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Author : zebethcontrol

Revere is creating a ratings system for the venture capital industry • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Revere, Startups, VentureNo Comments on Revere is creating a ratings system for the venture capital industry • ZebethMedia

The venture capital industry is built on signals. Lead investors help close rounds, pro rata rights show promise of a company, and the partner title gives validity to folks within firms looking to close deals. Revere, a new bet being built by former AngelList executive Eric Woo and family office operator Chris Shen, is playing upon these characteristics. The startup, launching publicly today, is building a rating system for the venture capital industry. The goal is to create a more standardized way to track information about emerging fund managers, so that institutional investors know how to navigate the shifting landscape. “There’s just too much influence in a small number of people, where if Keith Rabois or Elon Musk just tweet something, everyone just jumps on the bandwagon.” Woo said. “In the space of emerging managers, typically that signal comes from big anchor LPs.” How it works Revere’s pitch is that a wider audience wants to participate in backing venture capitalists; they just need the signal on where to go and how to gauge (since proof of consistent returns aren’t necessarily a reality thanks to the whole 10-year horizon thing). Using data provided by an emerging venture firm, Revere uses 20 categories to verify, aggregate and research into the quality of the firm across 5 areas: sourcing, team, value add, track record and firm management. It then creates a heat map, using the same provided data set, that shows, upon quick glance, a firm’s strengths and weaknesses in said categories. Research reports include everything from fund formation details, management structure, strategy and service providers, when evaluating the firm. It’s doing due diligence, and to date, Revere has written over 80 reports. The strategy is reminiscent of what Cambridge Associates has been doing for years, but the startup claims to do it cheaper, faster and with emerging fund managers as a key focus. For example, Revere doesn’t charge fund managers for reports; instead it charges LPs on a per-rating basis, or a monthly subscription fee for access to all reports. The 11-person startup currently takes around two weeks to whip up a report. Over time, if demand increases, it will get harder to turn around reports in that same timeframe. As Revere gathers more data, it sees an opportunity to create more performance benchmarks for the asset class, something that Pitchbook and Cambridge Analytics hasn’t done well, per Woo. “The moment we’re able to stand up and say here are the benchmarks, and we’re showing you why funds that are smaller, at an earlier stage are outperforming, then we think that’s going to be literally a sea change in terms of perception of risk,” from the LP side. The startup currently has over 100 funds on it platform. Revere declined to share any customer names, but said that one of its first customers was a sizable investment consultant. The company doesn’t see itself becoming a marketplace that helps conduct transactions between verified firms and interested LPs; but did confirm that millions have been invested in funds as a result of its reports. While Revere is not able to widely disseminate a report with actual fund manager data, the format, tone, and structure of the sample data in the template report below gives a good sense of what subscribers see. REVERE Ratings – Lantern Ve… by ZebethMedia   But who rates the ratings? Ratings is a sensitive topic in venture, only reinforced by some of the reactions I got by investors when telling them about this ratings platform. VC ratings sites have popped up in the past, largely led by and for founders, but have always struggled with negative bias selection and the difficulty of verifying individual accounts. Backchannel, currently accepting beta users on its Testflight, wants to be a private subreddit for founders and LPs. Revere will need to convince investors that this isn’t a ranking of who’s hot and who’s not, but instead research-based recommendations meant for LPs (not tech twitter). Still, Revere could find itself falling into the same trap that other have. Subjectivity in some of the qualitative reporting of new venture firms could raise questions. The company doesn’t use hard science or artificial intelligence to make conclusions about a firm, meaning that bias could easily sneak in. Would Woo feel stronger about a former AngelList exec raising a new fund, or would Shen look especially for people who understand the depths of the family office world? The difficulty is getting people to lean on data, instead of brands, when it comes to backing new ventures. Woo and Shen believe that Revere’s job isn’t necessarily to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on if a certain venture fund or person is a good idea, but instead offer a whole picture on what one entity is offering in a current moment in time. That said, in a mock-up of a report, Revere showed that it rates firms using categories like “excellent” and “best in class,” a nomenclature reserved for “all-around performers who rate well across multiple categories.” Every year, the company ranks a few firms as either best in class, rising stars, or verified. “Part of the reason people love investing in venture capital is for the intangibles, right? If they just purely wanted returns, and sort of good risk-adjusted returns, there’s other asset classes,” Woo said.     So far, Revere has raised $5.62 million since launching; including a May 2021 pre-seed round of $1.35 million from investors including AngelList, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Blue Future Partners. It also raised a $4.27 million round from Cherubic Ventures, Overlay Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures, Oyster Ventures, MDSV, and others. Instead of trying to get rid of investor’s need to pattern match and check specific boxes, Revere wants to disrupt the industry through standardization. Let’s see if the market is ready to ask for help; and if the standard is tired enough to be disrupted, PDF style.

