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Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
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Mary Ann is off on a well-deserved break, so we brought on fellow podcaster Rebecca Szkutak to take advantage of her insight and humor for this episode.
TechCrunch reported about Lightspeed Venture Partners engaging to invest in Pocket FM last year.
ADIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, whereas Pocket FM said it refrains from commenting on market speculations.
Pocket FM operates on a freemium model, leveraging long-form episodic storytelling to give users the choice to pay only for content they prefer rather than the entire library.
The startup announced last month that it will invest $40 million to grow its online reading platform Pocket Novel.
More than 90,000 writers had signed up to the app in less than a month, Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak wrote on LinkedIn this week.
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported.
DarwinAI had raised over $15 million in funding across various rounds from investors including BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and Inovia Capital.
BDC Capital and Obvious Venture didn’t comment on the story at the time of writing.
As Bloomberg noted in its report, apart from helping with manufacturing efficiency, DarwinAI uses techniques to make AI models smaller and faster.
This could be useful for on-device generative AI features Apple hopes to introduce in iOS 18 this year.
Two years ago, he launched Ballistic Ventures with an inaugural $300 million fund, a laser focus on cybersecurity, an interesting business model, and a who’s-who of investing partners.
Now Ballistic has already closed a second fund, even bigger than the first.
“We set out to raise a second $300 million fund and stopped at $360 million,” Schlein told TechCrunch.
Ballistic formally registered its plans for a second fund just four months ago, in November, TC was first to report.
The Ballistic team also includes general partner Kevin Mandia, the former CEO of Mandiant, which sold to Google in 2022.
Deep tech is on the rise in Europe, fueled in part by the match between AI and a local flavor of math excellence.
The deep tech fund will focus on computing, industry and life science.
The report, which was published this Wednesday, highlights 50 European deep tech companies, but more as an editorialized showcase than as a ranking.
While the firms may overlap in investments, they don’t fully see eye to eye on the “deep tech” term.
“For us, deep tech is a natural fit, as we’ve always been very close to research at Elaia,” she said.
Startups are hiring fewer workers, and paying out less in equity compListen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday episode, in which we dig into critical startup news to stay abreast of what founders and venture capitalists are working on.
Today on the podcast, we got through the following:
Thus, SaaS startups are not category-specific, instead sharing a business model approach more than any particular industry focus.
Among myriad SaaS startups, those focused on selling to business clients — a group often called enterprise SaaS — are a magnet for venture capital.
Since then, investment into enterprise SaaS startups has slowed.
Enterprise SaaS startups raised $21.9 billion, $45.0 billion, $55.1 billion and $58.3 billion in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Perhaps a rate cut or two and a strong enterprise IPO are the tonic required to really reignite venture investment into enterprise SaaS.
Phantom Auto, a remote driving startup that launched seven years ago amid the buzz of autonomous vehicle technology, is shutting down after failing to secure new funding, TechCrunch has learned.
Phantom Auto, which had cut staff last year, employed a little more than 100 people as of this week.
Phantom Auto’s demise is the latest in a long line of startups that popped up as the autonomous vehicle technology industry gained attention and investment from investors.
Phantom Auto was founded in 2017 and initially focused on applying its teleops technology to autonomous vehicles on public roadways such as robotaxis and self-driving trucks.
Phantom Auto pivoted in 2019 and started shopping its remote driving system to logistics, specifically forklifts and yard trucks that have no autonomy as well as autonomous sidewalk delivery robots.
Nanonets, which primarily targets the financial services sector, says its AI platform aims to improve the efficiency of these processes and make them cost-effective.
The company’s AI platform uses machine learning architectures to analyze unstructured data from uploaded documents and extract useful information.
Nanonets is not alone in the global market for AI-based workflow automation.
Consistent revenue growth is one reason investors have been investing in AI startups despite the slowdown in global markets.
AI startups in the U.S. receive the most investments, followed by companies in China, U.K., Israel and India.
LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots.
Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment in Bear Robotics, the California startup that makes artificial intelligence-powered server robots for restaurants and other venues — autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters.
With the investment, LG Electronics becomes Bear’s largest shareholder.
We’ve contacted Bear and LG for further comment.
The Korean electronics company has been researching and developing software and hardware in robotics.
