VC Daily Digest - 28/09/2023

📢 Major News

• VC firms working with D.C. to "self-regulate" AI startup investing

• Former Tinder CEO’s startup to fight loneliness with AI chatbot gets backing by Sequoia

• OpenAI updates ChatGPT to let AI tool ‘see, hear and speak’

• Featured Article: Unit Economics For Startups - Interesting Perspective

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📢 Venture Capital Highlights

Industry Ventures, with stakes in more than 600 venture firms, just raised $1.7B to snap up more stakes — and companies: Industry Ventures prides itself on trying to zig when others zag. When the outfit was first founded in San Francisco in 2000, the startup market was red hot, and its first product — a secondary fund — was a curiosity more than anything. The idea of selling one’s shares to another buyer wasn’t yet seen as a smart way to take some money off the table. It was viewed as a way to quietly dump distressed assets. More Here

Mythos Ventures grabs $14M for inaugural fund to invest in AI: Mythos Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm started by Vishal Maini, closed $14 million in capital commitments for its first fund that will invest in transformative AI companies. Metaplanet, Delphi Ventures and The Operating Group are backers alongside a group of individual investors, including Phil Black, co-founder of True Ventures; Walter Kortschak, managing director of Summit Partners; Tom Shaughnessy, co-founder of Delphi Digital; and Anna Counselman, co-founder of Upstart. More Here

All venture funds use the ‘2 and 20’ fee structure, right? Not really: VCs often use the shorthand phrase “two and twenty” to refer to the 2% of annual management fees a venture fund might take and the 20% carried interest (or “performance fee”) it would charge. In a nutshell: If a venture fund turns a $100 million profit from its investments, the fund gets to keep $20 million of that, and the remaining $80 million is paid out to the limited partners.

French billionaire Xavier Niel pledges to invest up to $210 million in AI: Xavier Niel, the founder, CEO and majority shareholder of telecom company Iliad, has announced several new projects around AI and told the AFP that he plans to conduct strategic investments in artificial intelligence of up to $210 million (€200 million). More Here

VC firms working with D.C. to "self-regulate" AI startup investing: A group of venture capital firms is working with the U.S. Commerce Department to develop "responsible AI" guidelines for themselves and their portfolio companies, Axios has learned. Why it matters: This effort is designed to cover thousands of current and future startups, whereas most other AI self-regulation talks have been limited to Big Tech companies and major AI model vendors. More Here

📢 Massive Fundings Updates

Former Tinder CEO’s startup to fight loneliness with AI chatbot gets backing by Sequoia: Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg’s startup Meeno, which aims to fight loneliness through an AI-powered chatbot, announced that it has raised a $3.9 million seed round led by Sequoia. Meeno aims to release its app on the App Store in December in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. More Here

EV boat startup Arc wades into watersports with $70M in fresh funding: The Los Angeles-based electric boat startup, which designed, built and has now delivered a limited edition run of the Arc One, recently raised $70 million in a Series B round from a bevy of returning investors, including Eclipse, Andreessen Horowitz, Lowercarbon Capital and Abstract Ventures. New investor Menlo Ventures — specifically long-time partner and self-proclaimed boating enthusiast Shawn Carolan — also joined in. Arc has raised more than $100 million, to date. More Here

Sam Altman backs Slope’s $30M round to digitize, scale B2B payments: Slope, a business-to-business payments platform for enterprise companies, closed on a venture round of $30 million to expand its business. The company intends on using the new funds on product development as it continues to take on bigger clients. Since launching in 2021, co-founders Lawrence Lin Murata and Alice Deng have sought to digitize the $125 trillion B2B payments market. More Here

Gringo’s super app for Brazilian drivers adds insurance, financing with $30M Series C: Brazil has over 75 million drivers, and Gringo wants to be the super app support for all of their automotive and insurance needs. The app enables drivers to manage their car’s documentation and services in one place, including the payment of fines, taxes and licensing, contracting insurance and loans using the vehicle as collateral. More Here

Rollstack automatically syncs data to reports and presentations raised $1.8M: To help ease the burden — at least on the data points front — Nabil Jallouli, Bahir Saad and Younes Jallouli co-founded Rollstack, a platform that automatically updates the metrics and figures in slide decks, reports and documents. A member of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 cohort, Rollstack has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator, UpHonest Capital, Kima Ventures, Monte Carlo Capital and Roosh Ventures. More Here