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Gmail to add a new package tracking feature ahead of holiday shopping season • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Apps, Commerce, gmail, GoogleNo Comments on Gmail to add a new package tracking feature ahead of holiday shopping season • ZebethMedia

Google announced today a small but useful update to Gmail that will allow users to soon be able to track their upcoming package deliveries directly from their inbox. The feature works by looking for emails that include tracking numbers, then using that information to determine the order’s expected delivery date and flagging this for you right in your inbox. That means when you’re scanning through your email list in Gmail, you won’t have to click on your order confirmation emails to see when your package is due to arrive. Instead, this information will be displayed just below the email sender’s name and subject line in the inbox in a small green label. You’ll notice a little truck icon followed by text indicating the order’s status, followed by the delivery date. This label will be updated as the order progresses, with information like “label created,” the arrival date or the delivery date, Google says. Image Credits: Google This feature will save online shoppers a lot of extra steps as typically, consumers have to open their order confirmation emails and then either copy and paste the tracking information into the appropriate carriers’ system, into Google, or click on a provided link to begin tracking the order, for example. Now, all they’ll need to do is look at their Gmail inbox. However, if you do click to open the order confirmation email, it will now include a summary card at the top that offers a bit more detail, including a timeline with checkmarks that shows the current order status — order placed, shipped or delivered — and a link that takes you to the order detail page. Google says the new feature will be available in the U.S. across “most major” shipping carriers in the coming weeks. The expectation is that this feature will arrive ahead of the holiday shopping season when it would be most useful. To enable package tracking, Gmail will first ask users if they want to opt-in to receive tracking updates in a pop-up at the top of the inbox. Users will click “Allow”or “Now now,” depending on their preference. This can also be enabled in Gmail’s settings. Image Credits: Google The system, of course, involves having your email scanned for tracking information, but this is automated — humans aren’t reading your email. Still, some may view this a potential privacy concern, particularly if Gmail chooses to use this data to help inform its various developments in e-commerce and first-party shopping features. The new addition could impact the adoption of popular third-party package tracking apps including Parcel, Route, AfterShip and Shopify’s Shop app — though the latter offers more functionality beyond tracking, like the ability to browse and buy from Shopify merchants. Later, Google says it will expand the package tracking feature to proactively update the label when a package is delayed and bring that email to the top of users’ inboxes to make sure they’re aware.

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George Hotz, aka ‘geohot,’ is leaving Comma.ai for a lofty AI project • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in automated driving, Comma.ai, George Hotz, TransportationNo Comments on George Hotz, aka ‘geohot,’ is leaving Comma.ai for a lofty AI project • ZebethMedia

