Andreessen Horowitz

Equals secures $15M investment to supercharge spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, Apps, Craft Ventures, Enterprise, Startups, worklifeNo Comments

Equals, a New York-based startup ambitiously aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine. Co-founded by Ben McRedmond and Bobby Pinero, two former Intercom employees, Equals claims its spreadsheet is one of the few with built-in connections to databases, versioning and collaboration features. Equals isn’t the first startup on a mission to kill the traditional spreadsheet. There’s Airtable, of course, plus upstarts like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk and Pigment — the last of which raised $73 million last November for its data analytics and visualization service. But Pinero, Equal’s CEO, claims that Equals is unique in that it doesn’t so much replace the spreadsheet as incorporate additional tools, like live data integrations. “Equals comes from a really simple and obvious insight: that the spreadsheet is the best way to do analysis,” Pinero told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Excel was built nearly 40 years ago. Google Sheets 16 years ago. The way companies work today is meaningfully different. Our data is way more accessible. We should automate much of the painful, manual work of getting data into a spreadsheet. And we’ve learned so much about how teams better collaborate over the past decade. A spreadsheet should incorporate those learnings. That’s Equals.” Customers can tap Equals to build analyses with real-time data directly from a database or data warehouse, with or without using sequel query language. It supports standard formulas and offers templates for common use cases, like tracking recurring revenue and measuring user engagement. Image Credits: Equals Soon, Equals will be able to import scripts to allow users to connect spreadsheets to different APIs and internal tools with JavaScript or Python. Also on the way are pivot tables and connectors to business intelligence apps from Salesforce, QuickBooks, Stripe and Google Analytics. “Equals represents a massive opportunity to get business stakeholders — typically folks who are neglected from being able to get their own data — access to data. To be able to work with data in a tool they’re comfortable and already know how to use: a spreadsheet,” Pinero said. “No more manual spreadsheets that take hours to manually update across the team. No more dumping data from BI tools into spreadsheets to then do analysis.” That’s a lot to promise, but Pinero is well aware of the hurdles ahead. He doesn’t expect 10-employee Equals to be profitable for a while — the Series A proceeds will go mostly toward R&D, he says; Equals has raised $23 million to date — and the platform will remain gated behind a waitlist pending the next major product release. Pinero claims that “thousands” of people have signed up so far. “It speaks to the excitement and traction with Equals that in this market we’ve been able to raise a significant series A. At our current burn, we have eight-plus years of runway,” Pinero said. “We’re very well positioned to outlast this downturn, however long it may go. As the saying goes, generational companies are built during these downturns, and we plan on making Equals one of those.”

Rewind wants to revamp how you remember, with millions from a16z • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, Dan Siroker, Optimizely, rewind, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

