Strictly VC - Does OpenAI have a right to "GPT"?

Apple has won its antitrust-focused appeals court battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games over its App Store policies, according to the opinion issued today by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling is a major setback for Epic Games and other developers who hoped the ruling could set precedent for further antitrust claims and require Apple to open iOS devices to third-party app stores and payment systems, notes TechCrunch. More here.

Coinbase took action against the Securities and Exchange Commission late today, asking a federal court to compel the agency to respond to its demand for clearer crypto regulations. The cryptocurrency exchange sent the SEC its so-called “petition for rule-making” last July, and asked the agency to propose and adopt rules for digital assets securities. It also sought answers to 50 specific questions that would provide “clarity and certainty regarding the regulatory treatment of digital asset securities." Decrypt has more here.

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to issue patents for inventions his AI system created. According to Reuters, the justices turned away his appeal of a lower court's ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors. More here.

Climbing interest rates and soaring inflation created the perfect storm to end a decade-long bull market for venture capital. Heading into 2023, many were hopeful that VC had hit bottom and things would slowly start to recover. Juniper Square’s latest market update looks back on Q1 2023 and explains why—even though VC hit a new low in March with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank—the worst-case scenarios have been avoided. Read The State of Venture Capital for Q2 2023.

If the startup OpenAI is feeling protective about its brand lately, it’s understandable. ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United State Patent and Trademark Office in recent months.

All are piggybacking off the stunning popularity of ChatGPT, the chatbot rolled out in November by OpenAI that itself is built off the company’s deep learning model, the latest release of which, GPT-4, was rolled out last month.

Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for “GPT,” which stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the “myriad infringements and counterfeit apps” beginning to spring into existence.

Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week. According to the agency, OpenAI’s attorneys neglected to pay an associated fee as well as provide “appropriate documentary evidence supporting the justification of special action.”

Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm’s trademark practice group. Even then, the outcome isn’t certain, Scher explains.

Certainly, he says, OpenAI has plenty of reason to expect that it will be able to secure the patent. We asked him, for example, if OpenAI might face resistance given that the “T” in GPT stands for “Transformer,” which is the name of a neural network architecture that researchers at Google first unveiled in 2017 and that has come into wide use. “Can GPT be a brand even if it has a very descriptive origin?” asks Scher. It can, he says, pointing to IBM, short for International Business Machines, as just one instance of a brand having a descriptive origin, even if the description is weak. That’s “no guarantee [OpenAI] could end up owning [GPT],” Scher adds, but such precedents help.

Also helpful, says Scher . . .

More here.

Enveda Biosciences, a four-year-old startup based in Boulder, Co., whose platform aids researchers in discovering new drugs through analyzing plants, added $51 million to the $68 million Series B it announced in December. The lead investor was Kinnevik, while Henry Kravis and previous investors FPV, True Ventures, Dimension, and Wireframe also participated. The company has raised a total of $174.9 million. More here.

Span, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that makes a network-connected breaker panel that provides real-time visibility into energy consumption and production as well as circuit-level control via its app, raised a $96 million Series B2 led by Wellington Management, with additional participation from previous investors Congruent Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, Munich Re Ventures, Fifth Wall, A/O PropTech, Qualcomm Ventures, and Amazon’s Alexa Fund. The company has raised a total of $231 million. Elektrek has more here.

Super.com, an eight-year-old San Francisco startup that offers a cash-back card to consumers, raised a $60 million Series C round and $25 million in debt. The deal lead was Inovia Capital, while Hyphen Capital, EDC, and Plaza Ventures as well as previous investors Telstra Ventures, Acrew, Lion Capital, and NBA star Steph Curry also took part. TechCrunch has more here.

Avalanche Energy, a five-year-old, Seattle-based fusion energy company, has raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Founders Fund and Toyota Ventures. GeekWire has more here.

Community, a nine-year-old Los Angeles startup co-founded by Ashton Kutcher that manages text message campaigns for brands like McDonald’s and HBO, raised a $25 million round. Investors included Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund, Verizon Ventures, and previous investor Salesforce Ventures. The company has raised a total of $110 million. The New York Times has more here.

