| Hey Insiders, Today we are taking a look at Augmend's $2.2M funding round, AngelList's acquisition of Nova, and Artifact's new text-to-speech feature. We have also rounded up the top early-stage funding rounds of this week. I hope you enjoy today's edition! Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Augmend, a startup that uses AI to enable software developer teams to search company data, came out of stealth mode with a $2.2M round. The five-person company was founded by Diamond Bishop and Tim Misiak, former engineers at Meta and Microsoft. More: - Augmend develops a chat bar that uses large language models and optical character recognition for query responses.
- The startup currently leverages OpenAI APIs, however, it is seeking to switch to using an open-source model.
- The company joins a space that includes Rewind AI, focusing on audiovisual notes.
- Augmend launched out of Madrona Ventures Labs, with participation in the funding round from 8-Bit Capital, Wayfinder Ventures, and Essence VC, among others.
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VCs deployed $733M in early-stage North American startups this week between Jul. 22 to Jul. 28, per Crunchbase data. AI sector raked in 22% of the funding this week. Biotech, analytics, and energy sectors nabbed 18%, 8%, and 7% of the financing, respectively. Here are the top five largest rounds announced this week: - Watertown, Mass.-based biotech startup Nexo Therapeutics emerged from stealth mode with a $60M Series A funding. Versant Ventures led the round, joined by New Enterprise Associates and Cormorant Asset Management.
- Space logistics startup Impulse Space raised a $45M Series A funding round led by Raytheon Technologies' venture arm RTX Ventures.
- Surgical navigation platform Proprio secured $43M Series B from Wheelhouse Capital, DCVC, Bold Capital Partners, and others.
- Kincell Bio emerged from stealth with $36M in funding led by Kineticos Ventures. Kincell spun out from Inceptor Bio.
- Protect AI, a startup that guards AI and ML applications against security vulnerabilities, data breaches, and emerging threats, closed its Series A round with $35M in funding. Evolution Equity Partners led the funding round with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Acrew Capital, Boldstart Ventures, and others.
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| 3 | | AngelList acquired Y Combinator-backed fintech startup Nova for an undisclosed sum. The move will help AngelList —which currently creates products and services for VC firms, investors, fund managers, and startups — to expand its product offerings to include services for the private equity sector. More: - Nova's products will be absorbed under AngelList's Investor Management product suite.
- "We're integrating Nova's investor management products with a series of other products we're building for larger institutional funds such as Treasury and the rest of our software suite," said AngelList's CEO Avlok Kohli.
- Nova's digital subscription offering has been rebranded to AngelList Transact.
- Per Crunchbase, Nova has raised $2M to date through a seed round back in 2018.
- The San Francisco, Calif.-based startup reportedly caters to 10,000 investors, including Van Eck, Pantera, Galaxy, and BlockTower.
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| 4 | | Artifact, a news app built by Instagram's co-founders, launched a text-to-speech feature powered by artificial intelligence. The app enables users to listen to articles using voices, including those of Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow. More: - The new feature also allows users to select speeds between 0.1x to 4.5x.
- The text-to-speech also enables the selection of localized accents, including voices from Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, and the U.K.
- In June, Artifact launched a feature that rewrites headlines using GPT-4 if a user marks it as clickbait.
- The app also uses AI via its recommender systems, taking into account clicks, sharing, and reading time.
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| 5 | | Latin American delivery app startup Rappi expects to offer nearly $60M in loans to restaurants across Mexico and Colombia. The Bogota, Colombia-based startup has partnered with fintech R2 for the commercial lending program. Rappi's senior vice president Alejandro Solis expects to extend credit to 50,000 restaurants in Mexico and 30,000 in Colombia. More: - Restaurants will need to be a part of Rappi's platform for at least three months to be eligible for the loans.
- Rappi will recover the credit via restaurants' sales via their app.
- This is Rappi's latest diversification of its revenue stream, following in the footsteps of DoorDash, which launched a financing arm last year.
- Rappi started out as a grocery delivery business eight years ago and has since continually diversified into new areas.
- Rappi was valued at $5.25B in Jul. 2021 and is backed by SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, and T. Rowe Price.
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| 6 | | Materials Nexus, a startup that enables in-silico testing to discover new materials, raised a £2M (~$2.56M) Seed round led by Ada Ventures. Founded in 2020, the company seeks to enable the discovery of materials for renewable energy generation and storage. More: - The company was founded based on a model developed at Cambridge University that would reduce the number of physical tests needed for discovery.
- Materials Nexus plans to eventually expand to produce the discovered materials.
- The round included participation from the University of Cambridge, MD One Ventures, and angel investors Andrew MacKay and Jasmin Thomas.
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| 7 | | Quick Hits: - Don't miss your chance to invest in Virtuix, one of the fastest-growing startups in the booming gaming market. Invest by 8/10.*
- Women healthcare startup HerMD raised $18M in Series A extension funding led by JAZZ and joined by Amboy Street Ventures and B-Flexion.
- Effectiv, a fraud detection platform for financial institutions, secured an additional $4.5M in seed funding led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with support from Accel. The round brings the total raised under the seed round to $9M.
- China's Ministry of Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission asked Tencent, Meituan, and other large Chinese tech companies to submit case studies on their most successful startup investments across the consumer, telecom, and media sectors.
- Startupbootcamp shortlisted Weer, IN2VIEW, Ascentys ESG, Glam You Up, Deterdraft, Farmlifes, CoCircles, Crick Superfoods, Ekonavi, and ZEROW to join its third cohort of its Sustainability Accelerator.
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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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