Startup studio super{set} has a fresh exit under its belt with the sale of marketing company Habu to LiveRamp for $200 million in January.
Now, super{set} is adding another $90 million to its coffers as it doubles down on its strategy of building enterprise startups.
We remain a venture studio focused on building companies rooted in data and AI.
We found, fund and build new technology startups, mostly in the enterprise space,” founding managing partner Tom Chavez told TechCrunch.
That’s one aspect in which super{set} has changed compared to 2019, Chavez said, as its method went from art to science.
And they’re calling their company… The Mobile-First Company.
Too many companies that offer B2B tools treat mobile apps as companion apps and second-class citizens.
Small companies don’t need a complicated enterprise software solution.
While Siel Brunet is more experienced with the needs of large companies, he has also seen how B2B apps don’t work well with small businesses.
Many small companies simply rely on consumer apps to fill their needs.
Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September.
The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.
Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic.
Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red.
We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.
Not many startups can claim Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as paying customers, but Confetti can.
How it worksCompanies use Confetti to bring team-building experiences to their remote teams, with support for hybrid too.
ComplexitiesIn a prior job, Rubin says she was tasked with organizing a team-building event, an endeavor that proved more difficult than she initially envisaged.
“When we started, we were solely focused on in-person events, helping companies organize events in the office,” Rubin said.
“We’re already providing companies with options to purchase Confetti Credits, which can be used to buy experiences on our platform,” Rubin said.
Sila, Group14, Envoix, and Amprius are all trying to commercialize their silicon anode technology, hoping to cash in on consumers’ desire for ever more EV range.
Ionobell, a seed stage startup, is hoping to be at the top of that list, claiming its silicon material will be cheaper than the established competition.
Both established companies impregnate porous graphite structures with silicon; Sila also adds a coating to the particles.
Ionobell’s silicon supply comes from a waste material, Neivert said, which helps keep costs down.
Like other battery materials companies, Ionobell faces a challenging road ahead.
“The top use of Nextdoor is people looking for providers, HVAC especially,” Laufer told TechCrunch.
PipeDreams has purchased nine companies so far and currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tucson, and Denver with plans to expand.
“The beauty of this industry is it’s massive, there are over 100,000 businesses doing plumbing and HVAC,” Laufer said about the U.S. market.
Laufer said owning the HVAC companies outright is what differentiates PipeDreams from other competitors looking to just connect consumers with professionals, like Angie and Thumbtack.
PipeDreams is also addressing the skills shortage in the HVAC and plumbing industries, as Gen Z is less interested in learning trades then generations before them.
A new report highlights the demand for startups building open source tools and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution, with the adjacent data infrastructure vertical also heating up.
A broader look at the “top 50 trending” open source startups last year reveals that more than half (26) are related to AI and data infrastructure.
This ethos often translates into commercial open source startups which might not have a traditional center of gravity anchored by a brick-and-mortar HQ.
For comparative purposes, there are other indexes and lists out there that give a steer on the “whats hot” in the open source landscape.
So the ROSS Index has emerged as a useful complementary tool for figuring out which open source “startups” specifically are worth keeping tabs on.
Nvidia could be primed to be the next AWS There are a lot of parallels in the two companies' growth trajectoriesNvidia and Amazon Web Services, the lucrative cloud arm of Amazon, have a surprising amount in common.
But AWS growth has begun to slow down, even as Nvidia’s takes off.
The question is whether Nvidia can sustain that growth to become a long-term revenue powerhouse like AWS has become for Amazon.
The short-term financial outlookAs the above chart notes, Nvida’s revenue growth has been astronomical in recent quarters.
Much like AWS, Nvidia will face stiffer competition eventually, but it controls so much of the market right now, it can afford to cede some.
Liquid Death is just one of many VC-backed beverage startups ready to disrupt Coke and Pepsi Venture-backed beverage startups continue to popOn March 11, a fizzy startup announced that it had raised $67 million at a $1.4 billion valuation and reached $263 million in sales in 2023.
Did you guess that this startup is Liquid Death, a canned water company?
(Liquid Death declined to comment.)
It also rose to be the 11th fastest-growing beverage brand in the last month, besting brands like Monster Energy, Gatorade and Liquid Death.
Olipop and Liquid Death seem well on their way.
1991 Ventures is the brainchild of Ukrainian brothers Denis and Viktor Gursky, who are better known for running incubation and accelerator programs inside Ukraine.
The Gursky brothers previously backed over 200 startups between 2016 and 2024, via their incubator Social Boost and their 1991 Accelerator.
Startups backed to date include LegalTech startup AXDRAFT; European toll payment app eTolls; and cybersecurity company Osavul.
Finally, TA Ventures is perhaps the best known and most active Ukrainian VC internationally, headed up by the almost-ubiquitous Viktoriya Tigipko.
Of course, many of the tech companies Ukraine will produce in the forthcoming years are likely to be either ‘dual-use’ or related to defence.