While there have been quite a few attempts to disrupt search engines, Rewind may be the first I’ve ever seen try to revamp the way we search through our online lives. One app at a time. Built by Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely, Rewind wants to help people with their memory. The startup, launching today, uses nifty tech to record how someone scrolls and chats through their day. It creates a searchable recording of what happened when, who said what during that Zoom meeting and every instance someone has ever brought up expense reporting hacks. “The content of discussions, debates and decisions are often lost forever as soon as a meeting is over,” Siroker said. “With Rewind, you never have to worry about losing this content again….you can go back to the exact moment in a meeting you are looking for by simply searching for a word that was said, a word that appeared on your screen.” Siroker compares the app to a hearing aid, which he says changed his life after he started to go deaf in his 20s. “To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower,” Siroker said. After leaving Optimizely in October 2020, he began looking for different ways to augment human capability. According to LinkedIn, he started a foundation in 2018 to “fund and conduct scientific research in order to accelerate our path toward human mind emulation.” In product form, this goal looks like Rewind. Siroker said that the startup “uses APIs to determine the specific app that is in focus at any given time,” and then creates a timeline of that behavior. It also uses an API to allow deep linking to websites, so people can open in chrome directly from search results. Users don’t need to integrate with Gmail, Dropbox or Slack, but instead just can download and “rewind” to start capturing the apps. Put in practice, if, for example, you forget the URL of the landing page of a new rival app that someone mentioned during a developer stand-up, you can rewind – haha – through your day, find the moment in the meeting someone threw the link on the screen, copy the link and paste. As for the “why now” question, Siroker had an immediate answer: “Apple Silicon (i.e. M1 and M2 chips). Without it, we couldn’t do what we do. We leverage every part of the System on a Chip (SoC) to do everything locally on your machine.” Rewind claims that it compresses raw video recording data up to 3,750x times without a loss of quality; “that means even with the smallest hard drive you can buy from Apple today, you can store years of continuous recordings,” the company said in a statement provided to ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement. (Apple is not an investor). Rewind addresses one of the biggest challenges with any app – user trust – head on. The recordings are stored locally on individuals’ Mac computers. In theory, that means that the company doesn’t touch the data. Rewind says that only users have access to their data. Siroker added that users can pause and delete recordings at any time, excluding specific apps like Signal or 1Password or go Incognito mode, saying that “by default, we don’t record Chrome Incognito or Safari private browsing windows). Image Credits: Rewind There are still some risks with storing a sensitive, all-encompassing repository of everything you’ve seen, said or heard on a machine. Malware could potentially tap into sensitive data if your computer is compromised, for example. There’s also the awkward dance of a Rewind user recording someone on their screen without their permission; which is illegal in some states. Siroker said that he recommends users ask those they are recording for verbal permission, emphasizing that only the user can have access to the recordings. Still, a user with Rewind may feel less inclined to complain about their corporate parents or share personal stories knowing that there is a recording of it somewhere (delete button doesn’t retroactively work, unfortunately). “While the laws differ from state to state, we believe privacy is so important that we recommend users of our product hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than the bare legal minimum, ” Siroker said, speaking about proactive recording consent. “Not only is this the safest approach legally, but it is also just the right thing to do.” As for how this makes people better at remembering instead of just better at not losing track of random things throughout their workday, the jury is still out. If you look through your day, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll remember things more, it may just mean you have more stored memories at your fingertips. Which I guess is a memory aid, but definitely one that requires you to be sitting down at your computer. “The long-term vision is giving humans perfect memory, the product today is all about search,” Siroker said. “That’s where we can have the biggest impact. If you think about it, if we all already had perfect memory we wouldn’t need to search our emails, texts, dcos etc to find things we’ve seen before. We would just remember them.” So far, the company has raised $10 million at a $75 million valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from First Round Capital and others. The app is currently free, Siroker says, but there will be a freemium monthly subscription down the road. And, despite his history in helping companies better market advertising campaigns, Siroker says that Rewind “will never sell your data or do advertising.”

Apex Space takes on satellite bus ‘bottleneck’ with seed round led by a16z • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, apex space, katherine boyle, Space, StartupsNo Comments

