Startups

Zest wants to make buying and sending gifts online ‘delightful’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, boxgroup, character, Commerce, eCommerce, funding, GV, operator partners, startup, StartupsNo Comments

While e-commerce was on the rise before the pandemic, the massive shift to digital supercharged the online shopping industry — bringing entirely new categories of products (and shoppers) to the web. According to Adobe, Americans have spent a record $1.7 trillion online over the last two years, a 55% uptick from two years before the pandemic. A fair number of those online purchases are gifts as revealed by search trends — from 2019 to 2020, there was an 80% increase in searches for “online gifting” on Google Search. But despite the fact that hundreds of billions of people now regularly turn to digital channels (e.g. Amazon) to gift, the gifting experience remains subpar. That’s the opinion of Alex Ingram, at least, who co-founded a startup — Zest — that’s focused on e-commerce gifting flows. Zest is Ingram’s second company after Sunlight Health, which sought to make brand-name and specialty prescription medications affordable for patients with chronic conditions. He met Zest’s second co-founder, Jeremy Feinstein, while working at Flatiron Health, where they helped to develop cancer center software. “After Flatiron’s sale to Roche, we both felt it was time for something new,” Ingram told ZebethMedia via email. “Obviously, e-commerce is worlds away from oncology. But we wanted to build something that could really help small- and medium-sized businesses to succeed in an increasingly challenging environment.” Image Credits: Zest With Zest, Ingram says that the goal was to make the experience of online gifting “delightful.” How? By allowing e-commerce brands to embed a “send as a gift” button on their product or cart pages and letting givers choose a digital greeting card, add their own message, pay through Shopify and deliver the gift to the recipient via text or email. With gifts gifted through Zest, recipients — who can opt into shipping notifications — can add their own mailing address or customize the gift’s attributes (like size or color) and optionally send a thank-you note to the sender. There’s certainly something to affording recipients some choice in their online gifts. While it might ruin the surprise, a 2015 survey from Loop Commerce (now GiftNow) found that buying the wrong size and the hassle of online returns were some of the top reasons people were reluctant to buy gifts online. Ingram is well aware that Zest isn’t the only online gifting tool out there. There’s Goody, which has raised millions in venture capital for its mobile app that lets users send gifts via text. Givingli, an online gifting service that lets users customize digital greetings and send gifts to anyone, recently closed a $10 million equity round. GiftNow is perhaps Zest’s closest competitor, offering a checkout technology that lets customers buy gifts without having to worry about product details like size, color and shipping addresses. But Ingram argues that Zest uniquely takes a “brand-first” approach, helping brands grow by building direct relationships with their customers. “With some of the other gifting tools out there, the brands are almost an afterthought,” Ingram said. “Zest makes sending a gift a convenient and easy experience for shoppers, who never have to leave their favorite brand’s website — it’s as intuitive as clicking ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy It Now.’ There are lots of e-gift card apps too, but we don’t believe e-gift cards are the future of gifting. They feel transactional and impersonal. They’re so forgettable that billions of dollars of gift cards go unused every year in the U.S. And many brands don’t like to deal with the accounting headaches that come with the long-standing liabilities of unused gift cards.” Image Credits: Zest The future of e-gift cards aside — to Ingram’s point, consumers seem to prefer physical gift cards over digital — Zest is evidently beating back rivals to gain a toehold in the gifting space, with about 50 customers across categories like food and beverage, apparel and flowers. Ingram wouldn’t disclose revenue figures. But he revealed that Zest has raised $4 million in seed funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from BoxGroup, Character, Operator Partners, Bungalow Capital and Company Ventures. “E-commerce and gifting exploded during the pandemic,” Ingram said. “People wanted to send more gifts to friends and family to help bridge the literal gap between them and loved ones. And while that growth rate has slowed, it’s a behavior that’s here to stay. [But] it’s never been harder for direct-to-consumer brands to acquire and retain customers. That’s partly due to the sheer number of direct-to-consumer brands out there today … For brands, the value we’re providing is first and foremost an elevated gifting experience for their customers. When it’s so easy and natural to send a gift directly from a product or cart page, these brands will sell more gifts and reach more people.”