Four years ago, Comma.ai founder George Hotz turned to his board — of which he is the only member — and fired himself as CEO. At the time, the goal for the famed iPhone and Playstation 3 hacker, known as geohot, was to build out a new research division to focus on behavioral models that can drive cars. Now, Hotz says he is taking “some time away” from the driver assistance system startup that promises to bring Tesla Autopilot like functionality to your car. Although he will remain its sole board member and president. Hotz hasn’t been involved in the much of the day-to-day leaderships task for some time, he told ZebethMedia. That has fallen to COO Alex Matzner and CTO Harald Schäfer. The company hasn’t had a CEO since 2019 when Riccardo Biasini held that role. (Biasini left the CEO post in 2019 and remained at Comma to work on its open pilot software until February 2020.) Hotz has been what Matzner described an observer and occasional hard problem solver. Comma.ai, which developed and now sells a $1,999 driver assistance system devkit that is compatible on more than 200 vehicles, isn’t going anyway, Hotz told ZebethMedia. The focus now is turning the devkit, which runs on Comma’s open source software called openpilot, into a productized consumer product. “I’m good at things when it’s wartime,” Hotz told ZebethMedia in a recent interview. “I’m not so good at hands-on ok, let’s patiently scale this up. ‘Do you want to deal with a supply chain that’s capable of making 100,000 devices a year?’ Like, not really.” And that’s one of the goals: annual sales of 100,000 Comma 3 units. The startup quietly raised $10 million from individuals last year and moved into a 20,000 square-foot facility in San Diego. (Comma’s first $8.1 million in funding was taken in two rounds from Silicon Valley VC a16z.)  It is now “aggressively hiring” and on track to launch some major end-to-end machine learning updates to openpilot later this month, Matzner told ZebethMedia in a recent email. Comma.ai initially launched with a plan to sell a $999 aftermarket self-driving car kit that would give certain vehicle models highway-driving assistance abilities similar to Tesla’s Autopilot feature. Hotz canceled those plans in October 2016 after receiving a letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration. Five weeks later, Comma.ai released its self-driving software to the world. All of the code, as well as plans for the hardware, was posted on GitHub. The company continued to develop an ecosystem of hardware products all aimed at bringing semi-autonomous driving capabilities to cars. Those efforts have culminated into the Comma 3, which is priced between $1,999 and $2,499 depending on the storage size. The car harness, which connects the devkit to the vehicle, is another $200. The Comma 3 is far easier to use than its earlier iterations. It requires some patience to install and set up, but no longer requires any technical expertise anymore, Hotz said. Now, it’s up to the company to take the Comma 3 and make into a “productized” and scalable consumer product, he added. What’s next? Hotz is already deep into his next project, which he calls Tiny Corporation. His aim is to write a new framework for machine learning that is faster and less complex than PyTorch. Instead of training the ML model in the cloud and shipping it to the edge, Hotz wants to build tools that allow ML models to be trained at the edge. “The current Pytorch and TensorFlow are not going to cut it for training the edge,” he said. AI-related fields including automated driving are turning more to deep neural networks — a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence algorithms that allow a computer to learn by using a series of connected networks to identify patterns in data.  sort of, how a brain works. But as Hotz notes, “we’re all pretty new to this neural network stuff.” Andrej Karpathy, a deep learning and computer vision expert and former director of AI at Tesla, has referred to this stage as programming 2.0, or Software 2.0, in which programming is done by example and humans are really only writing the general scaffolding. In other words, software that writes itself. “You shouldn’t be building a (AI) chip until you can build software that outperforms or at least performs the same as Pytorch on Nvidia,” Hotz said. “As the build up to building AI chips, first let’s build the software.”

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3 investors explain how finance-focused proptech startups can survive the downturn • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in EC Fintech, EC investor survey, EC Real Estate and Proptech, economic downturn, Fintech, proptech, real estate tech, StartupsNo Comments on 3 investors explain how finance-focused proptech startups can survive the downturn • ZebethMedia

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest rates for mortgages dropped to historic lows. Predictably, home buyers made hay, taking full advantage of the favorable financial environment to pick up new homes and refinancing mortgages on their existing homes. Startups operating in the financial side of the real estate tech market suddenly faced a surge in demand, and many departed on hiring sprees to keep up. But as those interest rates, housing prices and inflation began to climb back up, demand slowed dramatically. This meant that the once high-flying startups were suddenly dealing with the opposite problem — too many employees and not enough transactions to make money. Layoffs became widespread. Shutdowns were a thing again. As interest rates soared even higher, the once frothy market morphed into an environment where only the fittest could survive. We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to participate in ZebethMedia surveys, where we poll top professionals about challenges in their industry. If you’re an investor and would like to participate in future surveys, fill out this form. To get a sense of how investors who have backed proptech startups with a financial focus are dealing with the market shift, we reached out to three active investors. The trio shared their thoughts on everything from what types of startups in the home buying and lending space have the best shot at survival to the advice they are giving startups in their portfolios. Pete Flint, general partner of NFX, noted that the chances of survival are higher for proptech startups that let consumers fractionally invest in properties and increase access for those seeking a rent-to-own approach. “The best thing founders can do during a downturn is move quickly and efficiently, and evolve their offering to match the new needs of the market. This will help them capture more market share, which will give them the highest chance of survival,” he said. Nima Wedlake, principal at Thomvest Ventures, agreed, noting that agility is a critical trait. “Startups that survive this period will adapt their product offerings to meet the needs of today’s homeowners and buyers,” he said. In such a climate, companies that help others navigate tough times seem to be in special demand. “Companies that sell software that enables cost-cutting or additional lead-generation opportunities are seeing accelerating adoption as incumbent mortgage companies realize they need an edge to drive demand,” Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner of MetaProp, pointed out. “If a startup can prove its users see significant savings, then they shouldn’t have a hard time being successful in this market,” he said. We spoke with: Editor’s note: For a more complete picture, we’re examining the proptech sector from three different angles. This survey covers proptech startups with a financial focus, and we’ll soon publish a survey that looks at upcoming tech in the space, and another that examines the environmental impact of proptech and what startups are doing to minimize their footprint. Pete Flint, general partner, NFX Startups doing anything related to home buying or lending have struggled this year. Which types of startups operating in the home buying/lending space do you think have the highest chances of survival? Resilient proptech companies have to be able to navigate the cyclicality of the industry. It is embedded in the category, and with the long housing and tech boom, many founders have underestimated this. In my view, it is less about the “type” of startup that is more likely to survive now and more about what the startups do to respond to this moment. The best thing founders can do during a downturn is move quickly and efficiently, and evolve their offering to match the new needs of the market. This will help them capture more market share, which will give them the highest chance of survival. The verticals that we think will be more resilient during this economy are:

