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| Hey Insiders, Today we are taking a look at EV bike startup Maka Motors' $37M funding round, Techstars investments in European startups, and Spencer Gore's new Silicon-ion battery startup. 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 | | Maka Motors, an Indonesian electric motorcycle startup, raised a $37M Seed round as it seeks to launch sales in late 2024. The company plans to use the funds to build a factory in West Java this year. More: - According to the startup, Indonesia currently has 43,000 registered electric motorcycles out of 127 million motorbikes.
- Indonesia's goal is to have 600,000 circulating electric vehicles by 2030.
- The round was co-led by East Ventures, SV Investment, and AC Ventures, with participation from Northstar Group, Provident, and Skystar Capital, among others.
- The startup was founded in 2021 by former Gojek employeesRaditya Wibowo and Arief Fadillah.
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What the numbers say: Colorado-headquartered accelerator Techstars backed 661 European startups between 2018 to date, per Pitchbook. Techstars has topped the list of most active accelerators investing in European startups, making it one of the four U.S.-based investors in the top 10. Trailing behind in the second spot is California-based Plug and Play Tech Center, which made 334 investments over the four-and-a-half-year period. Relevance: Techstars dominance in Europe startup investments is due to its presence across seven European cities and the recent expansion to Stockholm and Paris in 2021. The firm raised $150M in 2021 to invest in 100 European startups. Where to see the impact: Despite topping the most active investors list, Techstars still does not have the highest number of unicorn startups in its portfolio. Y-Combinator takes the crown in that aspect, boasting an impressive portfolio that includes payments startup GoCardless, marketing platform MessageBird, and ID verification startup Veriff. | | | |
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| 3 | | Spencer Gore and Rafael Vilá co-founded a new startup developing low-cost sodium-ion batteries. The startup's name was not disclosed as it is currently working under stealth mode. The duo raised an undisclosed sum from a seed round led by angel investors. More: - Gore's career includes stints at Enovix as head of electric vehicle products and at Tesla as a battery engineer.
- Additionally, he founded the electric drone startup Impossible Aerospace in 2016.
- The new startup is the first outside of China to develop silicon-ion batteries.
Zoom out: - Battery manufacturers and automakers are not keen on developing silicon-ion batteries as they are, in theory, unlikely to match the extended driving range expected from newer technologies such as ultrahigh-energy density batteries with silicon anodes or solid-state batteries with pure lithium anodes.
- Silicon-ion batteries weigh three times more and produce a third of the kilowatt-hour capacity than iron-based batteries.
- However, silicon-ion batteries are much cheaper to manufacture, thanks to the abundance of sodium, which accounts for 2.3% of the world's crust, making its reserves 1,000 times larger than global lithium reserves.
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| 4 | | Unstructured Technologies, an LLM data processing startup, raised $25M to expand its operations. The company works on a Python open-source library, containers, and an API. More: - The company, founded in 2022 by CIA analyst Brian Raymond, has Phase I and II Small Business Innovation and Research contracts with the U.S. Air Force and Space Force.
- The startup is collaborating with the U.S. Special Operations Command on building the first LLM with mission-critical data.
- The round was led by Bain Capital, with participation from MongoDB Ventures, M12 Ventures, and Shield Capital Partners, among others.
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| 5 | | "Bid-based" ride-hailing platform InDrive, formerly known as inDriver, launched in Miami. InDrive allows customers to bid on fares for upcoming rides while drivers can accept or counter the offer. More: - InDrive has raised $387M in total funding, per Crunchbase.
- The firm raised $150M in debt funding earlier this February from General Catalyst to pursue aggressive expansion.
- It has added 15 Nigerian cities to its network.
- With the expansion into South Florida, InDrive caters to residents in 655 cities across 48 nations.
- InDrive has a presence in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India.
- 3,500 drivers in South Florida have already signed up for the launch.
Zoom out: - InDrive is waving off its commission until Jan. 2024, giving drivers 100% of earnings from each fare minus the airport fees and highway tolls.
- The firm faces stiff competition from Uber and Lyft. However, it expects to undercut them by charging lower fees of 10% compared to the 25% cut taken by Uber and Lyft.
*Note: Inside.com CEO and founder Jason Calacanis is an investor in Uber. | | | |
| 6 | | FedML, a collaborative AI startup, announced a $11.5M Seed round led by Camford Capital. The company works on a federated approach to machine learning, where models are trained on private or siloed data at the edge. More: - FedML would enable healthcare organizations to build models based on their data without sharing private information.
- Launched in March 2022, the open-source platform has over 3,000 users, performing 8,500 AI training jobs across 10,000 edge devices.
- The startup built FedLLM, a pipeline for domain-specific LLMs, compatible with popular libraries such as Hugging Face and DeepSpeed.
- Other investors in the round include AimTop Ventures, Road Capital, Finality Capital Partners, and PrimeSet.
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- Startup financier Capchase found that VC-backed SaaS startups with ARR between $1M to $15M showed nearly identical growth of 42.8% YoY compared to their bootstrapped counterparts between June 2022 to May 2023.
- Abu Dhabi's G42-backed chip-making startup Cerebras Systems has built a $100M AI supercomputer cluster called Condor Galaxy 1 in Santa Clara, California. The AI supercomputer is the first of the nine such systems to be developed by the startup.
- Japanese bank Mizuho Financial Group is looking to launch a $72M (10B yen) venture debt fund this month to back mid to late-stage startups in the nation.
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 | Analyst | | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot. | | This newsletter was edited by Vibha Chapparike | |
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