Global Payments and Green Seas
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Welcome to the 38th edition of our newsletter, where we feature the most exciting early-stage startups, job openings, and valuable resources, all in a single newsletter.
Let's dive in...
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Startup spotlight
Blaze
What? Blaze is a payments app designed for modern nomads. It merges the convenience and social experience of established P2P payment apps with the cost-effectiveness, speed, and global coverage of modern digital currencies.
With Blaze, you can effortlessly pay friends globally without requiring account numbers. You can send and request payments worldwide using just a phone number, email, Instagram account, or by scanning a QR code. Additionally, Blaze allows you to split bills, connect with local communities, shop worldwide with a Blaze Card, stay updated on friends' travels, and invest in cryptocurrency with as little as $1.
Why? The ability to travel the globe while maintaining a successful career is a dream scenario. However, like all aspects of life, there are challenges, particularly in managing finances. The idea of having to exchange currencies or open multiple bank accounts in different cities can be overwhelming and unnecessary in today’s technological landscape.
Here's a fascinating fact: Recent surveys indicate that digital nomads contribute a staggering $787 billion annually, injecting significant capital into emerging markets. According to the US-based consultancy MBO Partners' 2023 Digital Nomads Report, there are 17.3 million digital nomad workers in the US, and an additional 24 million aspire to join them within the next two to three years. In places like the Philippines, nomadism is anticipated to double GDP growth from tourism alone.
Founded: 2023 in New York, US
Industries: Fintech
Stage: Pre-seed
Founders: Faiyam Rahman (CEO) - ex-Lead Backend Engineer @ Seasons; Luc Succes (CTO) - ex-Co-founder & CTO @ Seasons, Tech Lead @ Artsy
Investors: N/A
Seabound
What? Seabound builds carbon capture equipment for ships.
Why? The shipping industry, often overlooked despite its immense impact, operates through a fleet of tens of thousands of container ships, collectively carrying an astonishing 1.95 billion metric tons of cargo each year. What's lesser-known is the environmental toll these vessels exact, fueled by some of the most environmentally harmful substances, emitting a staggering amount of greenhouse gases—surpassing even the emissions of airplanes.
While the industry is actively exploring alternative fuels and electrification for the next-generation ships, the immediate focus lies on mitigating emissions from the existing fleet. Seabound aims to help by focusing on decarbonizing the sizable vessels already navigating the seas.
How does Seabound's technology work?
Seabound's carbon capture equipment functions by attaching to the smokestacks of ships. It utilizes a 'lime-based' method, directing the exhaust into a container filled with calcium oxide pebbles. These pebbles absorb the CO2 emitted by the ship's exhaust, transforming it into calcium carbonate, commonly known as limestone.
Once the CO2 is absorbed and converted, it can be transported to the port where it has the potential to be either sold for utilization in various industries or sequestered to prevent it from being released back into the atmosphere. This process effectively traps and captures up to 95% of the CO2 emissions produced by the ship, contributing to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from maritime transportation.
Founded: 2022 in London, UK
Industries: Hard Tech, Climate
Stage: Seed
Founders: Alisha Fredriksson (CEO) - ex-Global Partnerships Associate @ Generation; Roujia Wen (CTO) - ex-Software Development Engineer @ Amazon
Investors: Lowercarbon Capital, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Leap Forward Ventures, Eastern Pacific Shipping, Emles Venture Partners, Hawktail, Rebel Fund, Climate Capital
Which early-stage startup should we feature next? Send us a reply. (Criteria: Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A startups)
Venture deals
Udaan, a Bangalore, India-based B2B commerce company, has raised $340M in Series E funding led by M&G Plc. Existing equity investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and DST Global also participated.
Kapital, a Mexico City-based global bank and tech platform, raised $160M in equity and debt funding: $40M in Series B equity financing led by Tribe Capital with participation from Cervin Ventures, Tru Arrow, MS&AD Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and others and a $125M debt raise.
True Anomaly, a Centennial, CO-based developer of advanced hardware and software systems for space security, raised $100M in Series B funding. The round was led by Riot Ventures with participation from Eclipse, ACME Capital, Menlo Ventures, Narya, 645 Ventures, Rocketship.vc, Champion Hill Ventures, and FiveNine Ventures.
Qogita, a London, UK-based platform for wholesale procurement, raised €80M in Series B funding led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Accel, LocalGlobe, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Armada, a San Francisco, CA-based full-stack edge computing platform, revolutionizing connectivity, compute, and AI, raised over $55M in funding. The round was led by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Shield Capital, and 8090 Industries, with participation from Felicis, Contrary, Valor Equity Partners, Marlinspike, 137 Ventures, Koch Real Estate Investments, 8VC, and others.
Liquid AI, a Boston, MA-based domain-specific and general-purpose AI systems developer, emerged from stealth mode with $37.6M in Seed funding led by OSS Capital and PagsGroup, with participation from Breyer Capital, Samsung Next, Safar Partners, ISAI Cap Venture, Tom Preston Werner (Github Co-founder), Naval Ravikant (AngelList & AirChat Co-founder), Chris Prucha (Notion Co-founder), Tobias Lütke (Shopify Co-founder), and others.
Simply Homes, a Portland, Maine-based Single Family Rental (SFR) sourcing and underwriting platform, secured $22M in funding led by Gutter Capital and Watchung Capital, with participation from Village Global, Ambush Capital, RavenOne Ventures, Neil Parikh, Gabe Flateman, Luke Sherwin, and others.