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Web3 infrastructure startup Tenderly takes on Infura, Alchemy with new node offering • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Alchemy, Crypto, Infura, tenderlyNo Comments on Web3 infrastructure startup Tenderly takes on Infura, Alchemy with new node offering • ZebethMedia

Web3 developer tooling startup Tenderly is getting into the node game with a new product it announced today called Web3 Gateway. The product will help web3 developers read, stream and analyze blockchain data, according to the company. The offering builds on the company’s observability stack, which it says indexes over nine billion transactions across more than twenty blockchain networks. While many blockchain and crypto companies have struggled to grow amid unfavorable market conditions, infrastructure providers such as Tenderly have remained relatively resilient to the headwinds, buoyed by the trend of steady developer interest in building web3 products. The new offering is a sign of competition between web3 infrastructure providers heating up, as it puts the startup in direct competition with ConsenSys, the company that owns popular node-as-a-service provider Infura, and Alchemy, another widely-used node provider in the industry. Prior to this, Tenderly was focused solely on the smart contract space with its dashboard and API that helped engineers develop, test and monitor the health of decentralized applications. Node providers, meanwhile, are often compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for web3 companies because they provide a critical layer of blockchain infrastructure. Belgrade, Serbia-based Tenderly last raised a $40 million Series B announced in March this year, just before crypto prices started a substantial descent. The financing came just months after the startup’s Series A round and it was announced in the same month as Alchemy’s $200 million Series C extension, which valued the latter company at $10.2 billion. The company says its platform is used by tens of thousands of developers from apps such as Uniswap, Yearn Finance and OpenSea and that it works with the majority of the top 100 Ethereum projects, ZebethMedia reported in March. Yasmin Razavi, a growth investor at Spark Capital who helped lead the firm’s investment in Tenderly, told ZebethMedia that the startup’s new offering came as a result of its developers finding they could not rely on existing node providers for their purposes and deciding to instead build out that capability themselves. “The issues you hear with Alchemy and Infura are mostly around their inability to scale,” Razavi said. According to Razavi, customers report that Tenderly’s offering is three times as performant as Alchemy’s based on beta testing the company has conducted. While its performance has yet to be validated in the public realm, it’s clear that this offering brings Tenderly closer to being a full-suite provider of web3 infrastructure services and therefore a more formidable force in the subsector.

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OpenAI will give roughly 10 AI startups $1M each and early access to its systems • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in AI, artificial intelligence, funding, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, VentureNo Comments on OpenAI will give roughly 10 AI startups $1M each and early access to its systems • ZebethMedia

