PIN'd

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
April 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

Airchat is a new social media app that allows users to have audio conversations. The app was relaunched yesterday on iOS and Android and is visually intuitive. You can follow other users, scroll through a feed of posts, and reply to, like, and share those posts. The app is currently invite-only and ranked #27 in social networking on Apple’s App Store.

Andreessen Horowitz raised $7.2 billion for its latest set of funds. Half of the capital was aimed at their growth fund, and $3.75 billion was raised for it. Funds were split into sectors, with $1.25 billion for AI infrastructure, $1 billion for AI apps, $600 million for "American Dynamism" strategy, and $600 million for its second gaming fund.

Humane took centre stage on Twitter/X this week. This review of the AI Pin made by Humane, which promises to free you from your smartphone, shows that the wearable computer is not quite there yet. 

In 2024, Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Hippeau announced they were moving away from consumer tech, sparking debate on social media. Despite doubts about "massive consumer tech trends", Jim Scheinman and Sara Deshpande of Maven Ventures raised $60 million for a fourth fund that has invested in seven companies, including Medeloop, Lutra AI, and MultiOn.

Spend management startup Ramp raised $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion. New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer Founders Fund co-led the funding round, which also included new backers Sequoia Capital, Greylock, and 8VC. The funding is an extension of Ramp's Series D, where the company raised $300 million at a valuation of $5.8 billion.

Two former SpaceX executives, Tom Ochinero, Achal Upadhyaya, and Spencer Hemphill, one of Sequoia’s top finance leaders, have come together to form a new venture called Interlagos Capital. The company was formally incorporated in Delaware on March 7th and registered as an out-of-state company in California on April 11th, with a principal address in El Segundo.

HR tech startup Rippling is raising a Series F round of funding. The round is expected to inject $200 million into the company, with existing stockholders selling $670 million worth of shares. This could increase the company's valuation to $13.4 billion, up from $11.25 billion from its Series E round just a year ago. Rippling has already raised $1.2 billion prior to this round.

Cherub is a platform that connects angel investors with entrepreneurs, allowing them to see each other's interests and connect if they find a potential fit. Cherub has launched with 100 startups on the platform, generating $50,000 in revenue. The company plans to grow to 500 startups and has a waitlist of 1,500.

SOSV’s new fund makes it one of the largest pools of deep tech venture capital raised recently. The fund will continue the firm’s focus on human and planetary health, an emerging trend among deep tech investors who have recognized that the two areas are closely intertwined.

💰 Funding announcement highlights

HumanX, a New York-based advisory business focused on AI, has raised $6.125 million in a seed round led by Primary Venture Partners. Foundation Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and FPV Ventures also participated in the funding.

Loft Labs, a startup that virtualizes Kubernetes clusters to share underlying applications, raised $24 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, along with participation from previous investors Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Emergent Ventures, Fusion Fund, and Surface Ventures.

LunaJoy Health, a startup dedicated to maternal health care, raised $4.2 million, from Y Combinator, FoundersX Fund, Goodwater Capital, Magic Fund, VentureSouq, Nurture Ventures, and NorthSouth Ventures.

HyLight, a startup that uses hydrogen-powered airship drones to inspect energy infrastructure, has raised $4 million from Y Combinator, Ring Capital, Kima Ventures, and Collaborative Fund.

GovDash, a platform that provides workflows to support government contract capture, proposal, development and management processes, closed a $10 million Series A funding round from Y Combinator and Northzone.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, released his latest interview with Sam Altman from OpenAI.

Anna Binder, Head of People at Asana and the company's first HR hire, shares her step-by-step process for intentionally building its company culture.

One of the biggest misconceptions about deep tech companies is that they are extremely challenging and expensive to build. While that may have been true 10-20 years ago, today, it is not.

Venture capital used to be a cottage industry and some firms are still operating like nothing has changed. Can they survive? Will capital agglomerators consume them, or can they coexist?

Read the transcript of this episode of Ezra Klein interviewing Dario Amodei, the creator of GPT-2 and GPT-3 at OpenAI. He then co-founded Anthropic, whose latest AI model, Claude 3, is considered the most powerful by many.

11 new companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in March 2024. The cryptocurrency and Web3 sector had three newly minted unicorns, while Uzum, an e-commerce and payments platform, became the first company from Uzbekistan to join.

💪 Tech mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Daily

🤑 Total money raised by the Shutterstock Mafia: $526 million

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard

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

The Shutterstock Mafia takes the 53rd spot, with 26 companies founded in total and $526 million in total raised.

PS: Are you a Shutterstock 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.

Castor Ventures is looking for a VC Principal.

Point72 Ventures is looking for a VC Associate. 

O1 Advisor is looking for a VC Investor.

Transpose Platform is looking for a VC Associate.

Second Muse is looking for a Managing VC Director.

📠 Fun fact of the week

In Q1, 37 startups crossed the billion-dollar valuation mark—the highest quarterly figure in a year and 48% higher than Q4 2023

AI had something to do with the rebound: Generative AI startups Mistral AI, Celestial AI, Perplexity and Together are among the latest batch of new unicorns.

More than half of the newcomers were based in Europe or Asia, continuing a trend that began last year. Previously, US-based companies tended to make up the majority of new unicorns.

Source: PitchBook

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