Gadgets

News, updates and reviews on the latest gadgets in tech. Coverage includes smartphones, wearables, laptops, drones and all of your consumer electronics needs.

“Unveiling Silence: A Cutting-Edge Climate Tech VC Fund With $35 Million”

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Silence wants to shake things up when it comes to climate tech investment. This new angel-style VC firm has already raised $35 million and plans to make dozens of small investments in climate startups to help them apply the tech startup playbook. He also founded Merlin, an hourly jobs marketplace in the U.S.With Silence, Borja wants to apply his experience to climate investment. A silent partnerSince the first close of the fund in June 2022, Silence has already invested in 22 different companies. So we told them ‘we’ll be your lead,’” Borja said.

Sustainable Investment: Greenly Secures $52M in Funding to Aid Small Businesses in Monitoring Carbon Footprint

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Plenty of major corporations have announced net-zero emissions targets. Those are the companies Greenly has targeted. It takes that information and, coupled with its own data and algorithms, calculates carbon emissions by category and scope for customers. It came into the round with an advantage: it’s applying SaaS to climate tech, and SaaS a business model that’s well understood. But it does suggest that venture investors are warming to climate tech more broadly, proving that there’s a market for businesses focused on sustainability.

“European Deep Tech to Receive $185 Million Investment by OTB Ventures with Support from NATO Innovation Fund”

Otb Ventures Co Founders And Managing Partners Marcin Hejka And Adam Niewinski
Not a day goes by without some confirmation that ​​deep tech is on the rise in Europe — and that public and private capital investors are here for it. Latest case in point, OTB Ventures, which closed a $185 million fund to invest in deep tech in Europe that it will mostly deploy at the Series A stage. OTB’s take on deep tech focuses on four verticals that do sound fairly NATO-compatible: space tech, enterprise automation and AI, cybersecurity and fintech infrastructure. This means we can’t confirm either whether the funding that went to OTB could also have gone to, say, a French or Austrian deep tech fund. Like NIF, OTB is headquartered in Amsterdam, and its other office is in Warsaw, where NIF is also planning to have a regional office.

“Candela’s Ferries Experience Electrifying Growth with $25M Injection of Funds”

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Electric boat maker Candela is approaching cruising speed with $25 million in new funding and the first commercial deployment of its new P-12 ferry, in New Zealand. The P-12, a ferry design that can handle up to 30 passengers, made its debut late last year. Like any other industry, you have to know when to buy and when to build, and big boating companies are happy to buy — or invest. Candela’s boats use hydrofoils with electric engines mounted on the bottom to effectively fly above the surface of the water once they get past a certain speed, vastly reducing energy consumption — historically and understandably a sticking point for electric boating. Theh $25 million round was led, as mentioned, by Beneteau, with participation from EQT Ventures, Ocean Zero LLC, and Kan DelaAB.

Investor Demand for Tech with an AI-Twist Drives Astera Labs’ IPO to 54% Increase

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Astera Labs started its life as a public company trading at $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang. Astera Labs makes connectivity hardware for cloud computing data centers. Astera Labs’ IPO price valued it at around $5.5 billion, a figure that swells to around $8.9 billion at its current trading price. The strong performance of Astera in its first hours as a public company could also ameliorate some investor activity that is holding back, or even preventing some public offerings altogether. If VCs know that the startup could pop on the public market like Astera Labs, maybe they will think about the timeline differently.

Creating a Climate for Success: Casper’s Co-Founder Aids in Launching Incubator for Tech Startups Focused on Sustainability

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One path, which is particularly well trodden, is to start a venture fund. Instead of launching a VC fund, they’re starting with an incubator called Montauk Climate, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Montauk Climate is one of the latter. Montauk Climate will remain shareholders in its spinout companies and have seats on their boards. As the number of incubated companies expands, Montauk Climate expects to raise its own venture fund to help support them.

“The Carevoice secures $10M in Series B funding, defying the health tech funding slowdown”

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The Carevoice, an embedded insurance solution provider that started in Shanghai and now has a footprint across 15 countries, has apparently made that math look attractive to investors in the space. The company just raised $10 million from a Series B financing led by U.K.-based Apis Insurtech Fund I, which contributed to most of the round. In 2023, U.S.-based digital health startups raised a total of $10.7 billion across 492 deals, the lowest amount since 2019, according to Rock Health, a health tech-focused seed fund. That funding slowdown also hit The Carevoice, though it weathered the storm by reaching healthy cash flow. Embedded health solution providers like The Carevoice can find themselves competing with traditional IT and consulting service companies, such as Tata’s TCS.

Inflection Devoured by Top Investor Microsoft After Raising $1.3B

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In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently). Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, where the former will head up the newly formed Microsoft AI division, along with “several members” of their team as Microsoft put it — or “most of the staff,” as Bloomberg reports it. Ultimately Microsoft got a bit of extra leverage on the company instead of eating it alive. Whether it was OpenAI or Inflection, Microsoft was feeding their cash and compute addictions, whispering in their ear about partnerships, and then as soon as they tripped, out came the hidden fork and knife.

“Establishing Connections: Ethos Fund’s Inaugural Investment in U.S.-Vietnamese Tech Pioneers”

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Yi and Shin started Ethos Fund two years ago to bridge opportunities and startup communities between Vietnam and the United States. They are also investing smaller checks into third culture founders there who fall into categories, including returned Vietnamese diaspora, Vietnamese Americans and expats residing in Vietnam, and subsequently doubling-down with larger checks into validated startups. “Ethos is called Ethos because we focus on the ethos of the founders,” Yi said. One of the things Yi noticed about his startups was that they weren’t growing past a certain stage. Now the pair wants to help startup founders figure those lessons out early.

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