Riverlane, a six-year-old startup based in Cambridge, UK, that is designing software to address the problem of quantum errors that occur during computation, raised an $18.7 million Series B round led by Molten Ventures, with Altair and previous investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund also contributing. The company has raised a total of $42.8 million. Silicon Canals has more here.

Woodoo, a seven-year-old Paris startup that is manufacturing composite materials based on wood in order to replace carbon-intensive materials such as glass, leather, and steel, raised a $31 million round, one third of which is debt. Lowercarbon Capital was the deal lead; One Creation and Purple also chipped in. The company has raised a total of $36.9 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Chiefy, a two-year-old, New York-based maker of collaboration software intended to help surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other surgical stakeholders more seamlessly meet for pre-op huddles, checklists, surgical protocols, debrief and feedback loops, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding. LionBird led the round, joined by Nina Capital and Emerge Ventures. More here.

Sonet.io, a three-year-old, Cupertino, Ca.-based cloud service startup that says it can enable secure zero-trust access from any device without requiring any agents to be installed, has raised $6 million in seed funding co-led by The Hive and WestWave Capital. More here.

Stack Identity, a three-year-old startup based in Menlo Park, Ca., that helps businesses manage IT issues such as user provisioning, password management, and access control, raised a $4 million seed round. WestWave Capital and Benhamou Global Ventures were the co-leads, with Plug and Play also pitching in. More here.

Associates spend 40% to 50% of their week in email. And often that time isn’t used efficiently. Find ways to improve your workflows with best practices from Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and Nexa Partners in the dealmaker’s email playbook from Affinity.

Bread & Butter Ventures, a six-year-old, Edina, Mn.-based VC firm, is raising $60 million for its fourth fund, per an SEC filing first flagged by Axios. More here.

Ridge Ventures, a 16-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm specializing in seed and early Series A enterprise software investments, says it has closed its fifth fund with $180 million in total capital commitments. More here.

Bed Bath & Beyond, once a giant among retail companies, finally filed for bankruptcy following months of trying to come up with a rescue plan.

Signaling a new chapter for Silicon Valley, two veteran R&D leaders are combining, as 50-year-old Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) joins SRI International. This combination is the result of a planned donation of PARC and its assets by Xerox to SRI, which was established by the trustees of Stanford University established in 1946 to support economic development in the region. More here.

According to the WSJ, Johnson & Johnson is "poised to begin a roadshow to pitch shares of its consumer-healthcare business, the producer of household names such as Tylenol, in a test for an IPO market that has been in the doldrums for the past year." Kenvue was expected to start meeting with prospective investors as early as today, said the outlet, adding that the goal is to raise $3.5 billion or more in the offering at a valuation close to $40 billion. More here.

Jeff Bezos attempts to blend in at Coachella.

Thirteen companies threatened by ChatGPT.

Microsoft will stop forcing customers of its popular Office software to also have its Teams video conferencing and messaging app automatically installed on their devices, in a move designed to prevent an official antitrust probe by EU regulators. The tech giant has made the concession to avoid a formal investigation, according to the Financial Times. It has the story here.

Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates and Marc Benioff are among those betting that the decades-long goal of building fusion reactors is now within years of being reality. The WSJ has more here.

How Aurora is navigating the bumpy road to commercial self-driving trucks.

Apple Pay could pay off for Apple sooner than once expected, thanks to splashy new financial offerings, including buy now-pay later and a high-yield savings account, and an inflection point in adoption.

The great electrician shortage.

Fox News staffers celebrate Tucker Carlson’s abrupt departure: "Pure joy." Staffers at CNN are meanwhile seemingly delighted that its own controversial star, Don Lemon, was also axed today. ("The consensus internally is, onward.")

Meet Juvet Landscape Hotel, the luxe Norwegian retreat that starred in "Succession" last night.

A $1,900 brown bag.