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The official channel of V3V Ventures. We share updates on our investments, portfolio companies, and fund activities. Buy Ads: @JamesCookTg (this is our only account).
ℹ️ European VCs outperform US VCs over 10 and 15 year horizons
#VentureNews
© Venture capital might have been born in the US — but Europeans aren’t too bad at it nowadays.
European VC returns are better than North American VC returns over 10 and 15 year horizons, finds a new report from industry body Invest Europe, based on data from investment firm Cambridge Associates.
European VC yielded 20.77% net IRR (internal rate of return) over 10 years, compared to North American VC’s 18.18%. Over a 15 year period too, European VC has better returns: 16.57% IRR to North American VC’s 16.09% IRR.
💎 Why deep tech VC Driving Forces is shutting down
#Venture
💻 Sidney Scott decided to take himself out of the venture capital rat race and is now jokingly auctioning off his vests — starting at $500,000.
The Driving Forces solo general partner announced on LinkedIn this week that he was shutting down his $5 million fintech and deep tech VC fund that he started in 2020, calling the past four years “a wild ride.”
A healthy performance of his first, small fund wasn’t enough. He told TechCrunch that with increasing competition for what is, essentially, still a small number of hard tech and deep tech deals, he realized it would be a challenge for smaller funds like his.
“This wasn’t easy, but it’s the right choice for the current market,” he said.
🍔 Forestay, Europe’s newest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will focus on AI
#VentureNews
👍 Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland, has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The VC wasn’t well known in Europe until it started to lead rounds in enterprise startups a couple of years ago, notably scanning software startup Scandit — which has raised $273 million to date — out of Zurich.
The Forestay II fund will invest across Europe and Israel, with a “sweet spot” of leading growth rounds of $10 million to $15 million, at the inflection point of a company, it said.
As Chief Digital Officer in large corporations, mainly the biopharma clinical space, I had the chance to look at the entire value chain, from early research down to distribution, in fairly sizable enterprises,” he told TechCrunch over a call. “So by knowing the enterprise inside out, that’s why we decided to focus on enterprise and enterprise AI.
🍔 Senators urge owners, partners and VC backers of fintech Synapse to restore customers’ access to their money
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👍 A group of senators has banded together to urge Synapse’s owners and bank and fintech partners to “immediately restore customers’ access to their money.” As part of their demands, the senators implicated both the partners and investors of the company as being responsible for missing customer funds.
In a letter shared publicly on Monday, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, along with Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and John Fetterman (D-PA) pointed out that customers of companies that partnered with banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have not been able to access their money since mid-May.
👍The letter was addressed to W. Scott Stafford, president and CEO of Evolve Bank & Trust, but was also sent to major investors in Synapse, as well as to the company’s principal bank and fintech partners.
San Francisco-based Synapse operated a service that allowed others (mainly fintechs) to embed banking services into their offerings. For instance, a software provider that specialized in payroll for 1099 contractor-heavy businesses used Synapse to provide an instant payment feature; others used it to offer specialized credit/debit cards. Until last year, it was providing those types of services as an intermediary between banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust and business banking startup Mercury until Evolve and Mercury decided to work directly with each other and cut out Synapse as a middleman.
📎 Industry Ventures raises a $900M fund for investing in small, early-stage VCs and their breakout startups
#VentureNews
The venture fundraising trend in 2024 is fairly clear by now: Large, established VC firms are continuing to attract capital from limited partners, while smaller, newer funds are finding it more difficult to raise.
But Industry Ventures’ latest fundraise should offer a dash of good news for emerging managers.
📱 On Tuesday, the 24-year-old firm announced that it raised a $900 million early-stage hybrid fund for investing in emerging managers and directly backing breakout growth-stage companies alongside their managers. The fund will also buy a secondary interest in emerging managers from other limited partners.
📱 This is Industry Ventures’ seventh hybrid fund, and it’s more than 50% larger than its predecessor, a $575 million vehicle raised in 2021. The $900 million fund will be split three ways: backing VC funds (40%), directly investing in promising Series B startups from their existing partnerships (40%) and acquiring stakes in emerging investment firms from other LPs looking to exit (20%).
The common lore is that it’s very challenging for emerging managers to raise funds now, but Roland Reynolds, senior managing director at Industry Ventures, says that is not what he observes with the funds his firm backs.
