How many startups shut down last year compared to the year before?
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 interview show, where we sit down with a guest, think about their work, and unpack the rest.
Lee is an angel investor as well the creator of Layoffs.FYI and co-founder of Comprehensive and Human Interest.
We also talked about:Just how many more companies shut down in 2023 compared to 2022 (spoiler alert, it was a lot!)
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee.
Some of the other features for business accounts involve organizing chats with color labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick replies.
On his channel, Durov said that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats.
Telegram is trying to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features.
And it is using an undisclosed portion of its cash reserve to acquire Regate, an accounting and financial automation platform.
Qonto originally started with online business accounts with debit cards specifically tailored for small and medium businesses.
After a while, Regate will be integrated in Qonto directly to improve several accounting automation features of Qonto, such as invoicing, accounts payables, accounts receivables, etc.
Qonto finds itself in a different position from Payfit, another French unicorn (or former unicorn) that provides a software-as-a-service tool focused on payroll.
As many fintech startups are struggling to raise a new funding round, Qonto could become a consolidator in the space.
At the moment, large organizations often employ “business intelligence” (BI) tools to figure out what the heck is going on inside their operations.
Essentially, BI tools connect to a business database and use SQL to create visualizations and build out BI dashboards.
There are huge companies involved in this space: Tableau (owned by Salesforce), Power BI (owned by Microsoft), Looker (owned by Google), and QuickSight (owned by Amazon) to name just a handful.
And how is this marketing campaign performing.” He said other players in the market target data users, whereas Fluent targets the business market, not data.
For example, Metabase is an open-source analytics and business intelligence application that allows users to create dashboards more easily.
Numbers Station, a startup that is using large language models (LLMs) to power its data analytics platform, is launching its first cloud-based product today: the aptly named Numbers Station Cloud, which is now in early access.
With this service, virtually any user in an enterprise can analyze their internal data using Numbers Station’s chat interface.
As Numbers Station co-founder and CEO Chris Aberger told me, he’s somewhat tired of talking about how the service allows users to “chat with their data,” because there is so much noise around that.
Numbers Stations’ research shows that its approach results in significantly improved precision compared to more traditional text-to-SQL pipelines.
“Numbers Station is at the cutting edge of enterprise AI for structured data,” said Sharad Rastogi, the CEO of Work Dynamics Technology from Jones Lang LaSalle.
The category has seen success and has accordingly gone from one or two competitors to around a dozen.
Shure, on the other hand, makes some of the most beloved microphones across multiple industries.
The category has been hit or miss lately, so I’m excited to see what Shure has on offer here.
The mics pair to a phone without needing the receiver.
Also, one key thing the DJI unit has that these don’t is the ability to plug a wired lav mic directly into the clip-on, making it more camera-ready.
Berlin’s Razor Group has acquired U.S.-based Perch, and on top of this it has raised just over $100 million led by Presight Capital with other undisclosed investors participating.
The news is the latest development in a wider consolidation and reordering taking place in the world of e-commerce aggregation.
Perch, we have heard from multiple sources, had been looking for a buyer for the better part of a year.
Perch and Razor do happen to have some investors in common, such as Victory Park Capital, which may well have been central to the negotiations between the two.
He claims that this deal solidifies Razor as the “market leader”, and that it is on track for $1 billion in revenues in the next four to eight quarters.
Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem.
In forming the new unit, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based firm offering a range of business-oriented AI solutions including chatbots, data analytics tools and documentation builders.
Prior to launching Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems, that Ford acquired in 2018.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq’s second acquisition after Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions firm, in 2022.
Consolidation is afoot in the world of HR services, with larger players snapping up interesting, smaller startups en route to more robust unit economics and providing one-stop shops for customers looking to cut down on suppliers.
In the latest development, Deel — the $12 billion HR business out of Paris — is scooping up Zavvy, a Munich-based AI-based “people development” startup building tools for personalized career progression, training, and performance management.
Finally, Deel will also make its existing Deel HR tool, which was free for organizations of up to 200 users, now “free” for existing customers regardless of their size.
Originally Deel approached Zavvy with a partnership proposal before making an offer to buy it outright.
By Zavvy’s and Deel’s accounts, the former company has not found it hard to build its business in a tighter market.
It said it has also secured an emergency $90 million in emergency financing from unnamed existing lenders.
The $90 million in new capital, it said, “is expected to provide sufficient liquidity to support the Company throughout this process and beyond.
The news should not come as a surprise: there have been murmurs of the company’s impending bankruptcy since last year.
At the time, the company had just raised $1 billion at a valuation, it said, of “up to” $10 billion.
(It noted that even in 2022 it was “just” $4.5 billion, not the $10 billion that the company had said it was.)