AI-powered media editing app Descript lands fresh cash from OpenAI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Descript, media, Media & Entertainment, OpenAI Startup Fund, podcasts, Robotics & AI, Startups, VideoNo Comments

Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage companies. Descript is the second startup to receive a cash infusion from the fund after AI note-taking app Mem, and Mason says it reflects OpenAI’s belief in the future of Descript’s AI-powered features. “I founded Descript with the idea of building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI,” Mason told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We’re on the verge of a generational change in the way we create content — fueled by AI. That includes the kind of tools like creators are already using in Descript, and emerging stuff like generative AI. The challenge for companies like ours is how to make that technology useful and accessible.” Mason wouldn’t reveal Descript’s valuation post-money, but he noted that the funding — which also had participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital and ex-Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross — brings the company’s total raised to $100 million. According to a report from The Information in October, OpenAI had agreed to lead funding valuing Descript at around $550 million, over double the startup’s valuation as of January 2021 ($260 million). “We started the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate the impact companies building on powerful AI will have on the world, and we’re particularly excited about tools that empower people creatively,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a press release. “It’s clear from using Descript and talking to customers that Descript is breaking down barriers between idea and creation by extending video editing capabilities to an entirely new class of creators.” Descript was created as a spin-off of Mason’s audio-guide business Detour, which Bose acquired in 2018. The platform, geared toward podcasters and videographers unfamiliar with professional-level editing tools, lets users create instant transcriptions of audio and video that can then be cut and paired with music, photos and other content using drag-and-drop tools. Coinciding with the new cash, Descript today unveiled a host of editing features — some powered by AI — and a redesign intended to make editing video “as easy as editing a doc or slides,” in Mason’s words. That might be overpromising a bit. But the new capabilities do indeed streamline aspects of content creation that have historically been arduous. For example, Descript now offers a background removal feature that lets users put their videos in any setting they want. And with write mode, users can edit scripts in Descript, tapping the platform’s Overdub voice cloning tech to scratch a voiceover. Descript’s redesigned editing interface, rolling out today, which adds features like templates and background removal for video. Image Credits: Descript Other highlights in the latest release of Descript, called Descript Storyboard, include multitrack screen recording — the recorder is now integrated into the editor, with separate tracks for screen and camera — and free access to stock sound effects, videos, images and music tracks. Descript also now provides new video transitions and animations and various templates, including layouts, titles sequences and social clips, along with the ability to create custom project templates. With the redesign, Mason says that the goal was to both complement and augment Descript’s transcript-based editor while leaving core functionality intact. A new experience called Scenes allows users to break scripts composed in write mode into scenes and then arrange the visuals they same way they’d work with slides in a deck. Scenes keeps voiceovers from Overdub aligned with the script, letting creators swap a scratch clip with the final recording, for example, without having to worry about the tracks falling out of alignment. “We believe video should be in every communicator’s toolkit, as ubiquitous as docs and slides. The tools are the only things preventing that, and we intend to change it,” Mason said. “We think of our main competition as non-editors — people who aren’t making video because the tools are too complex and time consuming.” Descript isn’t the only company competing in the audiovisual content editing space. Besides incumbents like Adobe, there are startups such as Reduct.Video, which uses AI, natural language processing and other tech to automatically create editable transcripts. San Francisco-based Descript, which employs about 100 people, has been aggressively expanding, however, acquiring AI company Lyrebird in 2019 to power its Overdub feature. Initially focused on audio editing, Descript launched its first video editing features two years ago, chasing after a digital video market that’s estimated to be worth more than $20 billion. The strategy appears to be working for Descript so far, which counted NPR, VICE, The Washington Post and The New York Times among its customers as of 2021. While Mason wouldn’t answer questions about revenue, he says that Descript’s client base has expanded in recent months to “major universities and nonprofits,” as well as organizations in the public sector. “The pandemic changed the way we all create and collaborate — a lot of people cooped up at home got more curious about video, and a lot of people started exploring the creator economy,” Mason said. “Companies started using video for more of their async communications. Around the same time, individual creators stopped respecting the boundaries between media; YouTubers started podcasts, podcasters flocked to TikTok and so on. Our new funding, plus the fact that all those things I just mentioned are only gaining energy, puts us in a great position to weather any headwinds.”