⭐️ Kleiner Perkins announces $2 billion in fresh capital, showing that established firms can still raise large sums
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💡 Many VC firms are struggling to attract new capital from their own backers amid a tepid IPO environment. But established, brand-name firms are still able to raise large funds. On Friday, Kleiner Perkins announced that it closed on more than $2 billion in fresh capital across two funds, a slight increase from the 52-year-old firm’s $1.8 billion previous fundraise in early 2022.
Other prominent firms that successfully defied the VC fundraising slump this year include Andreessen Horowitz, which secured $7.2 billion for several of its funds; General Catalyst, which is reportedly wrapping up a $6 billion fundraise; and Norwest, with its $3 billion capital haul.
Kleiner Perkins said in a blog post that it will continue to invest in enterprise software, consumer, healthcare, fintech and hardtech startups, as it has for its previous fund. But what’s changed is the opportunity to make these industries more efficient with the help of AI. The firm has already backed a few buzzy AI-driven startups, including business application search tool Glean and Harvey, an AI assistant for lawyers. However, compared to other large VC firms, Kleiner Perkins’s investments in prominent AI companies remains modest.
🍔 Defense tech and ‘resilience’ get global funding sources: Here are some top funders
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👍 We live in a very different world since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. With global military expenditure reaching $2.4 trillion last year, startups are hoping to get a share of the pie, and formerly reluctant investors are keen to help them do so.
The U.S. budget is by far the largest, with contracts worth $53 billion to major tech firms between 2019 and 2022. But the rise of defense tech as an investment trend is very much global.
German-based AI startup Helsing is a strong example of the unprecedented amounts of capital available to tech companies with military potential.
Investor appetite is particularly strong for tech solutions with dual-use potential, meaning that they can be used for both civilian and military applications. The idea that defense tech can benefit society more broadly is also reflected in the rising concept of “resilience tech.” More than the worn-out term of “defense,” the word “resilience” reflects the idea that innovation can make democratic societies less vulnerable to attacks and help them recover faster.
💎 Austin-based Ironspring Ventures raised $100M to invest in the industrial revolution
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💻 The Austin, Texas-based firm raised $100 million for its second fund to focus on industrial startups. This is a noticeable increase from the firm’s $61 million debut fund that closed in 2021. This latest raise enabled the firm to hire its first principal, Colleen Konetzke, and a head of platform, Stephanie Volk. The firm plans to invest Fund II into 20 startups, backing four to five companies a year.
The industries Findley is referring to include: manufacturing, construction, transportation and energy. The firm backed 16 companies in its first fund, including Solvento, a payments infrastructure startup for trucking companies in Mexico; OneRail, a last-mile logistics startup; and Prokeep, a communications platform for distributors, among others.
“What we saw back then was as true as we see today,” Ironspring co-founder and general partner, Ty Findley told TechCrunch. “There is a big gap in the venture industry that deeply studies and has genuine GP market fit with these industrial markets and can help them navigate a pretty challenging go-to-market [process].
🍔 Andrew Ng plans to raise $120M for next AI Fund
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👍 AI big shot Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, a startup incubator that backs small teams of experts looking to solve key problems using AI, plans to raise upward of $120 million for its second tranche.
A filing with the SEC shows that the AI Fund’s second fund, AI Venture Fund II, has so far amassed $69.75 million from 13 partners — leaving around $50 million to be invested. The AI Fund’s PR declined to comment.
Ng, the founder of the Google Brain deep learning project, co-founder of Coursera, and recent Amazon board appointee, was one of the most recognizable names in the AI community when he became Baidu’s chief scientist in 2014. He left Baidu in 2017 to jumpstart a number of AI ventures, including the DeepLearning.ai course and Landing AI, a startup developing AI tools targeting manufacturing companies.
🍔 The Compounding Advantage of a Big Chip Stack in a Downturn
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👍 First, companies with bigger balance sheets can sustain higher monthly burn rates, which fuels growth. Imagine the same company under three different net burn conditions: $0.5m, $1.0m, & $1.5m in monthly net burn [1]. In five years’ time, the $1.5m scenario triples the size of the $0.5m in monthly net burn.
The elbow of compounding growth creates a minor separation to start, but a yawning gap within a handful of years.
👍 The same phenomenon plays out in the fundraising markets. The faster-growing company raises more capital to reinvest in growth. The richer the balance sheet & the more solid the business model, the greater the growth rate & ability to win market share.
Why does this reinforcing effect exist? Companies with greater presence in the market will build brand, hire more sales teams, pitch more prospects, close more customers. More revenue growth translates into more dollars raised. Note, I haven’t factored in the valuation multiple premia afforded to top quartile growth.
