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| Hey Insiders, Today we are bringing you news about an AI startup that raised $113M in seed funding and why Thirty Madison is acquiring patient records of The Pill Club. We have also rounded up the top leadership changes in startups this week. Scroll down for some quick hits, and let us know what other content you'd like to see in future issues.
Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Paris-based startup Mistral AI raised a $113M Seed round to build a large language models application. The pre-product company is valued at $260M post-money. More: - The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Redpoint, Index Ventures, Xavier Niel, and JCDecaux Holding, among others. The startup also claims Bpifrance and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as equity holders.
- The company, founded by former DeepMind and Meta alums, is aiming for a product launch in 2024.
- "At the moment we have proof that AI is useful in some cases, but there are still too many workers in different fields being asked to be creative [with AI], and we need to figure this out for them. We want to give them tools that are easy to use to create their own products", said Mistral's co-founder, Arthur Mensch.
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| 2 | | AI-powered data analysis solutions provider Primer Technologies, which held the first close of its Series D round at $69M today, announced Sean Moriarty as its new CEO. Moriarty stepped into the role vacated by founder Sean Gourley. Startups DTEX, Cyemptive, Calm Wave, and Smarsh also saw leadership changes this week. Hires: - San Jose, Calif.-based cybersecurity startup DTEX Systems hired Dave Salverson as its first CFO. Prior to joining DTEX, Salverson held the CFO role at real-time data processing services firm Hazelcast and the vice-president role at cybersecurity firm Shape Security.
- Cybersecurity company Cyemptive hired former Hitachi Data Systems SVP Ray McCay as its chief revenue officer.
- Houston, Texas-based IT services company Softeq Development Corp hired Craig Ceccanti as COO, Albert Esser as a chief delivery officer, and Edwin Lemus as chief people officer.
- Seth Falcon joined nurse burnout and alarm fatigue reduction solutions maker CalmWave as VP of engineering.
- Vinay Mehta joined Portland, Ore.-based startup digital communications compliance and intelligence startup Smarsh as its CTO.
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| 3 | | Healthcare startup Thirty Madison acquired the patient records of bankrupt startup The Pill Club, including medical records, patient lists, and prescription files. The news will come as a relief for The Pill Club's over 100,000 patients, who can continue receiving care through Thirty Madison's women's telehealth unit Nurx. More: - Thirty Madison acquired certain debt obligations of The Pill Club, including a $30M loan from TriplePoint.
- San Mateo, Calif.-based birth control and telehealth startup The Pill Club declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Apr. 2023 after California officials alleged that the company fraudulently charged the state's Medicaid program for contraception and counseling services never provided to clients.
- The company settled the claims for $18.275M without admitting any wrongdoing.
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| 4 | | Glyphic AI, a London-based startup founded in 2022 by former DeepMind and Apple engineers, raised a ~$5.4M pre-seed round. The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Dhyan Ventures and the Creator Fund. More: - The startup develops a co-pilot for sales teams to process unstructured data from customer interactions.
- Glyphic AI is aiming to help businesses obtain data on deal completion and potential customer churn.
- The round also included participation from the head of product at Google DeepMind and the director of Google Bard, Rushin Shah.
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| 5 | | Seattle, Wash.-based carbon footprint software maker Climate Vault Solutions nabbed $9.4M Series A funding led by Inclusive Capital Partners Foundation. The firm intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and business reach. Additionally, it intends to use the funding to double its workforce. More: - Climate Vault Solutions uses data from government-regulated carbon markets instead of voluntary carbon markets.
- King Philanthropies, Valor Siren Ventures, and ThirdStream Partners participated in the funding round.
- The firm has already mitigated 1 million metric tons of carbon so far and expects to expand its services to 10 million metric tons by 2025.
Zoom out: - Banks, insurers, private equity firms, and investment managers are expected to spend $256M on climate-tracking software by 2027.
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| 6 | | Vancouver-based fantasy sports startup GameOn announced a $1.7M round led by Lightning Capital. The amount includes a non-dilutive grant from the Flow Ecosystem Fund, subject to milestones. More: - The startup partners with brands in sports and entertainment to develop NFT-based games.
- GameOn has worked with NBCUniversal, Dick's Sporting Goods, Bravo, the WNBA, and the Gaming Society, among others.
- The startup claims more than 500,000 active users.
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- VCs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross set up an AI cloud service dubbed Andromeda Cluster with 2,512 of Nvidia's H100 GPUs. The VCs have set up this unit to provide computing power to portfolio startups because several of them were encountering AI GPU shortages.
- Software startup Pendo conducted a second round of layoffs, reducing its workforce by 12%, or 100 employees.
- Professional membership network Pollen raised $4M in fresh funding from Animo VC, Founder Collective, XYZ, and Precursor Ventures.
- Pincus Capital led a $1.6M seed funding round into AI energy startup Axle. Eka Ventures participated in the funding round.
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Term of the Day Customer Retention: Customer retention is the process of keeping customers loyal to a business and its products or services Question of the Week What's the most bizarre work-related dream you've ever had? Join the conversation |
INSIDE STARTUPS LEADERBOARD (7 DAYS) |
 | Analyst | | 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. | | This newsletter was edited by Vibha Chapparike | |
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