Sam Blond is leaving Founders Fund, as well as the profession of venture capitalist, just 18 months after he joined the storied Silicon Valley firm.
For now just immense gratitude to FF and all the incredible people and… — Sam Blond (@samdblond) March 4, 2024Before joining the VC firm, Blond was best known as the former Chief Revenue Officer at Brex.
Brex is not a Founders Fund portfolio company, although Founders Fund is an investor in one of Brex’s biggest competitors: Ramp.
We hope to have the opportunity to work with him again,” Founders Fund spokesperson Erin Gleason tells TechCrunch.
But this is the second splashy departure of a Founders Fund partner over the past couple of months.
Inspired Capital is celebrating its fifth birthday with the closing of its Inspired Capital Fund III with $330M in capital commitments.
The New York-based early-stage venture firm was founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Alexa von Tobel and Penny Pritzker.
They went on to raise $200 million for a debut fund and then $281 million for its second fund in 2021.
“Venture capital, when properly deployed is actually the most powerful economic engine that the world has ever seen.
As part of the new fund, Inspired Capital wrote a manifesto that highlights how the venture capital firm thinks, what it believes in and what it is looking for.
Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Three years later, amongst growing backlash against DEI and diversity-focused investments, the firm’s mission may be more important now than when it started.
The firm found initial fundraising success in 2021, and held a first close on $25 million that year, he explained.
“We have seen funding to diverse founders and Black-led venture funds decline rapidly.
The firm will also collaborate with Black Tech Nation, the nonprofit that is run by BTNV general partner Kelauni Jasmyn that created a digital network of Black tech professionals, when it can.
Meta has dropped its lawsuit against an Israeli web scraping company Bright Data, after losing a key claim in its case a few weeks ago.
Beyond being just another case of web scraping, what made this case particularly interesting was that Meta was a Bright Data customer at one time.
However, when Bright Data scraped Meta’s own data, the company sued.
“This concession by Meta is a pivotal moment for Bright Data and the web scraping community.
“Bright Data remains committed to keeping public web data freely accessible to everyone.
Google said Thursday it plans to roll out the SoundPod, its portable speaker designed to instantly validate and announce successful payments, to small merchants across India over the coming months.
The Google Pay expansion in India, where the company is among the mobile payment market leaders, comes even as the firm winds down some of its payments apps in the U.S.
The sound-box was invented to serve small Indian merchants unable to afford regular point-of-sale devices but accepting of UPI payments.
The company said merchants who use SoundPod to process 400 payments in a month will get $1.5 in cashback.
Reliance, India’s largest firm by market cap, also began testing a similar device at its campus last year, TechCrunch earlier reported.
Golden Ventures, a Canada-based venture capital firm, closed on over $100 million in capital commitments for its fifth fund targeting high-potential, seed-stage founders working across technologies, including AI, climate, blockchain and quantum.
“This is a continuation of our core thesis and created to be super founder-aligned,” Golden told TechCrunch.
The firm makes both core investments and those that lean more on the angel side.
Over 13 years, Golden Ventures has backed over 100 companies at the seed stage.
Golden Ventures V is backed by a group of existing institutional limited partners, including BDC Capital, ECMC Group, Foundry, HarbourVest Partners, Kensington Capital Partners, Northleaf Capital Partners, RBC, Teralys Capital, University of Chicago and Vintage Investment Partners, and new institutional partner Deloitte Ventures.
Uber has signed a memorandum of understanding with an Indian government-backed program that aims to make mobility and commerce more accessible across the South Asian nation.
The ride-hailing giant said Thursday that it will explore an integration with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to explore integrations with the network and expand range of its mobility offerings on the Uber app.
The ONDC is an ambitious initiative seeking to disrupt the country’s fast-growing e-commerce and mobility sectors.
Though firms like Amazon and Flipkart have expressed intentions to participate in the open network, their engagement remains limited.
“As the Open Network is continuously evolving, MTT (mobility, transport and travel) is certainly a critical sector for us.
Food tech investment may have declined along with overall venture capital, but Bluestein Ventures is not letting that slow it down.
The Chicago-based early-stage venture capital firm closed on $45 million in capital commitments for its Fund III.
Andrew Bluestein, co-managing partner of Bluestein Ventures, founded the firm in 2014 and brought on Ashley Hartman, also co-managing partner, eight years ago.
They join other venture capital firms, like Kost Capital, Supply Change Capital and Joyful Ventures, that have recently raised new funds to invest in food tech.
“When we started Bluestein Ventures, people would ask us why we were investing in food,” Bluestein told TechCrunch.
The U.S. firm specializes in building structures out of large concrete masonry blocks.
Amsterdam-based Monumental, meanwhile, specializes in the more familiar red clay variety.
Monumental has already been doing limited pilots in its native Netherlands, including the 15-meter exterior of an office building.
“At Monumental, we’re working to help the industry meet these challenges,” says co-founder and CEO Salar al Khafaji.
Funding will go toward hiring, scaling manufacturing and diversifying the manner of bricks/blocks its robots are capable of handling.
In fact, in the midst of raising the firm’s fourth fund, he seems to be positively cheery about the state of the crypto market despite how things are going.
With over $1.2 billion in assets under management, 10T counts major crypto entities like Gemini, Kraken, Yuga Labs and Animoca Brands as part of its portfolio.
And 1Roundtable Partners (1RT), Tapiero’s growth-stage firm, is also raising a not-insignificant amount for its upcoming fund: a minimum of $200 million and up to $800 million.
As the bear market thaws, Tapiero sees few other growth equity investors dedicated to the crypto space at this point in time.
Taking the long viewWith the new fund, 1RT plans to make about 10 to 15 additional investments with hopes of gaining another five to 10 board seats across those portfolio companies, Tapiero said.