🍔 Which Customer Segments are Healthiest During the Downturn?
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👍 In CloudFlare’s latest earnings report, the management team highlighted the strength of enterprise buyers within their customer base.
I wondered if this were broadly true. Do public software companies with largely enterprise customer bases benefit from superior growth to their peers with mid-market or SMB focuses?
Enterprise & Mid-Market public companies have seen a relatively constant decline in growth rates through the last six years. SMB businesses benefited from a post-Covid surge when the US re-opened - a phenomenon that seems to abate with time.
💬 Deal Dive: Sir Jack A Lot returns with a startup for retail traders
#VentureNews
When former YouTube product manager Kevin Xu, known as “Sir Jack A Lot” on Reddit, turned $35,000 into $8 million trading stocks between 2020 and 2022, many people thought his fortunes, and his way of investing, had peaked, just like 2021’s memestock craze had.
📱 Xu doesn’t agree, though, and he’s now building a startup for retail investors that aims to bring the good-natured investing advice and community that people used to enjoy on platforms like the WallStreetBets subreddit, but with a layer of accountability that discourages scammers and grifters.
📱 Launched in April 2022, AfterHour lets users link to their stock brokerage accounts and, under a username of their choosing, post their investments to a social feed. “The only reason people trust me and Roaring Kitty is that we are transparent,” Xu told TechCrunch. “Why not show your actual positions or prove you are actually in something? [AfterHour] brings back a level of credibility and trust. You connect your brokerage and share real verified positions and screenshots.”
The company currently has more than 23,000 users, and while that’s not an eye-popping number by any means, its user base is growing, and early adopters seem dedicated — Xu said that more than 70% of its users are on the app every single day. The company is currently focused on growth, Xu said, but has plans for how to monetize in the future.
ℹ️ Prosus zeroes out its 9.6% stake in Byju’s
#VentureNews
© Prosus, one of Byju’s largest investors, on Monday said its once-$2.1 billion worth stake in the Indian edtech startup is now worth nothing, but it is still hopeful that the formerly most-valuable Indian startup can be salvaged.
The largest external investor in Byju’s with a 9.6% stake, Prosus said in its quarterly report that its stake in the startup is now worth zero “due to the significant decrease in value for equity investors.” Prosus Group CIO, Ervin Tu, said on an earnings call that the firm is still hopeful about Byju’s outlook, but improving governance at the Indian firm will be key.
🚀 General Catalyst merges with Venture Highway in India push
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The Silicon Valley venture capital group plans to invest from $500 million to $1 billion in India over the next three years, it told TechCrunch
📱 General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital group, is expanding its presence in India by joining forces with local venture firm Venture Highway and earmarking $500 million to $1 billion for investments in the country.
📱 Venture Highway’s investments include social commerce startup Meesho and B2B industrial marketplace Moglix. TechCrunch reported in January that the two venture firms were discussing a tie-up.
The deal will see the combined entity plot a multi-stage investment strategy for General Catalyst in India, spanning early- and growth-stage startups across industries, Venture Highway’s founder, Neeraj Arora, and General Partner Priya Mohan told TechCrunch in an interview.
⭐️Paris-based VC Breega hits first close of $75M Africa fund to back pre-seed and seed startups
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💡 Paris-based VC firm Breega has observed Africa’s tech ecosystem mature over the years. From receiving less than a billion dollars in venture capital per year to a record-high $6 billion, there’s also been an increase in high-growth companies, from one unicorn to seven within the span of three years.
⭐️ Now the VC wants to put some of its own money behind what it sees, with a $75 million fund to invest in early-stage startups in Africa. It’s secured commitments for around 70% of the capital in the first close, the firm revealed to TechCrunch.
Since entering the VC scene in 2015, Breega has fully raised four funds: a first seed fund (€45 million), a second seed fund (€110 million), a first venture fund (€106 million), and a second venture fund (€250 million). In under a decade, the French investor, with a portfolio of over 100 startups across 15 countries, has reached $700 million in assets under management.
⭐️ The UK’s most active early-stage investors
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💡 2023 wasn’t a good year for early-stage deal count in UK tech. There were 2.7k pre-seed, seed and Series A deals, according to Dealroom; the lowest figure since 2016 and a long drop from the 4.1k deals done in the heady days of 2021.
The figures for 2024 aren’t looking much stronger — Dealroom counts 1.1k so far this year — although a reporting lag typically means early stage rounds are under-reported.
