PIN'd

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
September 22, 2023

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

People got emotional this week over another scandalous proposal by Elon Musk - to fully turn Twitter/X into a subscription-based social media platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform, which is a never-ending nuisance.

Musk didn’t say what the new subscription payment would cost, but described it as a “small amount of money.”

Cisco announced that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity firm Splunk for $28 billion. This will be the company’s biggest-ever deal and the biggest technology transaction of the year. The acquisition of Splunk will help reduce Cisco's reliance on its massive networking equipment business, which has suffered in recent years from supply chain issues and a post-pandemic slowdown in demand.

The Twitter/X crowd is gushing over OpenAI’s announcement on DALL-E 3, the latest version of its AI image-synthesis model that features full integration with ChatGPT.

DALL-E 3 renders images by closely following complex descriptions and handling in-image text generation (such as labels and signs), which challenged earlier models. Currently in research preview, it will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in early October.

WeWork is in trouble once again (sigh). DivcoWest, the San Francisco-based real estate titan, alleges breach of contract and is demanding a whopping $30 million in a lawsuit filed in Manhattan on Thursday.

WeWork fired back, claiming it had vacated the premises. However, DivcoWest asserts that the tenant never provided formal notice of its departure. Moreover, WeWork’s failure to remove its property from the space doesn’t align with the actions of a company surrendering its lease, as argued by DivcoWest in its lawsuit.

Thrive Capital is raising $300 million from California Public Employees' Retirement System, adding a marquee investor at a time when venture investors are finding it harder to raise money.

Rather than launch a new fund, Thrive is adding the CalPERS investment to its eighth fund launched in early 2022, which raised $2.5 billion for growth investments.

The FTX saga is back in the spotlight. Apparently, lawyers representing the bankruptcy estate of the failed exchange alleged that Allan Joseph Bankman and his wife, Barbara Fried, “exploited their access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves, directly and indirectly, by millions of dollars.”

Turns out Fried was encouraging her son and others within the company to avoid, if not violate, federal campaign finance disclosure rules. Juicy.

Crypto may be down, but Blockchain Capital is only going up. It closed two new funds for a total of $580 million. The funds will focus on six sectors: decentralized finance, centralized finance, centralized infrastructure, decentralized infrastructure, gaming and consumer/social.


💰 Funding announcement highlights

Yurts, the enterprise-ready Generative AI platform, announced a $16 million Series A to support its acceleration into the market. The oversubscribed funding round was led by Nava Ventures, with additional investments from XYZ Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Mango Capital, and Essence VC. Yurts plans to use the capital to continue to build its secure AI platform and expand its technology team.

Bessemer Venture Partners led an $8 million seed round for Mural Health Technologies, a Berwyn, PA-based clinical trial participant management platform provider. The company intends to use the funds to expand its platform to modernize the clinical trial participant experience.

Kayhan Space raised $7 million in an extension to the spaceflight safety startup’s seed round and unveiled an autonomous space-traffic coordination framework. The round was led by EVE Atlas and Space Capital, with added participation from Initialized Capital, Overline Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.

Startup Tabular Technologies announced a $26 million round of funding led by Altimeter Capital, and saw participation from the previous lead investor of Tabular’s earlier round, Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Zetta Venture Partners. Tabular is the creator of an independent data platform based on the open-source Apache Iceberg data lake software.

Cybersecurity company, Legit Security, raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by CRV with participation from Cyberstarts, Bessemer Venture Partners and TCV. Co-founder and CEO Roni Fuchs says that the funds will be used to expand Legit’s sales, marketing and R&D teams.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Great post on Sequoia’s seed investments in YC companies plus a breakdown of the estimated value on return. Fun fact: Sequoia was an early investor in Y Combinator itself!

In honor of Instacart’s IPO this week, President and CEO of Y Combinator Garry Tan, explained how Apoorva Mehta hacked his way into YC by sending Garry a six pack of beer. It wasn’t the hack that mattered though, but something else (can you guess what? 😉).

The big debate on AI continues: to regulate or not to regulate? Elad Gil wrote a rather long article on his thoughts about AI regulation and how it could negatively impact innovation.

The Steve Jobs Archive, an organization that collects and curates information about the late Apple founder’s life, announced earlier this week the first young creators of the brand new fellowship program. What’s interesting is that the program is not targeted at engineers exclusively, but also musicians and storytellers since Jobs often promoted Apple as a company at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

💪 Tech Mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Applied Intuition

⭐ Favorite rising star: Upduo

😇 NVIDIA’s first investors: Sequoia Capital

🤑 Total money raised by NVIDIA Mafia: $1.4 billion

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard

The latest addition is the NVIDIA Mafia. Former employees of NVIDIA have raised a total of $1.4 billion and founded 72 companies. According to Crunchbase data, most of the companies founded are in AI and Software. NVIDIA ranks 25th on our leaderboard.

PS: Are you an NVIDIA 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

🤝 Inside the Deal

In honor of Instacart’s IPO this week, we took a look at who the biggest winners are. Canaan, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital stand to be the top 3 winners, with Canaan bringing in a theoretical 7,579% return on investment.

Get the full scoop. 

💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

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

MicroVentures is looking for a VC Manager.

Earlybird is looking for a Finance Analyst.

YardVentures is looking for a VC Principal.

KK Goldstein is looking for a VC Senior Associate.

Harlem Capital is looking for Winter Interns.

📠 Fun fact of the week

28% of US unicorns have 1+ founders with a doctoral degree. One-fourth of unicorns have at least one founder with a doctoral degree in engineering. Medicine and computer science follow (23% each). Math and computer science have the highest odds ratio of producing a unicorn.

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