Cybersecurity firm Lumu raises $30M to detect network intrusions: Lumu, a startup that helps enterprises identify and isolate security compromises, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Forgepoint Capital, $6 million of which is debt. Ricardo Villadiego, Lumu’s founder and CEO, says that the new cash will be put toward growing Lumu’s sales team in the U.S., supporting its go-to-market strategy and increasing the startup’s investments in R&D. More Here

Senser launches its AI-enhanced observability platform, raises $9.5M: Senser describes itself as an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to help developers and ops teams more easily get to the root causes of outages and service degradations. The Tel Aviv-based company today emerged from stealth and announced a $9.5 million seed round led by Eclipse, with participation by Amdocs and other private investors. More Here

Resourcify, a platform to digitize waste management, raises €14M: Resourcify, a waste management and recycling platform, today announced that it raised €14 million ~($14.94 million) in a Series A round led by Vorwerk Ventures with participation from Revent, Ananda Impact Ventures, Speedinvest, BonVenture and WEPA Ventures. More Here

📬 Featured: Today’s Featured Article

Unit Economics For Startups🤔

People say that economics is boring. So unit economics must be really boring. And yet it’s a leading cause of startup death. Bret waters shares an interesting approach on achieving unit economics with some practical strategies.

If you are founder/investors, it will be helpful to you. Have A Look 👇

📢 The Latest In Emerging Tech: AI

OpenAI updates ChatGPT to let AI tool ‘see, hear and speak’: OpenAI is updating the capabilities of ChatGPT to allow the artificial intelligence (AI) tool to "see, hear, and speak" in the latest upgrades to the viral chatbot. OpenAI is rolling out updates that will allow ChatGPT to understand verbal prompts and respond in a back-and-forth conversation with the user using the chatbot’s new voice. The chatbot will also be able to respond to image prompts. More Here

Mistral AI makes its first large language model free for everyone: The most popular language models out there may be accessed via API, but open models — as far as that term can be taken seriously — are gaining ground. Mistral, a French AI startup that raised a huge seed round in June, has just taken the wraps off its first model, which it claims outperforms others of its size — and it’s totally free to use without restrictions. More Here

Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl says AI to impact the music industry within the next year: Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl believes AI will be significantly impacting the music industry within the next year. Speaking at the Code Conference this week, the industry exec said the industry should soon expect the increasing quality of music made with AI technologies that comes at a very fast pace, and the industry’s best bet is to embrace the technology. More Here

Tencent-backed AI chip startup Enflame raises $274 mln from state-linked investors, others: China's artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup Enflame, backed by tech giant Tencent, on Thursday said it raised 2 billion yuan ($273.68 million) from investors including funds linked to a government authority in Shanghai. The deal came as the development of generative AI, boosted by the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, raises investor interest in companies working on AI-related infrastructure such as AI chips. More Here

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📢 Startups Snap: The Latest Buzz

Vast majority of VC-backed UK startups do nothing on climate emissions: Some 76% of the top 500 VC-backed U.K. startups have done nothing to either measure or offset their carbon emissions, according to new research shared exclusively with TechCrunch. In total, these companies have raised $40 billion in VC funding. Furthermore, of the VCs looked at, the highest only scored 37 out of a possible 100 in the ranking, with the lowest on 3. More Here

Was tech’s ‘bull run’ simply a temporary surge?: For a few months this summer, it seemed that the trend of falling tech valuations was nearing an end. The U.S. pausing interest rate hikes, falling inflation in key markets, and software companies’ slowly rebounding revenue multiples led to a trio of IPOs that were both long in the coming and very welcome in their arrival. Though Arm, Klaviyo and Instacart all priced their IPOs strongly and traded well in their first few days on the market, their shares have since stalled. More Here

Photo-sharing app Lapse hits top of the App Store by forcing you to invite your friends: Forget invite-only social apps, Lapse is testing a new technique to acquire its users: It forces you to invite your friends in order to get in. The reinvention of a social camera app first introduced in 2021, Lapse is now king of the U.S. App Store after having jumped from No. 118 Overall earlier this month to reach No. 1. More Here

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What Do You Think Of Today's Newsletter? 🤓

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✍️Written By Sahil R | Venture Crew Team

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