OpenAI, the San Francisco-based lab behind AI systems like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, today launched a new program to provide early-stage AI startups with capital and access to OpenAI tech and resources. Called Converge, the cohort will be financed by the OpenAI Startup Fund, OpenAI says. The $100 million entrepreneurial tranche was announced last May and was backed by Microsoft and other partners. The 10 or so founders chosen for Converge will receive $1 million each and admission to five weeks of office hours, workshops and events with OpenAI staff, as well as early access to OpenAI models and “programming tailored to AI companies.” “We’re excited to meet groups across all phases of the seed stage, from pre-idea solo founders to co-founding teams already working on a product,” OpenAI writes in a blog post shared with ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement. “Engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders … from all backgrounds, disciplines, and experience levels are encouraged to apply, and prior experience working with AI systems is not required.” The deadline to apply is November 25, but OpenAI notes that it’ll continue to evaluate applications after that date for future cohorts. When OpenAI first detailed the OpenAI Startup Fund, it said recipients of cash from the fund would receive access to Azure resources from Microsoft. It’s unclear whether the same benefit will be afforded to Converge participants; we’ve asked OpenAI to clarify. We’ve also asked OpenAI to disclose the full terms for Converge, including the equity agreement, and we’ll update this piece once we hear back. Beyond Converge, surprisingly, there aren’t many incubator programs focused exclusively on AI startups. The Allen Institute for AI has a small accelerator that launched in 2017, which provides up to a $500,000 pre-seed investment and up to $450,000 in cloud compute credits. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng heads up the AI Fund, a $175 million tranche to initiate new AI-centered businesses and companies. And Nat Friedman (formerly of GitHub) and Daniel Gross (ex-Apple) fund the AI Grant, which provides up to $250,000 for “AI-native” product startups and $250,000 in cloud credits from Azure. With Converge, OpenAI is no doubt looking to cash in on the increasingly lucrative industry that is AI. The Information reports that OpenAI — which itself is reportedly in talks to raise cash from Microsoft at a nearly $20 billion valuation — has agreed to lead financing of Descript, an AI-powered audio and video editing app, at a valuation of around $550 million. AI startup Cohere is said to be negotiating a $200 million round led by Google, while Stability AI, the company supporting the development of generative AI systems, including Stable Diffusion, recently raised $101 million. The size of the largest AI startup financing rounds doesn’t necessarily correlate with revenue, given the enormous expenses (personnel, compute, etc.) involved in developing state-of-the-art AI systems. (Training Stable Diffusion alone cost around $600,000, according to Stability AI.) But the continued willingness of investors to cut these startups massive checks — see Inflection AI‘s $225 million raise, Anthropic’s $580 million in new funding and so on — suggests that they have confidence in an eventual return on investment.

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Opendoor lays off about 550 employees, or 18% of its workforce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Eric Wu, Fintech, Layoffs, OpenDoor, proptech, real estate techNo Comments on Opendoor lays off about 550 employees, or 18% of its workforce • ZebethMedia

Opendoor is letting go of about 550 people, or 18% of the company, across all functions, its co-founder and CEO Eric Wu announced in a blog post today. The real estate technology company is one of many real estate tech companies that have had to lay off workers in 2022. Online mortgage lender Better.com has had multiple rounds of layoffs and in June, Redfin and Compass shed a combined 900+ workers. Skyrocketing mortgage interest rates and inflation are largely to blame for the decreased demand that has led to slowdowns in business at such companies. For his part, Opendoor’s Wu said his company was navigating “one of the most challenging real estate markets in 40 years.” In his blog post, the executive said that his company over the past two quarters had worked to reduce its operating expenses. He wrote: “Prior to today, we scaled back our capacity by over 830 positions – primarily by reducing third party resourcing – and we eliminated millions of fixed expenses. We did not make the decision to downsize the team today lightly but did so to ensure we can accomplish our mission for years to come.” Impacted employees will receive ten weeks of severance pay, with an additional two weeks of pay for every full year beyond two years of tenure. All current healthcare benefits will remain active for the rest of the month, then Opendoor will pay for three months of health insurance.  The company also plans to offer “job transition support” and launch an opt-in talent directory to help laid off team members “connect with new opportunities.” Opendoor went public in late December 2020 after completing its planned merger with the SPAC Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings II, headed by investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The eight-year-old company first offered its stock to the public at $31.47 per share. At the time of writing today, shares were trading at $2.48, only slightly higher than the company’s 52-week low of $2.26. This means that the company is valued at just $1.56 billion, down from a valuation of $8 billion in 2021. When it comes to venture capital, Opendoor last raised $300 million at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation in March of 2019. Over time, it has raised about $1.3 billion in equity funding and nearly $3 billion in debt financing to finance its home purchases. Investors in the company include General Atlantic, the SoftBank Vision Fund, NEA, Norwest Venture Partners, GV, GGV Capital, Access Technology Ventures, SV Angel and Fifth Wall Ventures, along with others. Founders include Eric Wu and Founders Fund general partner Keith Rabois.