Impacked packs up $2.5M to give the packaging industry a greener tint • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, Impacked, packaging, Startups, sustainable packaging, TenOneTen VenturesNo Comments

Packaging is a trillion-dollar-per-year industry that, by and large, has some sustainability challenges. Impacked is a B2B company that’s bringing green tech to the forefront for everything from jars, tubes and pouches to bottles. The company raised a $2.5 million seed funding round led by TenOneTen Ventures, taking its total funding raised to $3.3 million. The new funding will be used to recruit more primary packaging suppliers to Impacked’s marketplace across North America and Europe, and also enhance its existing sustainability scoring system. The company declined to share its valuation or other details about the funding round. “As a former global brand manager at Unilever leading product innovations, sourcing primary packaging was one of the biggest bottlenecks in my product launch process. The buying and selling process is long and inefficient with the industry still dependent on in-person trade shows, word of mouth and analog middlemen to generate new business. This frequently forces brands to overpay, delay product launches or deprioritize sustainability,” says Lisa-Marie Assenza, CEO at Impacked, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “My goal with Impacked is to bring the tradeshow online 365 days per year, providing tools for suppliers to digitize their sales and marketing while instantly allowing brands to search, filter, sample, quote and buy packaging — all in one place.” The founders at Impacked, Natasha Trueman (COO) and Lisa-Marie Assenza (CEO). Image Credits: Impacked. “TenOneTen is the lead investor in this round. We wanted to bring on a strong stable of former operators who have successfully built and scaled companies themselves. David [Waxman] and the entire TenOneTen team have been amazing to work with, understand our mission and our vision, and as former operators have been incredibly helpful in helping us navigate the early stage journey,” said Assenza. “As sustainability regulations continue to change and become more complex for brands to navigate, our goal is to help more brands navigate these challenges by ensuring that every product listed in our marketplace is scored across a standard set of environmental sustainability criteria, empowering brand owners to make better sourcing decisions and ensure accuracy in the claims they make on their packaging.” The company is broadening its appeal and supplier reach, both in terms of product lines, and geographically. Impacked is joining a huge number of companies flowing into this space at the moment, biting off different slices of the market. Some companies, such as Olive, are focusing on reusable packaging, while others are exploring mycelium-based or plant pulp-based solutions. Impacked’s ultimate goal is to “source every primary package on the planet, for the planet,” creating an ecosystem for packaging that will, the company claims, foster greater connectivity and collaboration between brands and suppliers in the packaging industry. “The health of our planet is one of the most important issues of our time, and packaging is clearly a major contributor. In the next 10 years, Impacked will play a key role in surfacing the data and insights brands need to shift to more sustainable packaging, all while driving supplier innovation in packaging materials, design and production practices that do better for our planet,” said Assenza. “I personally have a love/hate relationship with the word ‘sustainable’ — it’s buzzy and the reality is that there is not a single way to be ‘sustainable’. It’s really about taking steps to reduce the beginning-of-life and end-of-life impact of a brand’s packaging. I believe that shifting our industry to more sustainable solutions starts with education. Brands need a better way to objectively assess the environmental impact of any packaging option they are looking at, early in the buying journey. For example, if a brand knew upfront that adding a frosted coating could make an otherwise recyclable 8 oz glass bottle no longer widely recyclable, they might consider a different decoration option to maintain recyclability and accurately claim ‘recyclable’ on-pack.”

WeaveGrid gets $35M Series B to help electrical grid cope with coming wave of EVs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, EC Enterprise Applications, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, electric vehicles, Enterprise, renewable energy, Startups, utilitiesNo Comments

Today, the electrical grid works because utilities have a time-tested playbook. They may not know exactly when you do your laundry, but they generally know washers and dryers run more in the evenings or on weekends. Air conditioners wind up when temperatures soar, and more lights click on during the dark winter months. But in the coming years, that playbook is going to go out the window. Renewables will reshape the grid, but EVs will present the real challenge. Utilities may know how many solar panels and wind turbines are hooked up, but what about how many EVs get plugged in every night? They might have a rough estimate at best. That’s where WeaveGrid comes in. The company’s enterprise SaaS serves as a platform integrating data from utilities, automakers, and drivers to help utilities manage the load that EVs place on the grid. This data will be increasingly important in the coming decade, when up to half of the U.S.’ 280 million vehicle fleet is predicted to become electrified. WeaveGrid hopes not only to help utilities plan for new generating capacity, it also wants to assist in identifying where they can most effectively upgrade their distribution infrastructure, which is going to need a significant overhaul. The average age of the grid’s power transformers, for example, is 25 years. “If 280 million vehicles all start charging around the same time at night, it’s going to create a lot of pressure on an aging infrastructure that’s really not ready to handle all of these giant batteries charging in a completely erratic manner,” said WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava. To help coordinate millions of vehicles charging — and to ensure they’re ready when drivers need them — WeaveGrid’s platform pulls data from utilities, automakers and even smart EV chargers to build a picture of when and where the grid will need the most power. The company is announcing a $35 million Series B led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investors Activate Capital, Emerson Collective, Collaborative Fund, and MCJ Collective. Existing investors Coatue, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Grok Ventures, and The Westly Group also invested in the round. It’s Salesforce Ventures’ first time leading a climate tech investment.

