Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood, two executives that worked on Facebook's advertising platform at Meta, launched a new startup dubbed Anonym. The Palo Alto, Calif-based startup aims to develop digital advertising campaign analytic solutions while maintaining user-level privacy. Mudd said, "We send the aggregate, anonymized and privacy-safe results to the advertisers and ad platforms so they know whether the campaign worked and who it worked with, but they don't get to learn anything about any individual." More: - The firm already secured $8M in seed funding.
- Anonym launched its first product that helps advertisers to track the number of users installing or purchasing apps after watching ads.
- Its second product, coming later this year, will allow advertisers to target customers with relevant ads while maintaining user privacy.
Zoom out: - Per Winterberry Group, marketers are expected to spend $21.9B on third-party ad data solutions in 2023 alone as mobile tech organizations worldwide take steps to limit ad-tracking on their devices.
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Bluesky, a social media app by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, entered private Beta testing. As of Feb. 28, the app had 2,000 installs on iOS. More: - Dorsey began working on the decentralized social media platform with Twitter's blessing in 2019 and pushed the first lines of code in May 2022.
- The AT protocol, on which Bluesky is built, enables an open market of algorithms and to change hosts without losing content and follows.
- The app allows posts with up to 265 characters, versus Twitter's 280.
- Besides Dorsey, Bluesky's board includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber/XMPP, and Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky.
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Temporal, a startup focusing on a developer productivity app, raised a $75M Series B extension led by Greenoaks. The startup was founded by former Uber engineers Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, who also contributed to the Cadence orchestration engine. More: - The round included participation from Index Ventures, Sequoia, and Amplify Partners, among others.
- Temporal last raised $103M in a round led by Index Ventures in February 2022.
- The startup claims companies such as Instacart, Coinbase, Indeed, and Netflix use the open-source productivity app.
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Dallas, Texas-based cybersecurity startup Island hired Kieth Weatherford as its first channel chief. Weatherford is tasked with developing the firm's partner program, which is scheduled to launch before 2024. His immediate area of focus is building out the channel team by hiring three channel account managers in the U.S. and one in Canada. Meanwhile, he will work closely with Carahsoft to increase Island's presence with federal customers. More: - Weatherford was formerly a vice president of worldwide channel sales at cybersecurity firm Forescout.
- He is an industry veteran, having held channel sales roles at Symantec and McAfee throughout his career.
- Island provides a Chromium-powered secure browser for businesses.
- It emerged from stealth in 2022 and has raised $285M in venture funding to date.
- Island is a unicorn startup, last valued at $1.3B.
- Island banked on channel partnerships in the initial year to drive customer growth.
- Client Trace3 is one of the partners that uses Island's product to secure application access and safeguard employees' devices.
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Pay-per-view video platform Zarta raised a $5.7M Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The startup is currently Alpha testing with a small set of creators and plans to launch the product this year. More: - Zarta was founded by YouTube creator and former Airbnb software engineer Luba Yudasina.
- The platform would enable free previews and ad-free full videos for under $1.
- Zarta splits content payments by sharing 75% with the creators.
- The round included participation from AirAngels, Endeavor, and Dragonfly Capital, among others.
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San Francisco, Calif.-based generative AI startup Typeface emerged from stealth mode with an oversubscribed $65M funding round. CEO and founder Abhay Parasnis said, "By adding brand affinity to generative AI, Typeface allows enterprises to harness their collective creative power for unique expression of their stories and imagination." More: - Typeface leverages AI to generate branding, marketing, advertisement, and blog content for enterprises.
- Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alphabet's GV, Menlo Ventures, and Microsoft's M12 led the firm's fundraiser.
- Parasnis previously held the CTO position at Adobe.
Zoom out: - Typeface's fundraiser comes as ad agencies start leveraging generative AI tools such as OpenAI's Dall-E 2 and Midjourney to create AI-generated creatives for advertisements.
- The Drum anticipates the generative AI market to balloon to over $110B by 2030.
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- AI-powered drug discovery technology startup TandemAI raised $35M in Series A funding led by Qiming Venture Partners.
- Seattle-based sales technology platform Outreach laid off 7% of its staff or 70 employees. This is the firm's second round of layoffs after it let go of 5% of its staff last August.
- Mental health startup Cerebral is reportedly planning to let go 285 employees, representing 15% of its workforce, per Business Insider.
- Venture funding deployment in Israeli startups nearly doubled from $340M in Jan. 2023 to over $700M in the following month, per Globes.
- Mastodon client and registration app Mammoth raised an undisclosed pre-seed round led by Mozilla, with participation from Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
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 |  | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot.
Nicolas is a Sr. Analyst at Inside, covering startups and transportation trends. He is an avid map maker and data nerd. Nicolas has worked in the shared-scooter space, as well as advised e-bike and moped start-ups. | | | | Editor | Vibha Chapparike is a Freelance Writer & Editor at Inside.com. With her post-graduation in Management and Finance completed, Vibha is expanding her knowledge in venture capital, business, startups, and technology. She has had a career in public relations and communications. An ardent reader and writer currently residing in Singapore, you can follow Vibha on Twitter @VChapparike. | |
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