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Eric Schmidt backs former Google exec’s digital family office platform in $90 million funding • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Caesar Sengupta, Coatue Management, Eric Schmidt, Fintech, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India, Sequoia India, StartupsNo Comments on Eric Schmidt backs former Google exec’s digital family office platform in $90 million funding • ZebethMedia

Caesar Sengupta has worked on, and overseen, several category-defining projects in the past decade and a half. As a product lead at Google, he was in charge of ChromeOS, the company’s desktop operating system. He then headed the Android-maker’s Next Billion Users initiative that made products such as Google Pay in India to serve and onboard the next wave of internet users. Last year, he left Google with scores of colleagues to start a new venture. Now, he is ready to share what they have been up to. Sengupta said Wednesday his startup, rebranded as Arta Finance, will work to provide individuals access to alternative assets that have so far largely been limited to the ultrawealthy. Arta is building the “digital family office for the world,” said Sengupta in an interview with ZebethMedia. “However, this is a highly regulated space, so we have to take very measured and cautious steps and we are also building it in a by-the-book manner.” Sengupta also disclosed that Arta Finance has raised some funding: It has raised over $90 million across seed and Series A funding rounds from investors including Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, Coatue and more than 140 entrepreneurs, including Eric Schmidt, Betsy Cohen and Ram Shriram. He and his colleagues identified the problem because they related to it in their personal lives, Sengupta said. “We realized that once you get to the $10 million to $15 million range, you can get the private bank to engage with you, and they will help you. But for the vast majority of us, who have some money and are making money, our options are very limited,” he said. “You can go to the financial planner, but it feels old-school for us tech-savvy people. You can try to do it yourself, but most of us are so busy with our work and life that all sorts of financial planning falls by the side. But if you look closely, certain parts around investing is a big data problem — the kind of problem we can apply machine learning to at scale.” Image Credits: Arta On Arta, customers will gain access to investment opportunities in alternative assets, including private equity, venture capital, private debt and real estate. The eponymous platform will allow members to start with as low as $10,000 in investment and gain access to funds from top-10 fund managers, including BNY Mellon, who have consistently delivered high returns over the past decades.  Arta customers will also be able to avail lines of credit without having to sell their stocks. “We don’t want our customers to liquidate to get liquidity,” Sengupta said. Members will also have the option to create “highly personalized” portfolios using stocks, bonds, options and leverage, he said, adding that fund managers and banks typically pool every customer’s money and are slow to make changes to their portfolio selection. The startup says it will accrue interest based on performance and will be transparent about its pricing. Arta has chosen a “massive unsolved problem in the global fintech space. Caesar and team are uniquely accomplished in having built multiple cutting-edge products that are used by billions of internet users. Similar to many other consumer fintech companies we have partnered with, this one also requires a more user-centric approach, a more delightful user experience and a more seamless and scalable platform than likely exists today,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director at Sequoia India, in a statement. Arta is going live with accredited investors in the U.S. today. Sengupta said the startup plans to expand to many markets, including Singapore and India, over the coming years. “What excites us about Arta is the depth of understanding of two critical lines. The first one is the complexity in financial services and the need to have more transparent access to the information that will allow you to make better decisions,” said Micky Malka, founder of Ribbit Capital, in a statement. “Second, is the automation of it by using the best technology around. At Arta, we find the best of the two. They understand the consumer, they understand the pain, and they have the experience of working with the best technology. We’re excited to see how they can influence and change how everyone thinks about their capital and assets.”

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Investors are either ghosting, quiet quitting or rewriting their entire playbook • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Equity podcast, maternity leave, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments on Investors are either ghosting, quiet quitting or rewriting their entire playbook • ZebethMedia

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex interviewed one of their favorite reporters, Business Insider’s Melia Russell! The trio chatted through how the role of a venture capitalist is changing. That means we spoke about emerging fund managers, seasoned operators and, of course, Russell’s latest story about how some investors are re-writing the playbooks when it comes to maternity leave policies at their firms. I don’t want to tease out all the hot takes, but let’s just say that this dispatch is a tad blunt. For one, apparently, no one thinks that venture firm M&A is a thing other than us. Anyways, we think you’ll love the episode, learn something new about how venture is changing and probably have a take on whether this is natural job cycle stuff or true structural changes. We’re back Friday with our weekly roundup, which, as you can imagine, is going to be packed. Chat soon! Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. ZebethMedia also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, a show that details how our stories come together and more!

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