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| Hey Insiders, Today we are taking a look at Meatable's $35M funding round, the role of immigrant founders in U.S. unicorn startups, and electric bike charging startup Microfleet's $500K grant. If you find this newsletter helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Thank you. Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Netherlands-based startup Meatable announced a $35M Series B led by Agronomics. The company uses pig stem cells to produce sausages and pork dumplings. More: - The process involves taking a single cell from an unharmed pig and artificially replicating the growth of the animal in eight days — 30x faster than raising a pig on a farm, according to the startup.
- Meatable filed with the Singapore Food Agency for approval to launch sales to restaurants and retailers. The company then plans to launch in the U.S.
- Other participants in Series B include new investor Invest-NL and recurring firms BlueYard, Bridford Group, MilkyWay, and DSM Venturing, among others.
- The new round brings Meatable's total funding to $95M, following a $47M Series A in Mar. 2021.
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What the numbers say: 319 of 582 U.S.-based unicorn startups had at least one immigrant co-founder or founder, per a new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). 80% of the unicorn startups were co-founded by immigrants or had at least an immigrant in key leadership roles. Relevance: 31% of the startups had immigrant founders from India or Israel. 66 U.S.-startups were founded or co-founded by immigrants from India, whereas immigrants from Israel co-founded 54 startups. Immigrants from India, Israel, the U.K., Canada, China, and France were instrumental in establishing half of the unicorn startups. What happened: The unicorn creation rate has slumped this year, with just 18 new startups entering the $1B valuation club in Q1, 89% less than the previous quarter's tally of 163. | | | |
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| 3 | | Australian e-bike charging dock startup Microfleet was awarded a $500,000 grant by the iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre, as it seeks to launch in New York City. The company is reportedly in talks with city officials to install 70,000 OneDock universal charging stations for e-bikes, e-scooters, and other light electric vehicles. More: - New York City officials are reportedly interested in the solution due to the reported safety issues involving lithium battery charging, which have been linked to 216 fires.
- Microfleet is also planning to install 100,000 smart docks in Australia.
- The company has a goal to reach one million docking points by 2030.
- The startup is seeking to capture what it estimates to be 2% of the micro-mobility charging market share by 2030, $1.35B.
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| 4 | | Indian gaming app startup Mobile Premier League (MPL) laid off 350 employees or 50% of its workforce. The layoffs were in response to the Indian government's decision last month to impose a 28% tax on online gaming platforms that involve actual money transactions. More: - MPL's founder and CEO Sai Srinivas said, "As a digital company, our variable costs predominantly involve people, server, and office infrastructure. Therefore, we must take steps to bring these expenses down in order to survive and to ensure that the business remains viable."
- Srinivas added that the new taxation will increase the tax burden by 350% to 400%.
- The layoffs will affect the product team the most, impacting more than 60 employees.
- The startup — last valued at $2.2B — has raised $375M capital to date from Peak XV Partners, Pegasus Tech Ventures, RTP Global, and other investors.
Zoom out: - 100 gaming firms addressed a letter to India's finance ministry asking them to roll back the changes as the decision could potentially wipe away $2.5B invested in the sector and cause the loss of 1 million jobs.
- MPL's competitor Dream11 lowered its profit projections to less than $100M, down 80% from earlier estimates of $350M to $400M.
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| 5 | | KetoSwiss, a Basel-based startup, announced it raised a €4.4M (~$4.8M) Seed round from undisclosed investors. The company focuses on medical nutrition for migraine and associated disorders. More: - The startup's product, MigraKet, contains micronutrients aimed at optimizing brain energy metabolism.
- The company plans to use the funds to expand to other metabolic dysfunction-driven neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease.
- KetoSwiss previously raised a $4M round in Oct. 2022 led by the William K. Warren Foundation, with participation from R42 Group, Healthspan Capital, Baszucki Group, and Ortho Innovators.
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| 6 | | Nvidia is set to launch its Training Cluster as a Service product which it developed in partnership with AI startup Hugging Face. The service is powered by Nvidia's cloud-based supercomputer DGX Cloud which offers clients cloud instances with H100 or A100 GPUs and access to 640 GB of GPU memory. Enterprise customers will be able to train their AI models on Hugging Face's 250,000 large language models and 50,000 data sets. More: - Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said, "Our collaboration will bring Nvidia's most advanced AI supercomputing to Hugging Face to enable companies to take their AI destiny into their own hands with open source to help the open-source community easily access the software and speed they need to contribute to what's coming next."
- Nvidia's DGX Cloud offering is available for $36,999 per instance per month.
Zoom out: - Hugging Face is reportedly looking to raise fresh funds at a $4B valuation.
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| 7 | | Quick Hits: - Wiz partnered with Wiley to create the AWS Security Foundations Guide For Dummies. This free 46-page guide includes techniques for securing AWS resources.*
- Industrial electrolyzer technology developer Verdagy closed its Series B funding round co-led by Temasek and Shell Ventures at $73M.
- Korean proptech startup Dongnae is acquiring co-living startup Dears for an undisclosed sum.
- Cloud data management startup Rubrik is acquiring public cloud data security Laminar. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. However, the deal is valued at $200M to $250M, per sources close to the matter.
- The SEC has concluded an investigation into suspected securities law breaches at digital non-bank lender Better.com and its blank-check SPAC entity Aurora Acquisition Corp, and the SEC determined that no enforcement action against Aurora or Better was required.
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Term of the Day Product-led growth (PLG): Product-led growth (PLG) is a marketing and sales strategy that focuses on using the product itself as the primary driver of growth. Question of the Week Do you think the 9-to-5 workday still relevant in today's modern workplace? 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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