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| Hey Insiders, Today we are taking a look at Essence VC's $27M pre-seed fund, GeologicAI's $20M Series A round, and Meituan's acquisition of Light Year. We have also rounded up the top early-stage funding rounds of this week. Scroll down for some quick hits, and then let us know what other content you'd like to see in future issues. Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Essence VC, a Seattle-based pre-seed venture capital firm, raised $27M for its third fund. The firm plans to invest in artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, and software development tools. More: - The fund has already invested in marketing content generator Jasper AI, computer vision company Groundlight, and serverless data analytics platform MotherDuck.
- Essence VC is managed by Timothy Chen, who co-founded the machine learning technical infrastructure company Hyperpilot, which was sold to Cloudera in 2018.
- The firm leads rounds between $250,000 and $700,000, and is geography-agnostic.
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VCs deployed $1B in early-stage North American startups this week between June 26 to June 30, per Crunchbase data. AI startups raked in 34% of the funding this week. Healthcare, cybersecurity, and biotech startups nabbed 16%, 12%, and 9% of the financing, respectively. Here are the top 10 largest rounds announced this week: - Author Health, a Boston-based healthcare startup for Medicare Advantage recipients, raised $115M in fresh funding from General Atlantic and Flare Capital Partners.
- Santa Clara, California-based Celestial AI, which provides scalable memory and compute resources to develop AI models, secured $100M in Series B funding led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and Temasek's Xora Innovation Fund.
- AI-powered data security platform Cyera closed its Series B funding round with $100M in capital. Accel led the funding round with participation from Sequoia, Cyberstarts, and Redpoint Ventures.
- Typeface, a generative AI platform for enterprise content creation, entered the unicorn club after an oversubscribed $100M Series B round led by Lightspeed Ventures Partners, Madrona, GV, Menlo Ventures, and M12.
- Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech startup K36 Therapeutics secured $70M in Series B funding led by Nextech Invest. Bristol Myers Squibb Company, Atlas Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Eight Roads Ventures joined the funding round.
- AI model startup Reka emerged from stealth with $58M funding co-led by DST Global Partners and Radical Ventures.
- Media and sports micro-betting platform Betr — co-founded by social media personality Jake Paul — secured $35M in Series A2 funding at a $300M pre-money valuation. The round is an extension of the firm's $50M Series A funding round from last year. Fuel Venture Capital and Roger Ehrenberg co-led the current round.
- Crypto trading platform One Trading, formerly operating under Bitpanda Pro, nabbed €30M ($32.8M) in Series A funding led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures.
- Travel tech startup Utu raised $33M in Series B funding led by SC Ventures. The firm also disclosed that it had acquired Singaporean fintech startup CardsPal.
- New York-based bring-your-own-device security startup Venn Software nabbed $29M in Series A funding led by NewSpring.
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| 3 | | Calgary-based rock digitization services startup GeologicAI raised a $20M Series A led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The company plans to use the funds to develop robot geologists. More: - GeologicAI uses robots to scan and software to improve extraction and exploration.
- The robots use a mix of imaging, hyperspectral data, and XRF to analyze rock samples and determine what is underneath the surface.
- The startup provides geologists with instant access to AI-enhanced digital twins of the rocks.
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| 4 | | Chinese food delivery giant Meituan is set to acquire a generative AI startup, Light Year, started by its co-founder and former director Wang Huiwen. Meituan will pay $233.7M in cash for Light Year and inherit the latter's $51M (367M yuan) debt. The firm will pay $28M to Light Year's existing backer HongShan, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China. More: - Light Year had $285M in cash as of June 29.
- Wang stepped down from the non-executive director role at Meituan on Sunday, citing health reasons.
- Jefferies analysts Thomas Chong and Zoey Zong noted, "The acquisition enables Meituan to cumulate talents in large language models and deepen the exploration of generative AI opportunities ahead."
Zoom out: - Meituan joins the ranks of fellow Chinese tech giants, namely Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, as they gear up to further develop generative AI services.
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| 5 | | Fintech platform Brex hired Jason Mok, a former operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and managing director at Silicon Valley Bank, as its head of startups. The news comes amid the San Francisco-based firm's revised focus on startups, after moving away to focus on larger enterprise customers a year ago. More: - The firm had to rethink its priorities and strategy after an influx of customers from the implosion of SVB.
- Within a week after SVB's implosion, Brex opened 4,000 new accounts and received $2B in deposits.
- In addition to helping startups navigate the economic and banking crisis, Mok is also tasked with assisting them with generative AI.
- Mok spent 16 years at SVB before taking up the operating partner role at a16z in 2020.
- He stepped down from his role at the VC firm to focus on family in September 2022.
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| 6 | | AlloyX, a decentralized finance protocol, raised a $2M pre-seed round led by Hack VC. The startup plans to use the funds to expand operations. More: - AlloyX aggregates tokenized credit, having integrated with nine credit protocols.
- The company plans to launch a blended investment vault with Credix Finance and a tokenized U.S. Treasury Bills protocol, which it expects to be live in Q3.
- The startup claims $5M in total value locked.
- Other participants in the round include MH Ventures, Archblock, and Circle Ventures, among others.
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- Humane, a startup started by former Apple design and engineering team members Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, launched its first product called The Humane Ai Pin. The product is an AI-powered wearable gadget that has a projected display.
- Tiger Global-backed African tech startup Union54 is developing a super app dubbed ChitChat app, which is set to debut in September.
- Seattle-based technical recruiting startup Karat held its second round of layoffs this year, cutting the jobs of 47 employees this time.
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 | Analyst | | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot. | | This newsletter was edited by Beth Duckett | |
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