With $18M in new funding, EngFlow wants to speed up your builds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in a16z, Bazel, EngFlow, Enterprise, funding, Gradle, StartupsNo Comments

Back in 2015, Google launched an open-source port of its internal automation tool for building and testing code. Dubbed Bazel (because the internal tool was called Blaze), the service uses a Python dialect to help developers write their rules and macros. Today, the tooling is used by companies ranging from Adobe to Databricks, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Redfin, so when the lead developer of Bazel at Google, Ulf Adams, and the lead of enterprise customer onboarding for Bazel at Google and co-creator of BazelCon, Helen Altshuler, raise new funding for their Bazel-centric startup EngFlow, it’s probably worth paying attention to. As the team announced today, EngFlow has raised an $18 million Series A round from Tiger Global, Firstminute Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which also led the company’s $3.7 million seed round. Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli, as well as Envoy creator Matt Klein and GitHub engineering VP Rachel Potvin also participated in this round. Image Credits: Bazel EngFlow describes itself as a “build acceleration company” that helps its enterprise customers more efficiently build and test their source code, with support for Bazel, Chromium and the Android Platform. “When we are talking about Bazel use at Google, an important factor is that Google has integrated Bazel with a lot of developer services,” Adams said. “So it’s not just the build tool, but you have remote execution, you have a user interface, you have coverage runners for analyzing coverage data from the tests, you have integration with deployment, all of that stuff. We’ve been talking to Bazel users for four years and they are looking for these things. Sometimes we say that Google is a snowflake, Google is special, but we often see that other companies want to want to do similar things. And so we thought there was an opportunity there.” Altshuler also stressed that increasingly, enterprises are creating platform engineering teams that aim to bring a more opinionated approach to CI/CD to their teams. “That is usually the audience for Bazel to try it to make it work for their specific company — and then launch it to the engineers. These platform engineering teams are our primary customers, but behind every platform engineering team, there are hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of engineers that are impacted by Bazel as a result and hopefully don’t have to be Bazel experts and know all of the internals — it should just work for them,” she noted. Image Credits: Bazel The team noted that a lot of new customers are migrating from Gradle or CMake to the service, so it’s maybe no surprise that EngFlow also recently hired Jay Conrod, the developer of the open-source Gazelle tool for migrating to Bazel (and also a former Googler). It’s worth stressing that while Bazel is a main focus here, the platform also supports Chromium and Android platform builds. Brave, with its Chromium-based browser, is a customer, for example. For Brave, EngFlow’s distributed build system brought build times down from two hours to fifteen minutes. But still, Bazel is the main focus here and the team today also launched its Bazel Invocation Analyzer, a new open-source tool that allows developers to get deeper insights into their Bazel profiles and optimize their builds. “Build is one of the most critical aspects of building software. And traditionally it’s been a massive time and cost sink for companies to get right,” said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “EngFlow is the leading company changing all of this. Coming from deep roots in Bazel and build, they’ve put together a solution which for the first time we’ve ever seen, is able to tackle the most complex code bases and large infrastructure environments and offer dramatic savings in development time and costs. These aren’t mere words, EngFlow has extraordinary customer traction across a number of verticals, far more than we normally see at this stage. We’re delighted to be investors and doubling down as EngFlow continues their path as the leading build company.” Given the popularity of taking Google open-source tools and bringing them to the enterprise (hello, Kubernetes), it’s maybe no surprise that EngFlow isn’t the only startup in this space. YC-backed BuildBuddy, for example, also offers a Bazel-centric build system. Meanwhile, well-funded Gradle Enterprise offers support for Gradle, Maven and Bazel as part of its enterprise build tool.