Arch, a NYC-based private investment management platform, raised $20M in Series A funding, led by Menlo Ventures and joined by Craft Ventures, Quiet Capital, Carta, Citi Ventures, GPS Investment Partners, and Focus Financial Partners.
Origin AI, a Rockville, MD-based Wi-Fi sensing technology company, closed its latest $15.9M Series B extension. The round was led by Verisure with participation from Okinawa Electric Power Company, Verizon Ventures, and INSPiRE.
Tetra, a NYC-based home services company helping homeowners transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, raised $10.5M in Seed funding. The round was led by Greycroft, Gutter Capital, Lerer Hippeau, and 1sharpe Capital.
Nonco, an institutional digital asset brokerage, raised $10M in Seed funding led by Valor Capital Group and Hack VC with participation from Morgan Creek Digital, Bullish, CMCC, Lvna Capital, Theta Capital, Bastion Trading, Libra Capital Ventures, and others.
Chalk (featured on Open Scout #20), a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a data platform for machine learning, raised $10M in Seed funding. The round was led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund.
Delphina, a San Francisco, CA-based LLM-powered copilot for data science, closed a $7.5M Seed funding round. The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Radical Ventures.
Helicity Space, a Pasadena, CA-based commercial space company, secured $5M in Seed funding. Backers include Airbus Ventures, TRE Ventures, Voyager Space Holdings, E2MC Space, Urania Ventures, and Gaingels.
Arbonics, an Tallinn, Estonia-based forest carbon removal platform, raised €5.5M in Seed funding led by NordicNinja, Plural, and Tilia Impact Ventures.
Pimento, a Paris, France-based generative AI systems provider, raised €3M in Seed funding led by Partech and Cygni Capital.
Other
BoxGroup closed on $425M in capital commitments across two new funds: BoxGroup Six, a pre-seed and seed-stage fund, and BoxGroup Picks, its third opportunity fund. Each fund is $212.5M. BoxGroup is a generalist firm investing in five "buckets": consumer enterprise, healthcare, financial, biotech, and climate.
Playground Global, a Palo Alto, CA-based early-stage venture capital firm, brought in $410M in capital commitments for its Fund III to invest in early-stage deep tech and science companies.
Artis Ventures, a San Francisco, CA-based venture capital firm, announced the close of its fourth fund, TechBio II, at $200M. This new fund is solely focused on the TechBio sphere – an industry defined by companies using data, software, AI, machine learning, and deep learning to transform human health and well-being.
Heartcore Capital, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based early-stage venture capital firm, raised €15M for its first Web3 fund. The fund will back startups advancing application layer protocols, including DeFi, gaming, social software, and DeSci.
Singular, a Paris, France-based VC firm co-founded by Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan that invests across Europe, raised €400M for the second fund.
What we're reading
Tracxn SEA Tech - Annual Report - 2023: SEA tech startups continue to see a downward trend as funding falls 65% to $4.3B in 2023, compared with $12.4B in 2022. 61 acquisitions and 10 IPOs took place. FinTech, Enterprise Applications, and Retail were the top-performing segments. There were 10 funding rounds that were $100M+.
Up to now this year, the app industry received just about $3B, a mere 2.5% of total US funding—its lowest share in ten years. Contrastingly, back in 2016, it claimed a 14% share. Only four app startups secured funding rounds over $100M this year, none surpassing $200M.
Google plans to implement a new Tracking Protection feature in Chrome beginning in January with the intention to completely disable third-party cookies in the second half of 2024.
Google DeepMind outdoes human mathematicians on unsolved problem
OpenAI suspends ByteDance’s account after it used GPT-generated data to train its own competing model in China.
According to a report in 404 Media, a marketing team within Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads.
Just in time for Christmas, Cruise, the self-driving vehicle business majority-owned by General Motors, is laying off 900 workers, nearly 24% of the company, in an effort to slash costs and revamp the company.
OpenAI has inked a multiyear deal with Axel Springer, the media giant behind outlets like Business Insider and Politico. This agreement allows ChatGPT to summarize Axel Springer's news content, crediting the original sources with links. The partnership’s expected to bring in big bucks for Axel Springer.
Netflix recently shared detailed viewership data for almost all its TV shows and movies (18K — or 99%), revealing that “The Night Agent” (season one) was the No. 1 show (812M hours viewed), while “Ginny & Georgia” was No. 1 when including all seasons.
Job opportunities
Mintlify: AI-powered documentation writer
Founding Backend Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
Customer Success Manager (San Francisco, CA)
Paraform: Recruitment marketplace
Customer Success Lead (San Francisco, CA)
Wispr: Building the future of human-computer interfaces controlled by the peripheral nervous system.
Founding Full Stack Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
Moonshot AI: Building an AI platform that teaches websites to evolve over time to increase conversions, sales, and revenue.
Mealco: AI-powered platform that helps restaurants simplify all the online orders they field from multiple food delivery apps every day.
VP of Product (NYC)
Aktos: Building a modern fintech SaaS platform to power the $18B ARM (Accounts Receivable Management) industry.
Staff Full Stack Engineer (Backend Leaning) (Remote - US/Canada)
Vellum (YC W23): Developer platform for building production-worthy Large Language Model applications.
Software Engineer - Frontend/Fullstack (New York, NY)
Interested in any of these jobs? Send us a reply for more info or a referral.
That's a wrap for this week.
Thank you for sticking with us until the finish.
We're open to hearing your suggestions for future newsletter topics, so feel free to share what you're grappling with or what you'd like to see from us in upcoming editions.
Have a great weekend.
Kenneth ✌️
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