09.2024: Superintelligent

My favourite early-stage rounds from September 2024: 

• First things first, Safe Superintelligence (aka SSI), newly co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in cash (RT) from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel. This is possibly the largest pre-seed fundraise in history: note that $1bn is the cash raised, not the valuation. According to their website, SSI’s main goal is to develop ‘safe and responsible AI’. Given the recent question marks surrounding OpenAI’s team exits and restructuring, it might be a good idea to pay attention to SSI in the near future. 
• Thatch, a personalised health benefits platform for forward-thinking businesses, raised $38 million in Series A from Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz and Avid Ventures (PRN). Existing solutions are complex and/or expensive, and Thatch is building a super simple benefits solution for companies across every sector of the economy improve their healthcare coverage while curbing costs. 
• OffDeal offers small business owners a faster, cheaper way to sell their companies at premium prices with its bespoke AI agents. OffDeal raised a $4.7M seed round led by Radical Ventures (TC). M&A activity amongst SMBs (specifically HVACs) is on the rise, with more traditional businesses being purchased by investors operating using the PE model. It’s still pretty early days for OffDeal, but time will tell.
• Distance Technologies, a Helsinki-based mixed-reality startup, is pioneering the world's first true glasses-free XR solution. Distance raised an $11 million seed round led by Google Ventures and FOV Ventures. The product is still quite new, but I think this could be promising: Distance has a range of use cases across the automotive, aerospace, and defence markets.
• Zeno, a startup creating motorbikes with swappable batteries, raised a $9.5M seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital and Toyota Ventures (TC). I was extremely fascinated to find out that Zeno is building for this solution for Africa, after emerging from stealth in East Africa. Motorbikes are ubiquitous in most African cities, and Zeno’s solution is both climate-friendly and cost-efficient. Zeno are poised to expand to India in 2025; perhaps we could see chargeable motorbikes as well.
• Brightband, an AI-powered weather forecasting startup, raised a $10M Series A led by Prelude Ventures (TC). The team possesses a wealth of experience across machine learning, computer vision and climate modelling. Brightband is currently designing its own model trained on years of weather observation data, and is committed to open-sourcing its datasets, models, and metrics to establish a common task for global weather forecasting.
• Foreverland, the Italian startup that invented a sustainable carob-based chocolate alternative, has raised €3.4 million in seed funding from food-specific venture funds like Grey Silo Ventures, Eatable Adventure, and Kost Capital (TFN). The past year has seen the cocoa market shaken by an astonishing 300% increase in raw material costs, driven by climate change rendering its production unsustainable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Foreverland include other food options in the long-term.

Bulls

• Cloaked is a consumer-focused cybersecurity tool. I attended a talk by David Colombo earlier in the year exploring the overly-neglected consumer aspect of cybersecurity. Cloaked seems quite useful but isn’t very popular. Either way, I think this is promising and we could expect similar tools in the future. 
• Wordy is a new iOS app that offers a unique way for users to learn English. Wordy app automatically translates and defines unknown words while users watch movies or TV shows such as Friends, Suits, GoT, etc. I’ve been thinking a lot about consumer, and I’m quite delighted to see more useful tools being built.
• Virtuous is a fundraising CRM for nonprofit organisations. Virtuous appears user-friendly, effective for the specific niche, and scalable as number of donors grows. Virtuous recently announced a $100 million from Susquehanna Growth Equity, off a recent 500% uptake in revenue. It’s an easy one to bet on for me.

Bears

• Howbout is yet another social calendar app. There’s not too much to say with this one, but I believe the fact we keep seeing so many emerge, and subsequently struggle with growth and/or monetisation, and none wildly succeed, indicates the space is perhaps unpromising. 
• Everday is an AI platform which creates a ’digital twin’ for each employee. Everyday forms a digital representation of their skills and willingness to grow; this information is gathered through an automated onboarding and assessment, which identifies employees’ experiences and digital footprint. I believe Everyday could be solving a problem across multiple organisations, but I’m unsure about their ability to find product-market-fit.