Induction cooking heats up with a $20M cash injection for Impulse • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, funding round, Hardware, impulse, lux capital, StartupsNo Comments

All electric, everywhere, all of the time; that’s one of the many climate mantras. Induction stovetops take a lot of power, however — they can pull 40 amps at 240 volts. That’s the same as an at-home Level 2 EV charger. Needless to say, a lot of older houses aren’t wired to plug in a Tesla in your kitchen, which means it could get expensive to upgrade to an induction range. Impulse to the rescue — the company’s stoves include a battery solution, which means that it doesn’t pull the full 40 amps when it’s operating, and you could find yourself cooking with induction without having to upgrade your panel. Clever! “I’d been thinking about how to supercharge home appliances for a while and the deeper I dug into the space, the clearer it became that there was a larger story bringing together whole-home electrification and added energy storage in alignment with new policy tailwinds and distributed energy resource incentives,” said Sam D’Amico, CEO at Impulse. “Integrating batteries not only unlocks really impressive performance improvements, it also removes a lot of common barriers around power or panel limitations with installing induction stoves while also adding energy storage to the grid.” The company today announced its official launch, and a $20 million Series A funding round led by Lux Capital, and joined by Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom and Construct Capital. This brings their total funding to $25 million (Lux Capital, Construct and Lachy Groom formerly led the company’s $5 million seed round in 2021). “There is an undeniable directional arrow of progress towards the electrification of everything, which will enable new appliances and applications to be created,” commented Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, who led the most recent funding round, in an email to ZebethMedia. “What Impulse is building is not only meaningful but a moral imperative, changing the architecture of our daily lives by decreasing our reliance on natural gas and carbon. We’re proud to back the Impulse team and help bring their vision to life.” Originally, the company set out to use batteries to create the perfect electric pizza oven, but as the company explored the market, it realized there were additional opportunities. As the company puts it: What started as a cool idea to make pizza became a mission to reframe the home appliance industry. Impulse realized early on that there was an opportunity to leverage all the amazing tailwinds from the electric vehicle and renewables space (including the policy tailwinds of the Inflation Reduction Act) to launch compelling products. The company identified induction cooking as something that already had a pretty compelling story, and figured out some foundational ways to make cooking using induction tech significantly better. Impulse’s futuristic-looking induction stovetops may bring some interesting new features to a kitchen near you. Image Credits: Impulse. “We’re very aware of the difficulty of building a hardware business, especially given the present economic climate. We credibly believe that this [round of financing] gets us through the major checkpoints required to ship our first hardware product, at the level where we can take orders from paying customers,” says D’Amico. “That paves the way for us to launch preorders in the next year with a credible, realistic delivery date that is not out of line with expectations for high-end home appliances.” The company is positioning itself squarely in the challenge around residential and light industrial decarbonization. “This is going to push us in a fairly fundamental direction — ending fossil fuel use ‘at the edge’ means we have to make everything electric,” D’Amico says as he outlines his vision. “Moving storage to the edge in lieu of fossil fuels enables us to do this without having to rely on extremely difficult changes to the built environment, and without having to massively scale up power distribution infrastructure to deal with new peak loads.” The big play from Impulse is that battery prices are declining, while the act of installing batteries are continuing to be non-trivial in the built environment. A lot of kitchens do have 220V connections, however, and that’s where Impulse is seeing an opportunity. “A key realization is that the spots where we install home appliances are typically wired for electricity and often for 220V connections in newer homes,” comments D’Amico. “At minimum this means we can electrify that previously gas appliance, and moving forward towards newer properties it also means that storage can be put to use for the home as well.”

Modus expands to sub-Saharan Africa with the launch of its AI and blockchain-focused $75M fund • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in africa, AI, blockchain, modus, Startups, VentureNo Comments