💡 Using data from Dealroom, alongside investor deal count figures reported to Sifted by the firms themselves, Sifted has selected the investors that did the most pre-seed, seed and Series A deals, both new and follow-on, in the UK in the past 12 months (the start of June 2023 to the end of May 2024). Accelerators were not included:
1. SFC Capital
2. Maven
3. Mercia Ventures
4. Fuel Ventures
5. Future Planet Capital
6. SyndicateRoom
7. Haatch
8. Octopus Ventures
9. Seedcamp
10. Development Bank of Wales
📎 J2 Ventures, focused on military healthcare, grabs $150M for its second fund
#VentureNews
📱 J2 Ventures, a firm led mostly by U.S. military veterans, announced on Thursday that it has raised a $150 million second fund. The Boston-based firm invests in startups whose products are purchased by civilians and the U.S. Department of Defense.
While many emerging VCs are struggling to raise second funds, J2’s latest vehicle is more than double its $67.5 million debut fund from 2021.
📱 At first blush, the firm may seem to be benefiting from VCs’ growing interest in defense tech. But J2 has no interest in positioning itself as a defense tech investor.
“Our portfolio is national-security adjacent, but not defense-focused,” said Alexander Harstrick, J2’s managing partner. The firm does not invest in technologies that protect critical national infrastructure or help deter attacks, such as drones, robotics, or surveillance tech.
⭐️ Spain’s exposure to climate change helps Madrid-based VC Seaya close €300M climate tech fund
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💡 According to a recent Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the combined enterprise value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023. In the latest confirmation of this upward trend, Madrid-based VC fund Seaya has closed Seaya Andromeda, an “Article 9” €300 million climate tech fund based out of Madrid.
Article 9 refers to the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation Act, which puts the onus on investment firms to ensure their investments have a positive impact on society or the environment.
Seaya has been around for 12 years, mainly focusing on mission-driven startups in Europe and LatAm. The new “Andromeda” fund will invest in growth companies that specialize in energy transition, decarbonization, sustainable food value chains, and the circular economy.
💎 Husband-and-wife former Olympians target $50M for new fund to invest in influencer-led consumer brands
#Venture
💻 Samyr Laine and his wife, Ayanna Alexander-Laine, started Freedom Trail Capital in 2023 and are working their way toward a $50 million fund. Both are former Olympians who competed for Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, respectively, in the triple jump. Now they put their grit and determination to work for founders wanting to launch and scale consumer brands.
“I love people and connecting with people,” Alexander-Laine told TechCrunch. “We know how to merge talent and business, and found that athletes are good in these spaces. We also have the stamina to conquer other things and other entities outside of sports.”
They, along with a third general partner, Ivan Lopez, have invested in seven startups so far with a small first fund close. These include a hair care company by Issa Rae called Sienna Naturals; a pet product company started by Kaley Cuoco called Oh Norman!; Ciara’s Ten to One Rum; and Kudos, a diaper company backed by Mark Cuban and Gwyneth Paltrow.
🍔 Sensorita uses digital twins to help waste management companies streamline construction waste
#VentureNews
👍 The amount of waste produced by the construction industry adds up to more than a third of the overall waste produced each year in the European Union.
👍 Sensorita wants to help the construction industry reduce its waste by fixing what Sensorita co-founder and CEO Ulrikke Lien considers to be the root of the issue: the lack of reliable data in the industry.
Lien told TechCrunch that many waste management companies collect from so many construction sites that they often don’t know where their bins are, how many of them there are or when they will need to be emptied.
“Since the very beginning, what stood out then, and what is still true now, the data that they have access to in the industry is so limited,” Lien said. “If you compare it to any other process industry, there is no one that would accept the level of data, or insight or knowledge, and that’s the general problem.”
The Oslo-based startup puts its sensors into construction waste bins and uses radar and machine learning technology to create digital twins of each bin. Waste companies can then use Sensorita’s software to get updates from where their bins are and how full they are and use that data to better plan pickups.
⭐️ Matrix venture firm distances from India and China affiliates
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💡 Matrix is rebranding its India and China affiliates, becoming the latest venture firm to distance its international franchises.
The U.S.-headquartered venture capital firm will retain its name, while Matrix Partners India will rebrand to Z47 and Matrix Partners China will rename itself MPC. Matrix began operating the India affiliated fund in 2006 and the China fund in 2008.
The unexpected rebranding takes effect July 1. Notably, Matrix’s announcement referred to its India and China operations as “entities operating under the Matrix name” rather than as its own units.
