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.
For them, the difficulty hasn’t been opening local USD accounts; it’s been cost-effectively facilitating payments from international employers and online platforms.
“Using local products meant many remote workers had large chunks of their earnings eaten away with excessive fees.
The USD products couldn’t be local,” said Oudjidane, who is also the founding partner of emerging markets fintech fund Byld Ventures.
“The product would need to move to offering U.S.-based USD accounts,” accounts that, critically, would facilitate ACH payments to enable those freelance payments and came with the security that you get with U.S. banking, such as FDIC assurance.
“Freelancers and remote workers in these markets will undoubtedly be a critical source of foreign income to help rebuild,” Oudjidane said.
If accurate, this latest injection of capital would value Moonshot AI at $2.5 billion – the largest single funding round for Chinese LLM developers on public record.
Co-leading the round are e-commerce giant Alibaba and HongShan – the VC firm formerly known as Sequoia China, according to South China Morning Post.
Other in the round included Chinese “super app” Meituan and Xiaohongshu (sometimes called China’s answer to Instagram), according to Chinese tech blog LatePost.
Pink Floyd Fan turned AI trailblazerYang Zhilin had a long list of achievements to his credit even before starting Moonshot.
The total amount raised by China’s AI firms amounted to roughly $2 billion, 70% less than the year before.
Nigerian fintech Cleva, focused on creating a banking platform for African individuals and businesses to receive international payments by opening USD accounts, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding.
“The team is uniquely qualified to address this given their experience building banking products at Stripe and robust platforms at AWS.
Both founders share a strong connection with the African market.
(It’s worth highlighting that while Cleva exclusively provides USD accounts, other players offer GBP and EUR accounts.)
Meanwhile, the YC-backed startup, which generates revenue when users swap and exchange their funds (in USD accounts) for the local currency (in naira for now), also charges a 0.9% fee on deposits into customers’ USD accounts.
A couple years ago, when the pandemic was still in full swing, Raj Kapoor and Josh Felser started making some investments in climate tech startups.
Things must have gone well, because now they’re jumping in: The firm today said it has closed a $65 million inaugural fund, using it to back founders who are starting climate tech software companies.
Felser founded Spinner in 1997 (sold to AOL) and Crackle in 2004 (sold to Sony).
He also started the #Climate nonprofit in 2014 and a public-private COVID task force during the pandemic.
Those experiences, coupled with a growing concern for the state of the Earth’s climate, led the two to form Climactic.
