PIN

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
November 01, 2024

Welcome to PIN’d - our weekly newsletter where we pin (lol, bear with us) the most important tech/startup news of the week for aspiring angels, vc’s, startup investors, founders, etc. Expect a new weekly roundup from us every Friday morning!

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📰 This week’s best news

Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Bedrock Fund Management, Index Ventures and Haun Venture will all be making hundreds of millions of US dollars from Stripe’s acquisition of crypto platform Bridge for US$1.1 billion in cash and stock, according to sources. The leader of the pack was Sequoia, which owns close to 16% of Bridge.

Yale University’s endowment saw a 5.7% investment return for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, as a lack of exits in its private market investments continues to batter the portfolio’s one-year returns. The endowment’s one-year return placed it behind peers like Columbia and Harvard Universities, which saw 11.5% and 9.6% gains for FY 2024, respectively.

Olivia Wilde, famous for her roles in “Tron: Legacy” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” launched venture firm Proximity Ventures late last year. Neil Sirni, formerly of Roc Nation’s venture division Arrive; Jason Mack, formerly of Mack Ventures; and Santi White, are also part of the firm that is planning to invest in companies in the consumer and enterprise sectors.

OpenAI’s Google challenger is finally here. The company on Thursday launched ChatGPT Search, an evolution of the SearchGPT prototype it unveiled this summer. Built into OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, ChatGPT Search is designed to give “timely answers” to questions, OpenAI says, drawing from a range of online sources.

xAI has been meeting with investors about a funding round that could value the company at around $40 billion. This would mark a $16 billion increase in value as its $6 billion round in the spring brought its valuation to $24 billion.

BBG Ventures, founded in 2014 by Nisha Dua and Susan Lyne, raised a second $60 million fund. With this fund, they will go beyond investing in businesses founded by women to startups launched by founders who are female or diverse in some other way such as race, age, and income.

💰 Funding announcement highlights

Pharos, a newly founded San Francisco startup that helps medical staff extract real-time data from patient records, producing verifiable quality metrics to improve patient care and prevent harm, raised a $5 million seed. The round was by Felicis, with participation from General Catalyst, Moxxie, and Y Combinator.

Oboe, a platform designed to help students and learners enhance their skills through personalized learning, raised a $4 million seed round. Eniac Ventures was the main investor, with Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, and Offline Ventures also joining.

Moondream, a startup building a compact AI model that combines visual and language processing to support advanced applications in vision AI, raised a $4.5 million pre-seed. Felicis led the round, with the M12 GitHub Fund and Ascend also showing up.

Table 22, a company helping restaurants, wine shops, and other hospitality businesses create new revenue streams through subscription services, pre-orders, and memberships, raised an $11 million Series A. Lightspeed Venture Partners was the main lead, with Footwork, Forerunner Ventures, and Alt Capital also contributing.

Casap, an automated platform for managing transaction disputes and combating fraud for financial institutions like banks, credit unions, and fintech companies, raised an $8.5 million round. Lightspeed Venture Partners was the main investor. Primary Venture Partners, Commerce Ventures, Curql, and Alloy Labs also showed up.

🎙️ Something New Podcast

What if social media interactions were exclusively powered by AI?

This week on Something New, Steph and Leeor talk with Michael Sayman, a social media prodigy and founder of Social AI, an innovative platform where AI personalities engage users in place of traditional social connections.

Michael, who started his career at Facebook as a teenager, shares how his journey through the tech industry shaped his thinking and led him to reimagine what social networks could be.

Not to be missed!

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Traditionally, venture capital firms and startups shared a common goal of building successful companies. However, with increasing fund sizes, the focus has shifted towards maximizing management fees rather than the success of individual portfolio companies. This shift can lead to misaligned incentives, as investors may prioritize quick deployment of capital over long-term value creation.

Quite literally, the big book of VC, don’t miss this 300-page Q3 report.

Palantir has produced a remarkable number of founders and technology leaders. This article digs on what makes Palantir a unique builder of talent and best practices in company building.

On the surface, Q3’24 was a sobering quarter for fintech. Funding declined by 25% from Q2’24, to $7.3B. Total deals also dropped 16% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) to 753 — their lowest quarterly level since 2017. However, average deal size has remained roughly stable in 2024 YTD, suggesting dealmakers are putting more money behind a select group of fintech companies.

General Catalyst is reshaping the venture capital model, moving away from the traditional playbook. Rather than sticking to early-stage equity investments, they’re introducing revenue-based financing for companies with high marketing and customer acquisition expenses, opting for a share of future revenue instead of standard equity stakes.

Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Sound Ventures, is a strong believer that every company is going to become an AI company, but that there might not be a winner in the space. Kutcher and his company have been betting big on AI. The firm launched a $265 million AI fund last year to invest in large language model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face.

💪Tech mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Verily

🤑 Total money raised by Google’s Female Tech Mafia: $6 billion

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard


Did you know we have a live tech mafia leaderboard?

Check out the current top 10 alumni founder groups!

📌 PIN tweet of the week

💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.

McKesson Ventures is looking for a VC Associate.

Venrock is looking for a VC Investor.

Cambridge Associates is looking for an Investment Director.

Hivemind Capital is looking for an Investment Partner.

11th Hour Project is looking for a Portfolio Manager.

📠 Fun fact of the week

One of the most infamous losses on a failed project was Quibi, the short-form streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Launched in April 2020, Quibi raised nearly $1.75 billion in funding but shut down just six months later after failing to attract enough subscribers.

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