💡 Matrix Partners India stated that the rebrand will not affect its operational structure, existing funds, or strategy. The new name takes inspiration from India’s journey towards becoming a developed country by 2047, it said.
Matrix is undertaking the “renaming and organizational update” to “clarify the local approach each of these teams has taken to operating in each of their geographies since inception and the organizational independence of each team,” Matrix Partners said in a post.
📎 Identity.vc is bringing capital and community to Europe’s venture ecosystem
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In 2023, the pair launched Identity.vc, a venture firm that invests in early-stage companies with at least one founder or executive who identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. The Berlin-based firm is currently raising €50 million for its debut fund and has closed on €15 million thus far.
The founding partners also brought on Mari Luukkainen, who has prior operating and investing experience, as a principal.
These young companies bring a killer combination that VCs love: significantly lower operating costs and far less punchy valuations.
📱 Further evidence of this “Southern trend” arrives with news that a new venture capital fund, Plus Partners, is being launched by Enrique Linares, one of the co-founders of breakout European unicorn letgo, and Oriol Juncosa, a veteran of the Barcelona VC scene. While Plus Partners hasn’t released a figure for the launch of their new fund, the rumor I’m hearing is it will be in the $30 million-$50 million range.
📱 The firm writes checks that range from €250,000 to €1.5 million into companies from the pre-seed to Series A stages. The firm is sector agnostic and invests in Europe and beyond. Identity.vc has backed four companies thus far, including eco.mio, a software plugin that helps companies manage the environmental impact of their business travel, and Paxton, an AI legal tech company.
“The majority of LGBTQ+ founders: They are not out to their investors because they feel that could be a disadvantage,” Klein told TechCrunch. “We think that is a big mistake and [that means] you don’t have this trusted relationship with your investors. Those investors who don’t like it, you don’t want to have them on your cap table. You should be able to be yourself.”
📎 As Spain gets its latest VC fund, Southern Europe appears to be on a roll
#VentureNews
Evidence for this was apparent during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, as time and time again your TechCrunch reporter bumped into Northern European VCs scouting startups on the “Iberian peninsula” (Spain and Portugal).
These young companies bring a killer combination that VCs love: significantly lower operating costs and far less punchy valuations.
📱 Further evidence of this “Southern trend” arrives with news that a new venture capital fund, Plus Partners, is being launched by Enrique Linares, one of the co-founders of breakout European unicorn letgo, and Oriol Juncosa, a veteran of the Barcelona VC scene. While Plus Partners hasn’t released a figure for the launch of their new fund, the rumor I’m hearing is it will be in the $30 million-$50 million range.
📱 Looking at the fund’s co-founders, Linares led letgo, a used goods marketplace, to become the first Spanish startup to achieve unicorn status, attracting investment from Accel, Insight Partners and Prosus, among others. Prior to letgo, he co-founded Captalis, a fintech company with a significant presence in LatAm.
Juncosa started his VC career at Nauta Capital in Barcelona and went on to co-found the early-stage VC firm Encomenda Smart Capital. He then become CFO of Carto, a data visualization SaaS company based in the U.S. and Spain, which has raised more than $100 million.
⭐️ Hebbia raises nearly $100M Series B for AI-powered document search led by Andreessen Horowitz
#VentureNews
💡 The round valued the company between $700 – $800 million although TechCrunch couldn’t verify whether that valuation is pre- or post-money. (One possible scenario is $700 million pre/$800 million post.)
💡 Hebbia disclosed in an SEC filing in May that it had by then raised $93 million out of a hoped-for $100 million but we understand from two of the people that the round hit a near $100 million mark and has closed.
Hebbia and Andreessen Horowitz didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Hebbia was founded in 2020 by George Sivulka, who launched the company while working on his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford. Sivulka was inspired by his friends working in the financial industry who told Sivulka that part of their long work weeks was spent searching for information in SEC filings and other dense documents. Sivulka thought that AI could help them save hours at the office and give them more time for rest and sleep.
⭐️ Sizing the Web3 B2B Software Market
#VentureNews
💡 In the last six months, 103 web3 companies generated revenue on-chain, the smallest of which recorded a few hundred dollars of sales & the largest, Ethereum, tallied $401m.
44% of these companies produced less than $0.5m. But a nascent mid-market does exist : 41 companies produced between $5-25m.
The average software company operates at about 70% gross margin, so let’s assume a web3 company is similar. To simplify, we’ll assume the typical web3 company spends all of that cost of goods sold (COGS) on software - about 30% of revenue. That implies the web3 B2B software TAM is roughly $231m in 2022 & $75m excluding Ethereum, which comprises roughly 60% of the revenue.
