PIN

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
July 19, 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

Stripe, a financial technology company that facilitates online payments for businesses, has seen its estimated value rise to $70 billion after Sequoia Capital reportedly offered $27.51 per share. Sequoia will be buying up to $861 million in shares from investors who participated in their funds between 2009 and 2012 and are looking for liquidity.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is reportedly in talks to acquire cybersecurity software startup Wiz in a deal worth $23 billion. This potential acquisition would mark the largest in the company's history. These talks come shortly after Alphabet ended negotiations to acquire marketing software company HubSpot, which has a market cap of $24 billion.

Computer scientist Andrej Karpathy announced on Tuesday that he was starting an AI-integrated education platform named Eureka Labs. This platform will make use of his years of experience at OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Tesla. On this platform, teachers will design courses with the assistance of an AI teaching assistant to guide students through the learning material.

SymphonyAI, a U.S.-based artificial intelligence company, plans to go public in the second half of next year. According to its CEO, Sanjay Dhawan, the decision to go public comes after the firm reached $500 million in revenue run rate last year and achieved profitability. SymphonyAI has been experiencing a revenue growth rate of about 25% and its products are used by companies like Pepsi to predict demand and by financial institutions to detect fraud.

Menlo Ventures, a major investor in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, has announced a partnership to establish a $100 million initiative called "the Anthology Fund." This fund will focus on investing in pre-seed, seed, and Series A AI companies. The capital for the Anthology Fund comes after Menlo closed its latest $1.35 billion vehicle in November.

💰 Funding announcement highlights

Exa, a startup building a tool that allows AI models to perform something like a web search but with an AI-native twist, raised a $17 million Series A round. Lightspeed’s Guru Chahal led the deal, while Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures and Y Combinator also contributed.

Echo Chunk, a startup building a Wordle-styled daily chess puzzle game Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed. a16z Speedrun (Andreessen Horowitz’s early-stage games accelerator), the founder of Zynga Mark Pincus, South Park Commons (SPC), Opendoor founder and CEO Eric Wu, and Stef Corazza, the head of Generative AI at Roblox, were part of the deal.

Kandji, a startup helping other companies manage their growing list of Apple devices, raised $100 million from General Catalyst. Half of the funding is in additional equity and the other half is in the form of a debt instrument.

CatalYm, a biotech startup focused on cancer therapies, raised $150 million in Series D funding. The round was led by new investors Canaan Partners and Bioqube Ventures.

Standard Bots, a startup developing AI-powered robots, raised $63 million in a Series B. General Catalyst led the round, joined by Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next. 

📚 Interesting reads of the week

At Epic Church San Francisco this past June, Trae Stephens, general partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril, a maker of high-tech defense machinery and weapons, addressed a crowd of tech industry professionals. During his speech, he connected Christianity with innovation and encouraged the audience to consider their faith when making decisions about their ventures. He also cautioned against the potential dangers of unchecked technological ambition.

You can’t go on vacation this Summer without taking a book or two from this list.

Dan Primack goes to X to show the letter that Sequoia sent to Stripe’s investors offering a wayto cash out of Stripe.

Many brilliant people from history seemed to have some things in common in how they grew up. Their families made education a huge priority. Even as little kids, their parents gave them tons of books and found tutors to work with them one-on-one.

Paul Graham’s latest essay. Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they keep trying and eventually find something that does. Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying; they won't listen. But is there any real difference between these two cases?

Society often tells us we should have our lives figured out by a certain point, but this is simply not true. The reality is that we are all constantly improvising, learning, and adapting, no matter where we are in life. Accepting this allows us to approach life with more freedom and self-reliance.

💪Tech mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Sunstone Partner

🤑 Total money raised by the Bain Capital Mafia: $2.4 billion

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard

The Bain Capital alumni network has built some amazing companies, so we took a look at the top companies.

The Bain Capital Mafia takes the 36th spot, with 46 companies founded and $2.4 billion raised.

PS: Are you a Bain Capital employee/alum interested in getting your community together to invest in the community (and earn carry/other benefits along the way)? Or are you a member of another community that you think would make for an amazing startup investment community? 

Learn more about us and sign up for the waitlist here.

📌PIN tweet of the week

💼Who’s hiring in VC?

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

Galaxy Ventures is looking for a Portfolio Talent Lead.

Plug and Play is looking for a Ventures Associate.

Interplay is looking for a Financial Analyst.

genera8tor is looking for a Managing Director.

📠Fun fact of the week

Dropbox was initially named "Evenflow" before the name was changed to Dropbox. The first investors in Dropbox included the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which provided seed funding in 2007. Other early investors were Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, both prominent venture capital firms.

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