[ad_1]
Welcome to Startups Weekly – your weekly digest of everything you can’t miss in the startup world. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Register here.
In startup news this week, we’ve got some contrarian bets, funding rounds from around the world, new venture capital funds, and a final word of caution.
The most interesting startup stories of the week
Many stories this week remind us that just because something didn’t work before doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying from a different angle. Plus, there’s one merger and acquisition that gives us a break from other WordPress news.
New waveA new wave of desalination startups are working on deep-sea reverse osmosis, a technology that is becoming easier to deploy and could deliver savings, with water being expected to be produced using 30% to 50% less energy than land-based reverse osmosis.
Bridging the gap: YC’s latest batch included a lot of AI startups, and some interesting companies, but the accelerator has reduced its focus on developing markets. In Africa, local accelerators supported by young African graduates are seizing this opportunity through new programmes.
House(h)er: WaveForms AI, a new large audio language modeling (LLM) company, hopes to make AI more engaging with its core models. Its founder, Alexis Kono, is obsessed with the movie “She,” but also thinks carefully about how not to create a dystopia. “We want to do exactly the opposite of what the company is doing in this movie,” he told TechCrunch.
Automatic robots: Automattic has acquired WPAI, a startup that creates AI solutions for WordPress. Her team will lead WordPress’s AI efforts.
Most interesting fundraiser this week
With the end of the year quickly approaching, this week brought us several funding rounds, so here’s a sample that also showcases their scope, both in terms of size and geographic distribution.
Take off: Archer Aviation, a startup that builds vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, has raised $430 million in new equity financing, bringing its total funding to nearly $2 billion. Archer has also entered into an exclusive partnership with Anduril to jointly build defense aircraft.
Stealth no more: Berlin-based startup Upvest, which makes a stock trading API used by some of Europe’s biggest fintechs, has raised a €100 million ($105 million) Series C round led by previously secretive venture capital firm Hedosophia.
Robot steps: Swiss robotics company Anybotics, a spin-off from ETH Zurich that builds four times more autonomous inspection robots for industrial applications, has raised another $60 million, bringing its total Series B funding round to $110 million. The capital will help it expand in the US, where it recently opened an office in San Francisco.
Strong credentials: Flare, a Canadian threat exposure management startup, has closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by Base10 Partners. The company wants to help SMBs and mid-market companies thwart the emergence of malware that steals information, or software that collects login credentials, as happened in the Snowflake incident earlier this year.
Crossing the channel: Aqemia, a French AI-powered drug discovery startup, has raised its second fundraising this year: a new $38 million round led by Cathay Innovation, which it will use to hire and open an office in London.
Allow venture capital to come in: Numia, a startup from Argentina that brings online and offline customer interaction data into one place, has announced a $3.5 million seed funding round led by Cometa. CEO Gustavo Loria said the company was already profitable but decided to raise outside capital for the first time to reach clients who are also limited partners in investment funds.
The most interesting venture capital and fund news this week
Open to confusion: The OpenAI Startup Fund has raised more than $44 million for its fifth special purpose vehicle (SPV), which a spokesperson said “will be used to support a diverse range of existing portfolio companies and to make new investments.” Despite its name, the fund says it does not have OpenAI as an investor, but its backers include Microsoft and other OpenAI partners.
New dimension: Dimension Capital has raised an oversubscribed $500 million fund to continue investing at the intersection of technology and life sciences. Portfolio companies include AI biotech companies Chai Discovery and Enveda Biosciences.
paper tigerHedge fund Tiger’s 15th Fund was known for its “spray and pray” strategy that led it to invest in more than 315 startups in 2021 alone. Tiger’s 15th Fund performed particularly poorly, with paper losses reaching more than 15%. According to a recent disclosure.
Last but not least
In an interview, Lead Edge Capital founder and managing partner Mitchell Green told TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos that there is “a lot of money chasing a very small number of companies that are overvalued.” This sees his company increasingly moving away from typical venture capital deals and toward buyout-like “control deals” more commonly associated with private equity. “I also refuse to invest in companies with 100 times, 200 times or 500 times revenue. And expect that game to end badly.
[ad_2]