New York-based venture platform Modus has launched Modus Africa, a venture capital fund for AI and blockchain startups across sub-Saharan Africa, ZebethMedia has learned. The fund is expected to reach a final close in the first quarter of next year. The spinoff continues Modus’s string of moves over the past 18 months, which has seen it add branches in Abu Dhabi, Cairo, and, most recently, Riyadh, supported by institutions like Mubadala’s Hub71. Modus says that its entry into Africa creates an “additional conduit of market access for Modus portfolio companies while also enabling African startups to scale into the MENA region.” As a “holistic venture platform,” Modus runs three business units focusing on entrepreneurs and startups in the MENA and GCC regions. They include the Venture Builder, which works with idea and early-stage MVP stage companies. Then there’s Corporate Innovation, a service platform that leverages the firm’s internal know-how to support corporations and government entities. And its Venture Capital arm provides investment to early and midstage-sized startups, such as staffing platform Ogram. On its website, Modus says its fund is backed by several investors ranging from UHNWI, family offices, private investors, and government-backed entities from the U.S., the EU, and MENA. Although Modus primarily invests in foreign-based companies that are “portable to the Middle East,” as well as startups in Egypt and the GCC, its expansion into sub-Saharan Africa isn’t surprising. Last year, African startups raised over $5 billion and minted five unicorns (per this report, the continent observed a 250% year-over-year growth in funding and surpassed capital deployed in MENA). And despite the current macroeconomic trends and conditions that have resulted in layoffs, down rounds and shutdowns, startups on the continent are set to top last year’s fundraising record numbers. Unlike other firms with marked funds interested in Africa, Modus’s interest in AI and blockchain technologies is intriguing. Though it has household names such as Tunisia’s InstaDeep, Kenya’s Sama, and South Africa’s DataProphet — and several web3 startups claiming to build on the blockchain — Africa’s AI and blockchain sectors are still relatively nascent. The thinking behind adopting this strategy can be traced to Vianney Mathonnet and Andre Jr. Ayotte, the general partners of Modus’s Africa-focused fund. Both partners, in an interview with ZebethMedia, described how several stints working in banking, finance and Dubai-based family offices pointed them to the emergence of blockchain technology and its outsized opportunity and application in Africa. “Not long after we launched this project after noticing how massive blockchain and AI could be in Africa, we were approached by Modus Capital because they wanted a Pan-African strategy themselves,” said Ayotte. “They were looking for people with the know-how, the network, experience to do that, so we started discussing how the partnership would work. Ultimately, what happened is that our project became the Modus Africa fund.” L-R: Andre Jr. Ayotte and Vianney Mathonnet (General Partners, Modus Africa) According to a statement, Modus says Africa has the potential of reaching 200 million+ new blockchain users in the next four years, fueled by necessity and a fast-growing tech-savvy population. Nevertheless, the six-year-old VC firm isn’t only taking a chance on purely AI and blockchain startups; instead, it is cutting checks in startups across broader sectors that are implementing those technologies into their products. The firm is currently closing three investments in startups using AI and blockchain across insurtech, fintech and health tech, said the general partners who control the fund’s thesis, direction and investment strategy while leveraging Modus’s 50+ team to carry out due diligence and portfolio management. Mathonnet said the “jurisdiction-agnostic” Modus Africa will invest in about 45 seed-stage startups and allocate 50% of the $75 million SDG-focused fund for follow-on investments, especially in Series A rounds. These checks will range from $350,000 to $1.2 million across both stages. “We as a fund will reinvest in our winners and our LPs are also looking to reinvest in them outside the fund, catalyzing even more money in the ecosystem in Africa,” said the partners. “In terms of countries, we know that tech talent and incubators are really strong in tech ecosystems like Kenya and Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa, and it’s inevitable that a good deal flow within all these regions. With that said, though, we are exploring new regions and searching for key partnerships to enter those markets and add some support and sustainability for deal flow.” Some of these markets include the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Niger and others in Francophone Africa. Speaking on the formation of Modus Africa, Kareem Elsirafy, the managing partner of Modus, said in a statement: “Modus is proud to be launching an Africa-MENA investment corridor to continue supporting and investing in emerging innovation ecosystems. The Modus platform is uniquely positioned to deliver impact and value to African communities through operational, institutional, and financial capital. We’re excited to have Vianney and Andre leading the way on this journey.”

Silkhaus gets $7.75M to digitize short-term rentals across emerging markets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Silkhaus, StartupsNo Comments

