WeWork, the once high-flying co-working company, could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange

Today, SpaceX’s Starship exploded a few minutes after successfully lifting off on an uncrewed test flight, abruptly ending the inaugural flight of a vehicle that Elon Musk wants to use for pioneering deep-space missions. More here.

WeWork, the co-working company, could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange if its shares don't rise above $1 over a consecutive 30-day trading period. The company, once valued by investor SoftBank at a very optimistic $47 billion, is currently valued at less than $400 million. After plans for a traditional IPO blew up in spectacular fashion in the fall of 2019, WeWork went public through a special purpose acquisition company in the fall of 2021. Reuters has more here. 

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Abdera Therapeutics, a three-year-old startup based in Menlo Park, Ca., that is developing targeted radiation drugs that can zero in on specific tumor proteins, raised a $110 million Series B round led by VenBio Partners, with Versant Ventures, Viking Global Investors, Amplitude Ventures, Northview Ventures, AdMare BioInnovations, and AbCellera also piling on. The company has raised a total of $148.3 million. BioPharma Dive has more here.

CoreWeave, a six-year-old, Roseland, N.J.-based cloud compute provider that specializes in large-scale graphics processing unit-accelerated workloads, raised a $221 million Series B round at a $2 billion pre-money valuation. Magnetar Capital led the transaction with an $111 million investment, while Nvidia, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and ex-Apple exec Daniel Gross divided up the remainder. The company has raised a total of $371 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Distalmotion, an 11-year-old, Lausanne, Switzerland-based company whose minimally invasive "Dexter" robot is currently being used in Europe for daily procedures in gynecology, urology and general surgery (it doesn't have FDA approval yet here in the U.S.), has raised $150 million from earlier backers, including Revival Healthcare Capital. FierceHealthcare has more here.

Noah Medical, a five-year-old startup based in San Carlos, Ca., that has built a single-use, disposable bronchoscope with a four-way articulation that enables navigation to "even the most peripheral lesions," raised a $150 million Series B round co-led by SoftBank and Prosperity7 Ventures, with additional investors including Tiger Global and previous backers Hillhouse, Sequoia China, Shangbay Capital, Uphonest Capital, Sunmed Capital, Lyfe Capital, 1955 Capital, and AME Cloud Ventures. MassDevice has more here.

CropX Technologies, an eight-year-old Israeli startup that helps farms manage irrigation, energy, and fertilizer use, raised a $30 million Series C round led by Aliaxis, with participation from Edaphon, Finistere Ventures, NTT Finance Corporation, OurCrowd, Reinke Irrigation, Yair Shamir, and Victrix. The company has raised a total of $55.6 million. More here.

EniferBio, a four-year-old Finnish startup that produces a protein-rich dried powder that can be used in pet food and so-called aqua feed, raised a $12 million Series A round led by Aqua-Spark, with additional funds provided by Tesi, Valio, Voima Ventures, and Nordic Foodtech VC. The company has raised a total of $13.2 million. More here.

Goals, a two-year-old Stockholm startup that is developing a soccer video game, raised a $20 million Series A round led by Seven Seven Six, with additional participation from Northzone, Moonfire, and Cassius. The company has raised a total of $39 million. Forbes has more here.

Halcyon, a three-year-old Austin startup that protects companies against ransomware attacks, raised a $44 million Series A round and $6 million in debt. The deal co-leads were SYN Ventures and Corner Ventures, while Dell Technologies Capital also contributed. The company has raised a total of $50 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Lexion, a five-year-old Seattle startup that uses AI to help businesses manage contracts, raised a $20 million Series B round led by Point72 Ventures, with Citi Ventures and previous investors Khosla Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and Wilson Sonsini also anteing up. The company has raised a total of $35.2 million. GeekWire has more here.

Mooncard, a seven-year-old Paris startup whose payment card allows businesses to maintain tight controls over employee spending, raised a $40.6 million Series C round. Orange Ventures and Portage co-led the deal. The company has raised a total of $75.7 million. The Paypers has more here.

Novalith Technologies, a three-year-old Sydney startup that uses carbon dioxide to simplify the production of lithium chemicals, thereby reducing production costs and creating a smaller emissions footprint than existing processes, raised a $15.5 million Series A round led by Lowercarbon Capital and including The Clean Energy Finance Corporation, The Grantham Environmental Trust, TDK Ventures, and Investible. The company has raised a total of $17.3 million. More here.

