transformative power of AI in the company's annual report, describing it as the next big leap in computing, surpassing intuitive interfaces to interpret human intent and the world. Microsoft's strategic partnership with OpenAI gives them a leading edge, allowing seamless integration of AI tools across their business units and products, positioning them ahead in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. This move highlights Microsoft's commitment to staying at the forefront of AI innovation. More Here

How Does AI ‘Think’? We Are Only Starting to Understand That: You can’t go very far in Silicon Valley without hitting an “AI for X” startup. AI for enterprise tech. AI for medicine. AI for dating. And on and on. Some of these startups, no doubt, are pure marketing hype. But even most of the others are simply applying existing AI to a given category of human need or desire—licensing big AI systems from well-capitalized startups and tech giants. More Here

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

• The Convergence of Data & Software Engineering in the Age of AI Read More (AI)

• Do VCs Think Your Go-to-Market Strategy is Boring? Read More (Venture Capital)

• The Worst Way to Launch a New Startup Read More (Startups)

• Why it's Better To Raise Less Capital In The First Round? Read More (Startups)

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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 VC best.

✍️Written By Sahil R | Venture Crew Team

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