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| Here's your daily Startups briefing: - Apple quietly acquired DarwinAI earlier this year to boost its AI offerings
- 🏗️ Adam Neumann's new startup Flow to construct rental apartments, retail space, and offices in Miami
- 🛡️ Zscaler acquired Avalor to boost AI-powered data security capabilities
Thank you. Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Tech giant Apple quietly acquired Canadian artificial intelligence startup DarwinAI for an undisclosed sum earlier this year, per Bloomberg. The acquisition will further boost Apple's AI offerings in 2024 and improve manufacturing efficiency. Apple reportedly plans to add AI features to its upcoming iOS 18 software for iPhones. More: - DarwinAI's employees are now a part of Apple's artificial intelligence division, sources informed Bloomberg, with co-founder Alexander Wong taking up the director role.
- The Waterloo, Ontario-based startup has raised over $15M from investors from BDC Capital's Deep Tech Venture Fund, Obvious Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, and Inovia Capital.
- BDC Capital's website confirmed its exit from DarwinAI.
- The firm counts Lockheed Martin Corp. and Intel Corp. as its two most prominent clients.
Zoom out: - Following the acquisition news, Apple's shares briefly jumped by more than 1% to $173.37.
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| 2 | | VCs deployed $1B in early-stage North American startups this week between March 9 and March 15, per Crunchbase data. AI startups raked in 26% of the funding this week. Healthcare, analytics, and blockchain startups nabbed 16%, 11%, and 9% of the financing, respectively. 
Here are the top five largest rounds announced this week: - AI-driven precision medicine biotech startup Zephyr closed its Series A funding round at $111M. Revolution Growth, Eli Lilly, Jeff Skoll, and EPIQ Capital Group provided the funding.
- Prime Movers Lab led an $80M Series A funding into CarbonCapture, a climate tech startup that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Siemens Financial Services, Idealab X, Saudi oil giant Aramco, and Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures participated in the round.
- Pouched baby food brand Serenity Kids raised $52M in Series B funding led by Stride Consumer Partners.
- Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain development startup Eclipse Labs raked in $50M in Series A funding. Placeholder and Hack VC co-led the round, joined by Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, and Fenbushi Capital.
- Hyperscale data processing and analytics startup Ocient extended its Series B round with an additional $49.4M capital provided by Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital, and Wolf Capital Management. The round adds to the firm's previous $40M Series B round led by Greycroft and OCA Ventures in January 2021.
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| 3 | | Cybersecurity software firm Zscaler acquired AI-powered data security startup Avalor Technologies. While the official transaction value is unknown, sources pegged the cash and stock deal to be worth $310M. The acquisition will help boost the firm's cybersecurity functions by adding security incident reporting, incident mitigation, asset recovery, data classification, and security policy generation capabilities. More: - Avalor had raised $30M from investors, including TCV, Salesforce Ventures, Jibe Ventures, and Cyberstarts.
- The startup had about 80 employees spread across its offices in the U.S. and Israel.
Zoom out: - This is Zscaler's third acquisition to date, after buying cyberattack protection startup Canonic and cloud infrastructure entitlement platform Trustdome.
- Zscaler's revenue jumped 35% last quarter to $525M.
- It has a market cap of $30B.
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| 4 | | WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann's new real estate startup Flow is planning to build rental apartments, retail space, and small offices in Miami, per a filing on MuniOS seen by Bloomberg. Concorde Group estimates the buildings to be worth $300M. The project is part of Miami Worldcenter, an urban redevelopment venture that covers more than 20 acres in an area of Miami that was once considered a tent city for the homeless. More: - Flow raked in $350M VC funding from Andreessen Horowitz at a $1B valuation in August 2022.
- The office and retail spaces are expected to be completed by next year.
- Miami Worldcenter is also raising $240M through a government bond sale.
Zoom out: - Neumann and other investors, including Dan Loeb's Third Point, are exploring a bid to bring WeWork out of bankruptcy.
- He stepped down as the CEO of WeWork after the company's initial failure to go public in 2019.
- WeWork was once valued at about $47B.
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| 5 | | Sal Rehmetullah and Suneera Madhani, the founders of unicorn payment startup Stax Payments, launched a new startup called Worth AI. The company leverages AI to generate a single credit score for small to medium-sized businesses. More: - Co-founder and co-CEO Madhani said, "We are launching Worth AI because there is a desperate need for data transparency and accurate financial profiling of businesses."
- The platform arrives at the WorthScore by studying financial transactions, sales data, and credit history.
- Worth AI's platform is integrated with Shopify, Stripe, payroll systems, and major banks.
- Additionally, the platform sends personalized recommendations to businesses to help them improve their score.
- Worth AI hopes the platform will help startups negotiate better terms with lenders.
- The startup has already raised $12M from investors.
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| 6 | | Textio, a startup that removes biased content from performance feedback reports and job descriptions, laid off 16% of its workforce, or 14 employees, as part of a company-wide restructuring initiative. After the layoffs, the company has about 71 employees remaining. The layoffs come as the firm shifts resources to Textio Lift, a product it released last year. More: - This is Textio's second round of layoffs after it let go of 15 employees in the first quarter of 2023.
- Since its founding in 2014, the company has secured $42.5M from investors, including Industry Ventures, Emergence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Cowboy Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta.
- Earlier this year, co-founder Kieran Snyder stepped down from the CEO role and moved into a new role as chief scientist emeritus.
- Snyder's husband, Jensen Harris, the co-founder and former chief experience officer, took up the CEO role.
- Notable customers include Bloomberg, Cisco, Hulu, Oracle, Spotify, and Warner Music Group.
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| 7 | | Quick Hits: - Meowtel is where convenience meets quality cat care. Personalized, in-home cat sitting for true cat enthusiasts.*
- Meta is suing former VP of infrastructure Dipinder Singh for allegedly stealing documents related to employee and business contracts while taking up a new role at an AI startup, Omniva, in June 2023. Singh also took at least eight former Meta employees with him to Omniva.
- EACON, a startup creating autonomous driving technology for mining purposes, closed its Series C++ funding round at $44.5M. The fresh funding was led by the global mining group Zijin Mining.
- Customer journey mapping startup TheyDo bagged $34M in Series B funding led by Blossom Capital. Arches Capital and Innovation Quarter participated in the round.
- Insulated apparel startup Oros Labs has raised over $21M in fresh funding, per SEC filings seen by Business Journals.
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 | Analyst | | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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