Happy Tuesday and welcome to
!A message from Deel
You found global talent. Deel’s here to help you onboard them.
Deel's simplified a whole planet's worth of information. It's time you got your hands on our international compliance handbook, where you'll learn about:
Attracting global talent
Labor laws to consider when hiring
Processing international payroll on time
Staying compliant with employment and tax laws abroad
With 150+ countries right at your fingertips, growing your team with Deel is easier than ever. Download our international hiring guide now.
Now, let's dive into our regular programming.
Startup spotlight
1.
Startup name: CoreDB (2022, US)
CoreDB is a commercial open-source (COSS) platform based on the popular database, Postgres1. Its focus is on simplifying the developer experience of deploying, managing, and scaling Postgres through a novel "database-as-code" approach.
Postgres has grown in popularity over the years. A survey from Timescale found that over half of developers reported using Postgres more in 2022 than they did in 2021. It is battle-tested with a large community that can handle SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) queries and a wide range of workloads such as analytical, time-series, geospatial, and more, thanks to its rich ecosystem of add-ons and extensions.
Founder(s) background: Ry Walker - Managing Partner @ Cincinnati Ventures, ex-Co-founder of Astronomer, which has raised $282.9mm in total funding to date & Differential
Backed by (public source): N/A
...
2.
Startup name: Dala (2021, UK)
In today's rapidly evolving knowledge economy, organizations generate vast amounts of information and insights at an unprecedented pace. This collective business knowledge is crucial for both leaders and employees to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities, make informed strategic decisions, and gain and maintain a competitive edge. However, with so much information scattered across different platforms, finding the right piece of information can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.
According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. On average, that’s 9.3 hours per week.
That's where Dala comes in with its innovative contextual search tool designed to unify a company's knowledge. By seamlessly integrating with a company's workplace applications, employees can conduct a comprehensive search across all of their knowledge silos to quickly find relevant information tailored to their needs.
Founder(s) background: Haroun Hickman - ex-Commercial Director @ Metomic & Zyper (Acquired by Discord); Joel K. - ex-Senior Software Engineer @ Metomic, Frame.io & Etsy
Backed by (public source): Seedcamp, Valia Ventures, Johnny Boufarhat (Founder & CEO at Hopin), Roman Schumacher (Co-founder at Personio), James Meekings (Co-founder & CMO at Funding Circle), and many more.
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3.
Startup name: Subset (US, 2021)
Subset is a software tool that aims to give your spreadsheets superpowers. It's designed with reusability and automation in mind, and offers the flexibility of Figma's canvas and the power of a full-featured spreadsheet. Subset provides intuitive ways to automate spreadsheets, making them easily usable by others. When you leverage the Subset template community for analysis, you don't need to audit every single cell like you would with a normal spreadsheet template. Simply input your data, and you're good to go.
Spreadsheets are not only the simplest, but also the most intuitive way of organizing discrete units of information. They offer the easiest method to create, read, update, or delete any type of data, making them the highest bandwidth IO interface for knowledge workers. With over 1 billion active users, their reach and impact are unmatched.
Founder(s) background: AJ Nandi - ex-Investor @ Insight Partners; Jason Chan - ex-Associate @ PSG, IB Analyst @ Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Backed by (public source): N/A
Funding highlights
Insurtech Hourly, a workers' comp & payroll startup, expanded its Series A financing to $32mm, led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from S Capital, MS&AD Ventures, J Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, CSC Upshot Ventures, and Sienna Investment Managers.
Two, a B2B payment suite, raised €18mm ($19.3mm) in a Series A funding round led by Shine Capital and Antler with participation from Sequoia Capital, Day One Ventures, and more.
Numbers Station AI raised $17.5mm in a Series A round to develop an "intelligent data stack automation platform" using foundation models. The funding was led by Madrona, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Factory, and angel investors like Jeff Hammerbacher, co-founder of Cloudera.
Aembit, a Maryland-based security startup that focuses on helping DevOps and security teams manage federated workloads, secured $16.6mm in seed funding from Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures.
Tavus, a Y Combinator (YC) alum, raised $6.1mm in a seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, and YC Continuity. Tavus offers a platform that allows users to create AI video templates in minutes and generate an unlimited number of video versions from that original source.
Nexoya secured €4.7mm ($5mm) in Series A funding from Blacksheep MadTech Fund to optimize advertising budgets for businesses using AI.
Klimato, a Swedish startup that helps the food industry reduce carbon emissions, raised €4.2mm ($4.5mm) in a funding round led by Global Cleantech Capital (GCC).
ICYMI
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Postgres, also known as PostgreSQL, is an open source database management system launched in 1996 as the successor to a database developed at UC Berkeley called Ingres.
I’m building a billon-dollar business in public. Maybe I’ll get featured one day? 😎 Follow along: leoariel.substack.com