Apex Space, a startup that aims to transform satellite bus manufacturing, emerged from stealth Monday with a $7.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The Los Angeles-based company has set its sights on the satellite bus — the part of the spacecraft that hosts the payload — which it says is the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry. Apex’s two co-founders, Ian Cinnamon and Maximilian Benassi, said in a blog post that they independently observed core changes to the industry that convinced them that a new satellite bus manufacturing solution was needed. Cinnamon, a technology startup founder whose company, Synapse Technology, was acquired by Palantir in 2020, said he saw payload customers being “held back” by the long and costly process associated with building custom satellite buses. Benassi, an engineer whose career includes a six-year tenure at SpaceX and nearly a year-and-a-half at Astra, observed changes to launch economics that make mass manufacturing — rather than the bespoke engineering process that’s characterized satellite buses thus far — more sensible. “Given this transformative change, we must begin to think about spacecraft differently and adapt to the new market conditions,” the pair said. “We cannot just build spacecraft. We must manufacture them at scale.” This approach, which Cinnamon described in an interview with ZebethMedia as scalable and product-led, is a major departure from traditional satellite bus manufacturing. Apex aims to deliver satellite busses to customers in a matter of months, rather than the status quo timescale of a few years. Apex will come to the market with a small satellite bus called Aries, which will be capable of carrying payloads up to 94 kilograms. That platform will be suitable for missions to low Earth orbit; the startup says on its website that future products will be compatible with other missions, such as those to geosynchronous orbit. Apex also offers add-ons like insurance and flight booking. Cinnamon said the company plans on delivering the first Aries platform in 2023, followed by 5 in 2024, and continue to scale from there. While the two co-founders praised the likes of Astra and Rocket Lab for transforming the launch sector, these companies are also competitors, each designing satellite buses as part of a full-stop-shop solution for customers. Other major players in the satellite bus manufacturing space are Terran Orbital, which announced plans last year to build a 660,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Florida, and York Space Systems, which landed a $1.12 billion valuation after selling a majority stake to Firefly Aerospace’s owner AE Industrial Partners. But Cinnamon said Apex is differentiating itself from these players in a few different ways: the first is that the startup’s “bread and butter” will be commercial customers, rather than government customers. He added that the company is aiming to manufacture on a scale of a matter of months to keep up with demand from the commercial sector. The call for large-scale manufacturing clearly found resonance at Andreessen Horowitz, which launched a new fund at the beginning of this year called “American Dynamism,” led by general partner Katherine Boyle. The fund aims to invest in companies that bolster the nation’s interest and solve problems in industries like supply chain, aerospace and manufacturing (amongst others). As Boyle argued in her sweeping investment thesis, “the only immediate way to kickstart American renewal is through startups building for critical problems.” To the Apex co-founders, solving the satellite bus manufacturing problem isn’t just critical to the space industry today. It’s also key to making humans a multiplanetary species in the future. “If we really think about that future, do we think that all of the other spacecraft that are out there, that are moving around goods and services, that are doing imaging of Mars and the Moon, that are providing communication services, etcetera, are all of those spacecraft truly going to be built by hand as custom one-offs like they are today? Or are they actually going to be manufactured at scale? And I believe that in order to enable that future, they have to be manufactured at scale, and we want to be the first company out there to truly scale up manufacturing of these vehicles.” In addition to a6z, the round also saw participation from XYZ Venture Capital, J2 Ventures, Lux Capital and Village Global. The number one priority for the new funding is hiring, Cinnamon said, and the company is looking for people from new space, traditional aerospace, and outside the space sector entirely. The company will also use the raise to continue developing the Aries platform, including ordering components and beginning to assemble the manufacturing line.

a16z GP on investing billions in Adam Neumann • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in adam neumann, Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Disrupt, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) general partner Chris Dixon shed some light on the firm’s recent investments in controversial WeWork founder Adam Neumann on stage at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. Neumann raised $350 billion from the venture firm back in August in a deal that reportedly valued his new real estate venture, Flow, at $1 billion before it had even launched. That investment, which marked the largest check a16z had ever written for a single company and its second bet on a Neumann startup in 2022, drew criticism from VCs and founders. Many noted Neumann’s less-than-ideal track record at WeWork, which under his tenure tanked in value from ~$47 billion to ~$8 billion and gained a reputation for mismanagement and poor treatment of employees. Marc Andreessen, the venture firm’s founder who led the Flow deal, saw Neumann’s track record differently, Dixon told interviewer Lucas Matney. “He’s one of the few founders — I mean, he’s one of the only people in the world who has built a real estate brand name,” Dixon said. The funding news in August also came on the heels of the release of WeCrashed, an Apple TV+ show that depicted Neumann’s rise, fall and exit from WeWork with actor Jared Leto playing the founder. The show, which portrayed Neumann as a narcissistic, chaotic leader, was inspired by actual events but did not purport to be a documentary. “I know there’s a lot of stuff written about [Neumann] and things we did, but we do our own research. We just don’t rely on books and movies for our diligence. We do our own research, and we just came to a different conclusion on a lot of what happened,” Dixon said.