Silkhaus, a Dubai-based platform for short-term rentals coming out of stealth, has raised $7.75 million in seed funding, money it plans to use for expansion across South Asia, Southeast Asia and the MENA region. Venture capital firms that participated in the round include Nuwa Capital, Nordstar, Global Founders Capital, Yuj Ventures, Whiteboard Capital and VentureSouq. A few international family offices and proptech founders also joined this round. CEO Aahan Bhojani and Ashmin Varma founded Silkhaus last year after identifying a $13 billion market opportunity for asset owners across emerging markets, particularly MENA, South Asia and Southeast Asia. In an interview with ZebethMedia, Bhojani, an HBS and Yale College graduate who had previously worked across roles that required extensive travel, such as management consulting and investment banking, said what spurred him to launch Silkhaus was the change in the travel behavior of small-business owners post-pandemic. “At some point when I was building software for SMBs to book and manage travel globally, I saw businesses were beginning to do something different,” the chief executive said to ZebethMedia over a call. “Businesses had traditionally always stayed in hotels. But interestingly, they were now beginning to ask for short-term rentals as well, you know, basically the Airbnbs of the world. And that’s when I started scratching my head and thinking about this entire space from a demand and supply problem.” The pandemic had changed the nature of travel, he said. According to him, while the frequency of leisure and business travel trips declined, the average duration of these trips skyrocketed. His interpretation of this event was that these trips were becoming more nomadic and long-term thinking. But while platforms like Airbnb have fantastically aggregated demand to meet supply in the U.S. and Europe, it’s a different experience in emerging markets where supply isn’t sufficiently pooled together to meet Airbnb-pulled demand. That’s where Silkhaus comes in. It’s digitizing the process of operating short-term rentals for large and small property owners by providing an operating system that includes tools needed to monetize and manage their properties. The company claims that it allows property owners to list multiple or single units on the platform with an average revenue yield increase between 20-40%. “Frankly speaking, finding a good Airbnb in these markets is like pulling a needle out of a haystack. And that’s what we’re solving for,” Bhojani said. “We’re aggregating some of the most successful short-term rental operators and building the highest quality supplier of that inventory to our partners, of which Airbnb is one. Our big vision is to bring quality, control and technology into the space. We exist to ensure that more people can experience high-quality short-term rentals.” Image Credits: Essentially, Silkhaus takes rental units from asset owners (in Dubai, at the moment) and manages distribution, pricing, revenue management and full coverage from a digital perspective; Airbnb is one of approximately 60 different distribution channels Silkhaus uses. Meanwhile, the company has built tools on the back end, including a marketplace for third-party vendors to access these rentals and handle operations. According to the CEO, Dubai was the ideal market for launching Silkhaus because its infrastructure presents one of the most advanced setups for short-term rentals, embodies a progressive government regulation for proptech and welcomes varying demands from different consumer types. Silkhaus’s engineering team, split across the UAE city and Bangalore, is currently building out its technology stack, the company said in a statement. Chief operating officer Varma leads the team, which is part of a 20-man workforce with professionals from Microsoft, Airbnb, Careem and Deliveroo. Bhojani claims that Silkhaus is currently part of the top 3% of operators in the city in terms of units under management. He said the proptech startup, which has grown over 10x in revenue over the last 12 months, is planning to enter the top 1% in the next two months by growing the supply of properties on its platform. Silkhaus estimates its market opportunity might grow to $18 billion in the next four years. With operations planned for Asia’s leading economic hubs and the MENA region, providing guests with high-grade accommodation options and letting enterprises choose extended stays for their employees on Silkhaus will be pivotal to capturing a significant chunk of this market share. “We are excited to see Silkhaus emerge as the leading platform for short-term rentals across Asia, and in particular excited to partner with Aahan and his team, who in a short time have proven their ability to disrupt two large and fragmented industries: real estate and hospitality,” Ole Ruch, managing partner at Nordstar, said in a statement.