Accredify, a four-year-old Singapore startup whose platform verifies documents such as degrees and certificates, raised a $7 million Series A round co-led by iGlobe Partners and SIG Venture Capital and including previous investors Pavilion Capital and Qualgro. The company has raised a total of $9 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Charm Solutions, a startup that provides a platform for banks and other financial institutions to offer personalized financial advice to their customers, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by BootstrapLabs. FinTech Global has more here.

Coinflow Labs, a one-year-old Chicago startup that aims to develop a payment stack to allow web3 companies to accept traditional payment methods such as credit cards and permit customers to move cryptocurrency to their bank accounts using existing real-time payment rails, raised a $1.45 million pre-seed round. The round was co-led by Jump Crypto and Reciprocal Ventures, while CMT Digital, Digital Currency Group, Gumi Cryptos, Builder Capital, Prompt Ventures, and Blocktech Ventures also participated. More here.

CurbWaste, a six-year-old New York-based outfit whose software helps trash haulers manage their routes and operations, has closed a $4 million seed extension round led by TTV Capital, with participation from earlier backers B Capital Group and Mucker Capital. The outfit has now raised $11.2 million. More here.

Evermile, a one-year-old London startup that claims to simplify and automate deliveries, bringing enterprise-grade logistics to small businesses, raised a $6 million seed round led by 10D, with Mensch Capital Partners also chipping in. TechCrunch has more here.

Fluree, a five-year-old startup based in Winston Salem, N.C., that provides web3 data management tools, including a blockchain-backed semantic graph database, raised a $10 million Series A round led by SineWave Ventures and including Eve Atlas, Augment Ventures, Nanban Ventures, Wave Financial, Good Growth Capital, and Rise of the Rest. The company has raised a total of $17.2 million. VentureBeat has more here.

Groundlight, a Seattle startup whose platform allows developers to interpret images programmatically using simple English language instructions and minimal code, raised a $10 million round led by Madrona, with Greycroft, Founders Co-op, Flying Fish, AscendVC, and EssenceVC also joining in. VentureBeat has more here.

Primo, a French startup that helps small businesses manage their devices without the need for a dedicated IT manager, raised a $3.4 million seed round. Headline and Global Founders Capital co-led the deal. TechCrunch has more here.

Qdrant, a two-year-old, Berlin-based vector database and search platform, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Unusual Ventures; other backers in the round included 42cap, IBB Ventures and angels including Cloudera co-founder Amr Awadallah. More in TechCrunch.

Universal Ledger, a crypto startup that enables users to build their own crypto wallets, raised a $10 million in SAFE. Hard Yaka was the deal lead. Axios has more here.

Vinci Games, a San Francisco startup that has developed a VR basketball game called Blacktop Hoops, raised a $5.1 million seed round led by Makers Fund, with Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Anorak Ventures, BonAngels, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin also pitching in. More here.

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Autotech Ventures, an eight-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based early-stage venture firm that invests in transportation technologies and businesses, has closed its third fund with $230 million in capital commitments. The outfit tells TechCrunch that it's particularly interested in transportation-related fintech ventures that are poised to grow during a recession. More here.

BDC, the roughly 80-year-old national development bank wholly owned by the Government of Canada, just created a $150 million  Sustainability Venture Fund that it says will be dedicated to funding tech that supports the world's sustainability and climate targets. Led by Joseph Regan, who is currently the managing partner of BDC Capital's Industrial Innovation Venture Fund, this new fund will be funneled into sustainability-oriented startups at the A and B stage with SaaS, hardware-enabled software, and software-led business models. BDC Capital separately manages a $400-million Climate Tech Fund II and says its new fund will complement this earlier initiative. More here.

Define Ventures, founded five years ago by former Kleiner Perkins investor Lynn Chou O'Keefe, has closed on $460 million in capital commitments across two funds to invest in early-stage digital health startups. The Bay Area-based outfit now has $800 million in assets under management. Forbes has more here.

A private investment arm of banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. has wrapped up its inaugural growth-equity fund with commitments of more than $1 billion. It plans to invest 270 Growth Fund I LP and related vehicles in software, real estate, financial- and consumer-tech startups up to the point where they may be ready for an IPO, according to fund sponsor J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners. The WSJ has more here.

Vesey Ventures, an early stage venture firm that says it's aiming to invest in startups transforming financial services, has closed its debut fund with $78 million in capital commitments. Founded by three former managing directors of Amex Ventures, the outfit declined to tell TechCrunch whether Amex is an LP but said its limited partners include seven "very prominent financial institutions." More here.

