companies

Foresite Capital Secures $900 Million in Sixth Fund for Healthcare and Life Sciences Investing

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Despite having 47 IPOs, 28 M&As and 58 FDA-approved drugs under its belt, the 13-year-old multi-stage healthcare and life sciences firm took two years to raise its sixth fund. On Wednesday, Foresite announced that it closed its sixth fund with $900 million. Last summer, Foresite co-led a $115 million Series F into CG Oncology, a drug discovery company that had a successful IPO listing in January. Foresite intends to back about 20 companies from its sixth fund, writing checks from a couple of million up to $75 million. “Over a decade ago, we named the firm Foresite because we thought we had an idea of where healthcare was headed,” Tananbaum said.

“Automated Financial Reporting Fintech InScope Secures $4.3M Seed Round Led by VC Sheel Mohnot”

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The financial reporting and auditing process is not often on the list of sexy topics that technology startups want to go after. After years of performing reporting and auditing work for companies like Miro, Autodesk, Dropbox, Flexport and Yelp, Mary Antony and Kelsey Gootnick decided reporting and auditing needed some technology love, too. So they started San Francisco-based InScope in 2023, leveraging machine learning and large language models to provide financial reporting and auditing processes for mid-market and enterprises. We make it possible for our customers to have effortless, but accurate and reliable financial statements every time.”InScope’s financial report drafting tool. So much so that they could be customers, Gootnick said.

Introducing the Third $118M Fund of Friends & Family Capital, Established by Former Palantir CFO and Son of IVP’s Founder

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When they first met in 2007, the now brothers-in-law bonded over their passion for venture capital, eventually leading them to invest together from their personal capital. By 2020, Anderson and Fogelsong decided to take their investing relationship to the next level by launching their first fund with external capital. That fund, which the firm considers its second vehicle, closed at $91.5 million, well above its initial target of $60 million. So,they named their firm “Friends & Family Capital” to capture that spirit, their own family connection, and Fogelsong’s roots in a prominent Silicon Valley VC family. Like its previous fund, Friends & Family’s third fund will be used to invest in “classic B2B enterprise software” companies and hardware businesses with recurring revenue components.

“Global AI Hardware Industry: Rebellion and Sapeon Merge as Competition Intensifies for Fabless AI Chip Manufacturers”

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Two of the country’s prominent fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, have agreed to merge, the companies said on Wednesday. The merger is a strategic move by Rebellions and Sapeon aimed at leading the fabless AI chip market in South Korea to take on global rivals like Nvidia. Indeed, the deal comes at a pivotal moment in the global chip industry. Meanwhile, KT in 2023 incorporated Atom, Rebellions’ datacenter-focused AI chip, into its cloud-based NPU infrastructure. Last November, the company launched a 7-nanometer AI chip, X330 NPU, for autonomous vehicles, and earlier this year, it said it would develop an on-device AI chip targeting the edge computing market.

Illuminating the Way: Danish Startup Emerges from Stealth with $13M in Seed Financing to Revolutionize AI Integration in Financial Records

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That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth Wednesday with $13 million in a seed round of funding led by European VC giant Atomico. The Copenhagen-based startup is reimagining general ledger software from the ground up, replete with AI to cleanse transactional data, while also enabling finance teams to ask plain-English questions and receive straightforward answers from their data. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is king, packing support for CRM (customer relationship management), HR (human resources), project management, and perhaps the most crucial component of all, the general ledger. And it’s this element of the ERP that Light is focused on dragging into the modern digital era, where AI increasingly rules the roost. “Our mission is to be the first automated ledger for global companies,” Sanders told TechCrunch.

Unleashing Diversity: Crunchbase’s Expansion of Tracking to Europe

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Crunchbase is expanding the scope of its tagging options in Europe to start tracking how much venture capital funding goes to minority founders on the continent. Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves. Crunchbase is now making this feature available in Europe. Crunchbase initially launched the Diversity Spotlight feature in 2020, and last year expanded it to add an LGBTQ+ tag. Women globally, meanwhile, typically receive less than 2% of venture capital funding across the world.

Elon Musk Issues Ultimatum: Ban on Apple Devices for Companies in Response to Apple’s ChatGPT Integration

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Elon Musk is threatening to ban iPhones from all his companies over the newly announced OpenAI integrations Apple announced at WWDC 2024 on Monday. This allows users to get an answer from ChatGPT without having to open the ChatGPT iOS app. Apple also announced another integration that would allow users have access to ChatGPT system-wide within Writing Tools via a “compose” feature. That’s great news for OpenAI, which will soon have a massive influx of requests from Apple users. Apple users may not understand the nuances of the privacy issues here, of course — which is what Musk is counting on by making these complaints.

“Delays and Obstacles: Wasoko-MaxAB Merger Challenges Africa’s E-commerce Growth”

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It’s been described as “the largest merger in African e-commerce” by both companies. When the planned merger was first announced, the B2B e-commerce players were active in eight countries. These recent moves suggest the new entity will likely serve fewer than the 450,000 retailers quoted during the merger announcement. As the merger nears completion, the CEOs from both companies will continue as full-time executives but function in different roles. “Regarding our merger with MaxAB, it is important to state that this is progressing as expected and in accordance with the initial terms.

Limiting Children’s Access to ‘Addictive Feeds’ in New York City

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New York’s state legislature has passed a bill that would prohibit social media companies from showing so-called “addictive feeds” to children under 18, unless they obtain parental consent. The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act defines an addictive feed as one where the content is recommended or prioritized based on information about the user or the user’s device — basically, these are the algorithmic news feeds used by most social apps. “Non-addictive feeds,” a category that includes “feeds listed in chronological order,” would still be allowed. “New York is leading the nation to protect our kids from addictive social media feeds and shield their personal data from predatory companies,” Governor Hochul said. It would also prohibit platforms from sending notifications related to these feeds between the ages of midnight and 6am without parental consent.

“Human Native AI: Revolutionizing the Marketplace for AI Training Licensing Deals”

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Human Native AI is a London-based startup building a marketplace to broker such deals between the many companies building LLM projects and those willing to license data to them. Human Native AI also helps rights holders prepare and price their content and monitors for any copyright infringements. Human Native AI takes a cut of each deal and charges AI companies for its transaction and monitoring services. Human Native AI announced a £2.8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, two British micro VCs, this week. It is also a smart time for Human Native AI to launch.