🐵 Seizing the Moment: Strategies for Startups to Outmaneuver Competition in a Turning Economy
#VentureNews
👍 The Fed no longer predicts a recession. Economic data is turning more positive, eg housing starts exceeded forecasts. 80% of public companies beating earnings estimates - three percentage points higher than the 5 year average.
This is the moment startups with big balance sheets’ advantage will shine.
👍 On the other hand, enough uncertainty permeates the market to depress prices. Public software companies’ share prices have fallen 10% on average in the last 30 days dotted with positive notes like the stabilization cloud growth rates for Microsoft & Google.
Efficiency has been the watchword for the last 3-4 quarters. Most companies have trimmed excess costs to drive go to market sales efficiency & burn ratios. For those companies with hundreds of millions on the balance sheet, they have two strategic options to evaluate.
✅ What Vinod Khosla says he’s ‘worried about the most’
#Venture
💻 Vinod Khosla is more popular than ever right now. The Sun Microsystems co-founder turned prominent investor — first at Kleiner Perkins and, for the last 20 years, at his venture firm Khosla Ventures — has always been sought after by founders thanks to his no-nonsense advice and his firm’s track record, including bets on Stripe, Square, Affirm, and DoorDash.
But a $50 million gamble on OpenAI back in 2019 — when it was far from clear that the outfit would succeed on the scale that it has — put Khosla Ventures, and Khosla himself, squarely in the spotlight.
He’s thoroughly enjoying himself. I sat down with Khosla this past week in Toronto at the Collision conference, and ahead of our stage appearance, he told me that he’s been appearing in public — either onstage or on podcasts or television interviews — several times a week lately. Asked if he was exhausted by the schedule — for example, he flew into Toronto just hours before our sit-down — he shrugged off the suggestion.
⭐️ The Series A Crunch or the Seedpocalypse of 2024
#VentureNews
💡 2012 was the year of the Seedpocalypse. Also called the Series A Crunch, a fear gripped Startupland : raising a Series A. Two years later, this indigestible excessive bolus of fundraising rounds hit the Series B market & Series Bs became the most challenging round to raise.
⭐️ Whenever there are “too many” of fundraises of one type, the next round becomes the hardest to raise.
In 2024, the Series A Crunch has returned. Software companies that have achieved the previous era’s milestone, $1m or more in ARR, face a challenging Series A market. Why is this happening again?
Just as in 2012, a surge in seed investments met a relatively stable Series A market. The supply/demand imbalance creates a funding squeeze. The orange crush of seed investment has outpaced the growth in Series A & Series B rounds. Many new seed funds started & the rate of company formation surged during the early 2020s driven by an ebullient capital markets.
🔔 Lawyer-in-the-loop’ startup Wordsmith wants to bring AI paralegals to all employees
#VentureNews
💻 Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with an AI platform that they can configure to help other workers in the company.
This way, anyone in the company can solicit help with legal tasks such as reviewing contracts and answering specific questions about a document.
Incorporated in October last year, the Edinburgh-based company is the handiwork of former senior TravelPerk executives Ross McNairn (CEO) and Robbie Falkenthal (COO), alongside CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, who served in various engineering roles at Microsoft, Facebook, and Instagram. Six months after leaving their previous positions, Wordsmith already claims notable customers, such as Trustpilot, while it’s partnering with at least one major law firm — DLA Piper.
ℹ️ Ex-HubSpot exec builds an AI-powered CRM that learns for you, with $4M seed led by Sequoia
#VentureNews
© Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that somebody needs to populate and keep updated, Day learns everything about a person from conversations they had with the company, emails and public records such as LinkedIn.
O’Donnell knows CRMs. He was responsible for creating one of the most popular ones out there, HubSpot’s.
© O’Donnell spent more than 10 years at HubSpot, initially turbocharging the company’s marketing automation solution, and was later tapped by the founder and former CEO Brian Halligan to build HubSpot’s customer relationship management tool. That CRM later became the product HubSpot is best known for, which eventually helped earn O’Donnell the title of chief product officer.
While O’Donnell enjoyed being an executive at HubSpot, which now has a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion, he missed building new software. So in 2021, he left HubSpot to work on Arianna Huffington’s Thrive. He was also simultaneously involved with ProfitWell, a bootstrapped business he co-founded that sold to Paddle for $200 million in 2022.