Twitter’s legacy blue check marks are officially gone, following a commitment made public weeks ago by owner Elon Musk to turn the icon -- previously reserved for public figures -- into a driver of subscription revenue that's available to any user willing to pay $8 a month for it. We're still spiraling after losing ours; at least we're in good company. Halle Berry's take is especially priceless, but even government agencies are having fun with what many worry will fast devolve into a misinformation sh*tshow. In the meantime, Musk has quietly doled out check marks to some high-wattage users, including LeBron James and Stephen King, even as they say they did not and would not have paid for one. Bloomberg has more here. 

Epic Games is expanding its footprint in Latin America with the purchase of Aquiris, a 16-year-old, Brazilian game company. Aquiris will become Epic Games Brasil, giving the social gaming giant a foothold in the country’s fast-growing gaming market. Epic, the Cary, N.C.-based maker of "Fortnite," invested an undisclosed amount in Aquiris a year ago.  Terms of the deal aren't being shared publicly. TechCrunch has more here.

Berlin-based Razor Group, one of the string of startups that has made a name for itself as a “roll-up” startup — raising big money to acquire and consolidate Amazon and other marketplace retailers — is now making a different kind of consolidation play. The three-year-old startup, which says it is profitable, has acquired one of its competitors in the aggregator space, Stryze Group, as part of a bid to be “the consolidator of consolidators.” TechCrunch has more here.

Air Water Ventures, an Abu Dhabi-based company whose technology condenses airborne moisture to produce drinking water, is going public through a merger with a U.S. blank-check company. Combined with Athena Technology Acquisition Corp. II, Air Water will have an enterprise value of about $386 million, according to a statement reviewed by Bloomberg News. More here.

Nima Momeni, 38, the tech consultant who was arrested on a murder charge in the death of Cash App creator Bob Lee, was previously cited on suspicion of assault and battery, according to police records obtained by Insider.

Tamar Yehoshua, who spent more than dozen years across Amazon and Google before logging another four as Slack's Chief Product Officer (she left the role in February), has joined IVP as a venture partner. More here.

Pending home sales in San Francisco are down 45% year over year(!), according to SocketSite. 

Tiger Global Management’s $12.7 billion venture fund, launched near the peak of the tech stock boom in October 2021, had paper loss of 20%, net of management fees, as of December, according to documents viewed by The Information. That’s down from an 8% loss it recorded as of June 2022 and an 11% loss as of September that year. More here.

BuzzFeed is laying off 15% of its staff and making plans to end BuzzFeed News, as it contends with ongoing business challenges, CEO Jonah Peretti said in a note to employees today. The company is laying off about 180 people of its total base of 1,200 employees; Peretti said the company will no longer invest in BuzzFeed News as a stand-alone entity, and will instead focus its news efforts on HuffPost. The WSJ has more here.

The news outlet Insider announced to staff via email today that the company lay off 10% of its workforce, including staff writers. Insider Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson announced last week that the outlet’s writers would be experimenting with ChatGPT. Asked by Gizmodo if the layoffs were related to the nascent use of the AI chatbot, an Insider spokesperson said, “Of course not.” More here.

As Google looks to maintain pace in AI with the rest of the tech giants, it’s consolidating its AI research divisions (that reportedly hate each other); to wit, it announced today that Google DeepMind, a new unit made up of the DeepMind team, and the Google Brain team from Google Research, are combining into a new unit. TechCrunch has more here.

From the WSJ: "First, they said, came discussions about potential partnerships or integration of their technology into Apple products. Then, they said, talks stopped and Apple launched its own similar features." When Apple comes calling, "It’s the kiss of death." ☠️

Like Reddit before it, Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service. More here.

A crucial character trait for happiness.

Where interior designers say it's A-OK to skimp.

Cosplaying "Succession" in New York's swankiest dining rooms. ("The Grill at lunch is less a power place than it used to be, but it’s still very important,” says a wealth consultant to the show.)

The best gifts for bookworms that aren't books.

Tiny Japanese pick-up trucks. (More of them here.)

“In most cases the best deals aren’t going to come to you, you have to find them.” – Kyra Durko, Principal at Two Sigma Ventures. She spoke to Affinity about ways to optimize outbound sourcing. Download the dealmaker’s email playbook for five best practices from Two Sigma Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Nexa Partners.