Nigerian startup that stored its ‘day-to-day operational budget’ on FTX announces staff cuts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello, and welcome to the beginning of another week. As mentioned last Friday, Haje is off scuba diving, leaving the rest of us to pick up the Twitter and FTX pieces. No bother, we are here for you. Mary Ann starts us off by reporting on SoftBank writing down an almost $100 million investment into FTX. And with that, let’s dig in! — Christine The ZebethMedia Top 3 This FTX business has wide reach: Tage reports on what happens to a young company that held some assets in FTX and now can’t access them due to, well, you know. In this instance, African web3 startup Nestcoin said it had to lay off employees as a result of not having that access. A true comparison: Now people in Europe can know the joy and wonder that is the Klarna price comparison tool, which Paul writes may just be a “credible alternative to Google and Amazon.” Oops: Bird, a micromobility company, told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had included unpaid customer rides in its revenue, thus having overstated that particular number for two years. Jaclyn has more. Startups and VC At this point, we all expect our data to move pretty quickly, but there is so much of it that it’s still a headache. This is where Quix comes in, Mike writes. The real-time data startup grabbed $12.9 million in Series A funding, not to do this with ksqlDB, Java-based solutions or any of those fancy schmancy SQL-based analytics solutions. Oh no, Quix is developing event-driven applications with Python. And we have five more for you: The show must go on: Just because FTX is having issues doesn’t mean other companies are shying away from association. Jacquelyn reports on the Joepegs NFT marketplace, which raised $5 million in a round co-led by FTX and Avalanche. “Adult friendships are fickle beasts”: Indeed they are, but have no fear, 222 will help you find that perfect friend who doesn’t care that you make more than they do or who “tends to be lazy,” if that’s what you’re into, Kyle writes. Singapore, get your exotic taste buds ready: Vow, an Australian-based cultured meat company, gobbled up $49.2 million in Series A funding to get its first cell-based meat product into Singapore restaurants, Christine writes. Spring into action: Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future signed a $350 million financing deal to hopefully get it out of its previous monetary challenges and to launch its first vehicle, Jaclyn reports. “The sun’s a ball of buttah”: Butter, now flush with $9 million in funding, led by Gradient Ventures, is helping smaller food distribution businesses comply with food safety rules, Catherine writes. Preparing for fintech’s second decade: 4 moves your firm must make now Image Credits: Emilija Manevska (opens in a new window) / Getty Images According to consultant Grant Easterbrook, fintech startups that hope to succeed over the next few years must be prepared to go up against: Major banks and financial service providers with loyalty programs and “super apps.” Emerging DeFi protocols “that can offer financial products that involve real-world assets.” Banking, invoicing, lending, payments, accounting packaged as “embedded financial products.” Multiple countries issuing their own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). “Your firm will need a very strong value proposition to compete with all four types of competitors,” writes Easterbrook, who shares his ideas for navigating the next decade of fintech in a TC+ guest post. Two more from the TC+ team: See, Mom? Layoffs can teach us something: The big tech layoffs have not been great, but Natasha M writes that even though we could see more, entrepreneur Nolan Church, who helped lead Carta’s 2020 layoffs as its chief people officer, has some perspective on Twitter’s recent layoffs. If VCs aren’t investing in you, who are they investing in?: That’s what Becca discusses in her latest piece that looks at all the dry powder in the VC world, and why it’s not yet being deployed. ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. And just like that, VLC’s download ban in India was lifted, Manish reports. Nine months ago, the country’s electronics and IT ministry instituted the ban on the popular media playback software, something VLC worked to try to reverse, stating that the ban had been “put into place without any prior notice” and didn’t allow VLC a chance for rebuttal. Natasha L has more on our favorite social media channel, this time writing that “Twitter is no longer fulfilling key obligations required for it to claim Ireland as its “so-called main establishment under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.” Can’t wait to see where this goes. And we have five more for you:

Long live the vibe capitalist! • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Crypto, diversity, EC Cryptocurrency, EC News Analysis, EC venture capital, FTX Bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Last week, many investors were left with egg on their faces after FTX’s valuation went from $32 billion to zero in a New York minute. VCs were left wondering, “What the hell happened?” And they’re still wondering, “Wait — did I do something wrong? Is it me?” Why yes, actually, it is you. People are led to believe that, for the most part, investors are clear-eyed, data-driven people who carefully explore the financial underpinnings of the companies they invest in. There is little room for emotions like jealousy or the fear of missing out (FOMO). Of course not. And these people investing billions of dollars surely have their eye on the ball, right? Well, not exactly. In a surprisingly honest tweet today, former SoftBank COO Marcelo Claure, who stepped down in late January after a reported battle over pay, had this to say about the FTX fiasco: I have been reflecting personally on the whole FTX fiasco and it taught me one more time that we should NEVER invest because of FOMO and we should always 100% understand what we are investing in. I totally failed here on both. — Marcelo Claure (@marceloclaure) November 12, 2022 This is from the same guy whose former firm also invested significant money in WeWork, another spectacular example of poor judgment on the part of investors. Steve Jobs once said, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.” At the time, Jobs was talking about building products, but evidently, this also applies to the people funding the startup ecosystem. While it’s good that Claure was so open, honest and reflective, perhaps we should all remember that investors are not any smarter than anyone else. They’re human after all, and their classic lack of self-awareness combined with venture enthusiasts’ myopia is perhaps the problem. Most investors and the founders in whom they invest are white men, and you get double points if you went to Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. These folks are handed the mantle of genius in all that they do and touch. The next Warren Buffet is rarely if ever, predicted to be a Black man.