PIN'd

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
September 08, 2023

Edition #02

Welcome to PIN’d - our brand new 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

Earlier this week, Reuters reported that according to Arm’s initial public offering documents filed a few days ago, Apple signed a new deal with Arm for chip technology that "extends beyond 2040”. Arm also disclosed that its IPO valuation is somewhere around the $52 billion mark, which will make it the largest deal of the year in the US.

The AI hype is still going strong, with Morgan Stanley announcing its plans to introduce an AI chatbot to give insights and administrative support to financial advisers. The bot was developed by OpenAI, the makers behind ChatGPT.

Remember Clubhouse? It’s apparently kind of back. The app that popularized social audio rooms is reinventing itself “to be more like a messaging app” with new voice-only group chats called “chats.”

Clark joined Flexport from Amazon, where he headed up the company’s consumer business. Just one year later, he’s decided to quit as CEO of Flexport and hand the reigns over to founder and executive chair Ryan Peterson. The announcement took place via X/Twitter.

The WeWork saga continues. The troubled company shared that it will attempt to renegotiate nearly all of its leases and may exit some properties, an announcement coming just weeks after the workspace-sharing company sounded the alarm over its ability to remain in business.

Y Combinator just wrapped up their first IRL Demo Day in three years. Garry Tan shared his thoughts via a blog post, where he also broke down the stats on the S23 batch. The next Demo Day will also take place in-person with the option to watch it virtually for those who can’t make it.

GM-backed Cruise is “just days away” from regulatory approval to begin mass production of its fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals. Cruise first unveiled the Origin robotaxi in early 2020 as a bus-like vehicle built for the sole purpose of shuttling people around in a city autonomously. But since then, the company has been mired in a lengthy regulatory process before it can begin mass production.


💰 Funding announcement highlights

Fintech startup Alix, which provides the world's first seamless wealth transfer by harnessing AI and humans, raised a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Initialized Capital. The platform combines both empathetic AI and live support from experts to guide people through every step of the estate settlement journey.

Generative AI startup, Automat AI, raised $3.75 million in a round led by Initialized. Automat was birthed based on its founders’ previous experience at Google, where they realized that creating automation should be as simple as describing it. It incorporates features such as natural language processing and image recognition, made possible by generative AI.

Delphi, a startup offering an AI digital cloning service, announced its $2.7 million seed round led by Founders Fund and Keith Rabois. Delphi will create an AI chatbot that mimics, as closely as it can, your personality, manner of writing, or speaking, audibly, through a partnership with voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs.

Compliance platform for cosmetic products, Worldover, recently received $3.8 million in a funding round led by Index Ventures. The startup is trying to simplify the compliance process when it comes to launching new products in multiple markets around the world — starting with cosmetics.

SaaSGrid, a San Francisco, CA and NYC-based provider of a data and analysis platform for SaaS metrics, raised $3.3 million in seed funding led by Craft Ventures. The funds will be used to further develop the product, including pipeline metrics and benchmarking.

Story Protocol, a startup providing an infrastructure that allows creators to manage the entire lifecycle of IP development, closed a $54 million funding round led by a16z. The project also aims to attract third-party developers looking to build platforms for crowdfunding, capital formation, IP discovery, licensing modules, and authentication for AI content, among others.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

A long, 12-minute read breaking down Instacart’s upcoming IPO and strategy to become a vertical solution for the grocery industry. Alexandre invests in Seed and Series A companies building in SaaS, marketplaces, and fintech.

Venture capitalist Marc Schröder shares why the next six to 24 months are extremely important for investors, and that many of the venture deals that will go down in history as legendary will be made. The sweet spot to make once (maybe twice) in a lifetime investments is coming up on the horizon.

This one is for our founder friends: a detailed seed round pitch guide by the founders of Chronicle, explaining step-by-step how they raised $7.5 million from Accel.

We often hear of startups reaching unicorn status (valued at $1 billion or more), but did you know there’s also several decacorns? Decacorns are startups that are valued at $10 billion or more, and there’s only 27 of them in the United States.

Now imagine that out of those 27, you happen to invest in three of them with a small $8 million fund!

💪 Tech Mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: AtoB

⭐ Favorite rising star: Flux

😇 Cruise’s first angel investors: Tikhon Bernstam, Tim Draper, Justin Kan

🤑 Total money raised by Cruise Mafia: $208 million

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard

The latest addition is the Cruise Mafia. Former employees of Cruise have raised a total of $208 million and founded 28 companies across e-commerce, software, B2B, B2C, fintech, and the automative industry. Cruise ranks on the 36th spot in terms of most money raised.

📌 PIN tweet of the week

🤝 Inside the Deal

Our new weekly series Inside the Deal takes a look at the first/early investors of iconic companies. Since we were researching Cruise, we decided to dig into the backgrounds of the company’s first investors.

Get the full scoop.

💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

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

CoinFund is looking for a Blockchain Venture Investor 

Munich Re Ventures is looking for an Investment Associate

DeepWork Capital is looking for a Fund Ops Administrator

Base10 is looking for an Early Stage Investor

📠 Fun fact of the week

North America still accounts for the largest share of global unicorns, by the end of 2022, 58% of unicorns all-time were HQd in North America. EMEA accounts for 18%, and Asia & Oceania 23%.

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