a16z’s Chris Dixon announces new accelerator program for crypto founders in LA • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Crypto, crypto accelerator program, Disrupt, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is one of the most influential players in the web3, funding entrepreneurs in the space amid “crypto winter.” Founded and helmed by general partner Chris Dixon, the venture firm’s crypto arm raised a massive $4.5 billion fund in May for its fourth dedicated sector fund to continue backing early-stage founders just as the crypto downturn had begun to take root. Now, it’s doubling down on its programming for crypto founders, Dixon, an early Coinbase backer who has been investing at a16z since 2012, revealed on stage at Disrupt 2022 in San Francisco on Tuesday in an interview with ZebethMedia’s Lucas Matney. On stage, Dixon announced a16z’s plans to expand its educational “Crypto Startup School” initiative to include a new accelerator program for entrepreneurs. The inaugural accelerator program will take place in-person in March in Los Angeles, Dixon said, adding that he has noticed particular excitement in the city around the creator economy and its potential intersections with crypto. Participants in the 12-week program will each get $500k in seed funding and access to mentors and advisors as well as the opportunity to participate in a Demo Day at the end of the course, according to the website. Applications for the accelerator are now open, Dixon said, though he did not share details on the expected cohort size. “This one will be different than the last one in that we will also provide capital and take equity, similar to an accelerator and Startup School combined,” Dixon said of the new program, contrasting it with the current version of “Crypto Startup School.” “Crypto Startup School” first launched in 2020 as a seven-week course meant to educate people on how to build a crypto company. The in-person cohort had 40 founders participating, including those behind companies such as Phantom and Notional Finance, and raised a collective $300 million+ in venture funding, according to a16z. a16z Crypto also released video segments of its lectures for the public to view, which it says have been watched by over 1 million people. Instructors for the first program included Dixon, Stanford computer science professor Dan Boneh, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and other well-known industry leaders. Dixon noted that the new program will remain crypto-focused and that a16z is “not trying to build some sort of new startup accelerator,” saying the new offering is instead intended to be an educational program with funding that is tied to the “very specific” sector. When asked about what makes the firm’s offering unique from accelerators such as Y Combinator, Dixon said there isn’t a “grand master plan” for this launch and that it was built as a response to feedback he had been hearing from founders. “We literally just meet entrepreneurs all the time, who say, hey, I wish that conversation we had was available online … so we’re just listening [to them],” Dixon said.

Andreessen Horowitz backs Synonym’s bio-manufacturing facilities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, bio-manufacturing facilities, fermentation farm, Startups, Synonym Biotechnologies, VentureNo Comments

Armed with $6.3 million in new pre-seed capital, Synonym Biotechnologies has begun the development phase for its first productized bio-manufacturing facilities for non-pharmaceutical applications. Edward Shenderovich and Joshua Lachter started the company in January 2022 to develop, finance and build commercial-scale bio-manufacturing facilities to provide synthetic biology producers of all size with flexible production capacity while also giving infrastructure investors access to a new, carbon-negative bio-manufacturing asset class they are calling “fermentation farms.” Andreessen Horowitz, Giant Ventures, Blue Horizon, Thia Ventures and other venture funds active in decarbonization were part of the investment. Shenderovich and Lachter closed on the funding this month and told ZebethMedia via email that the pre-seed round “has allowed us to build an exceptional and well-rounded launch team and establish our product in the market.” “We plan to use the capital to catalyze our facility development efforts,” CEO Shenderovich said. “This means focusing on hiring across our design, engineering and finance teams to lay the foundations for our first facility break-ground and accelerate our outreach for strategic partnerships across the value chain.” Synonym is developing both the standardized designs and underwriting standards for financing its fermentation farms so that companies will be able to easily utilize them to produce better quality bioproducts at lower costs than existing options. On the investor side, the company said it is building an underwriting model to provide ESG investment opportunities. The company is also channeling the U.S. government’s recent executive order on bio-manufacturing that wants to accelerate innovation in this area to meet goals around climate and energy goals, food security and sustainability and supply chains. However, Shenderovich and Lachter say this will only be possible if bioproducts, for example, dairy protein, polymers and resins, reach cost parity to legacy products. And right now, the infrastructure to properly scale “does not exist today” in a way that enables companies to make the quantity at the kind of quality that will meet future demand. They either have to build their own facility — which costs hundreds of millions of dollars — or rely on contract manufacturing organizations to produce products on their behalf. “Costs will be the driving factor to adoption and production costs have prevented them from already entering supply chains,” Shenderovich said. “The means of production for these products will therefore be crucial, and Synonym’s core insight is that when it comes to industrial infrastructure, productization precedes financialization which precedes mass adoption.” The global contract bio-manufacturing organization market, which venture-backed startups like Planetary and Culture Biosciences are doing, was estimated to be $22.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to more than double by 2030. Lachter said what Planetary is doing is “indeed trying to close the capacity gap in fermentation,” but where Synonym varies is its approach to “focusing more on productization and financialization of facilities rather than a more traditional CMO model.” The company is still very much in the early stages, with the co-founders saying their most important milestone was the launch of the development of its first facility that includes site selection and initial design. They expect to break ground on the facility in the third quarter of 2023. This will be followed up in coming months by further announcements on construction, architecture and other development partners.