Altman amends, Craft Ventures goes big, and Amazon quietly changes the terms of its climate pledge

Friday! We have a shortish edition for you today/tonight as we have out-of-town guests here for the long weekend. (Relatedly, we hope you enjoy your Memorial Day weekend here in the U.S.; note that we will not be publishing the newsletter on Monday in observance of the holiday. And also because of said guests.)

Before we go, here's a freshly baked StrictlyVC Download episode, featuring Spencer Bogart, a general partner with the 10-year-old, blockchain-ecosystem-focused venture firm Blockchain Capital, who led the newest round in one of the startup world's strangest but also most promising startups (if it can pull off what it's hoping to accomplish). Called Tools for Humanity, it is the parent company of Worldcoin and yet another Sam Altman production that very much fits into Altman's vision of what the world will soon look like. We'd never talked before with Bogart and really enjoyed this one; if you're interested in this company and what this venture firm finds most compelling as we head into the second half of 2023, it's worth checking out. (You can also read some excerpts from our chat below.)

Much thanks to the sponsor of this week's podcast, Wing Venture Capital, which recently compiled a proprietary list to establish what Wing believes are the 30 best privately-held companies in enterprise technology today. Wing says the list is vastly changed from last year, with new names making up more than two-thirds of the whole. (Yes, there are a bunch in the generative AI category.) See what you think; you can check it out here.

See you Tuesday.:)

OpenAI's Sam Altman — days after making comments that he might pull out of Europe if he didn’t feel he could meet the EU’s regulations — said he plans to comply with the bloc’s rules. More here and here.

Amazon has given up a key part of its climate pledge and deleted the blog post that announced its "Shipment Zero" initiative. Business Insider has more here.

Juniper Square surveyed nearly 100 VC firms about their concerns, plans, and focus areas for the rest of the year, and found that: 63% of VC firms plan to raise capital this year, the most pressing concern from LPs is around exits, and 40% want to invest in better LP reporting. Download its research to learn more, including: Why VCs are worried about investor sentiment, how optimistic firms are about the rest of 2023, which operational investments VCs are prioritizing. Get the research now.

This week, Worldcoin, an outfit that aims to serve as proof of personhood in a world where it’s harder by the day to distinguish a human from a bot, raised $115 million in Series C funding.

Led by the 10-year-old venture firm Blockchain Capital, whose bets have included Coinbase, Kraken and OpenSea, the investment brings Worldcoin’s funding to at least $240 million, even as the controversial organization — founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — has much to prove.

Yesterday, we talked with Blockchain Capital General Partner Spencer Bogart about what gave him confidence in Worldcoin, which aims to create a global ID, a global currency, and an app that enables payment, purchases and transfers. Like many others, we wondered how it can achieve its goals when, right now at least, its mission relies first and foremost on convincing tens of millions of people to allow Worldcoin to scan their irises using futuristic, tech-dense globes.

Below is part of that conversation, edited for length. You can also hear the longer conversation here.

Your co-investors in this new round include earlier backer Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global. Did Khosla Ventures or Tiger Global, which are also previous backers, re-up?

They might be part of this financing; I don’t believe they’re a large part of it.

How much of the company do investors own? I’d guess it’s hard to negotiate with Sam Altman given the power he wields and also his extensive experience on the other side of the table as an investor.

That is a correct characterization. Sam is a formidable founder and knows how to manage a cap table. Again, I apologize. It’s not a figure I have in front of me right now. Generally, companies sell 20% of the [equity] in each financing. Granted, things can move down or up from there significantly. I think in this case, the number is going to be meaningfully lower than that across the Series A, the Series B, and the Series C.

More here.

Acadeum, a seven-year-old Austin startup that helps colleges share online courses with each other, raised an $11.9 million Series B round led by Green Street Impact Partners, with ECMC Group and Pearson Ventures also pitching in. The company has raised a total of $23.9 million. Higher Ed Dive has more here.

Incredo, a nine-year-old Tel Aviv startup whose patented technology that makes sugar taste sweeter, raised a $30 million Series C round co-led by dsm-firmenich Venturing and Sienna Venture Capital co-led the round and were joined by Teseo Capital and previous investors Pitango and BlueRed Partners. The company has raised a total of $60.2 million. AgFunder News has more here.

Basedash, a three-year-old Montréal startup that helps teams build internal tools without having to write code, raised a $4.5 million round from Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, Form Capital, and Worklife. More here.

Loot Labs, a Seattle startup that is launching a new platform for digital collectibles that brings the “loot box” mechanic from video games into the NFT space, raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with Polygon Ventures, Mechanism Capital, and Lofty Ventures Syndicate also taking part. GeekWire has more here.

Mate Fertility, a three-year-old Los Angeles startup that partners with existing OBGYN practices to build mini-IVF labs in underserved communities, raised a $5.2 million Series A round co-led by Struck Capital and Cortado Ventures, with participation from Rise of the Rest and the Oklahoma Life Science Fund. The company has raised a total of $8 million. TechCrunch wrote about an earlier close of this round here.

RootFi, a Bengaluru startup that provides a unified API for business financial data, raised a $1.5 million seed round. Investors included Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, and Soma Capital. The SaaS News has more here.

Trébol, a one-year-old Bogotá startup that aims to automate KYC processes for its financial clientele, raised a $3 million seed round co-led by Better Tomorrow Ventures and Canaan Partners, with help from Y Combinator, SOMA Capital, and Unpopular Ventures. Fintech Finance has more here.

Vensum, a Finnish startup that is developing power converter technology, raised a $4.1 million round led by Lifeline Ventures and includes Grid.vc, Harjavalta Oy, and Business Finland. Tech.eu has more here.

XFlow, a Bengaluru startup that has developed software to facilitate cross-border payments, raised a $10.2 million pre-Series A round led by Square Peg and including Moore Strategic Ventures and previous investors Lightspeed and General Catalyst. PYMNTS has more here.

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Craft Ventures, a Bay Area venture firm cofounded by entrepreneur-investor David Sacks, has garnered $1.6 billion in capital commitments across three funds, per SEC filings. It closed its fourth flagship fund with $712 million in commitments; it closed its second-ever growth fund with $749.4 million; and it closed on $164.5 million in capital commitments for a growth "feeder" fund, show filings. The New York Times has a quick backgrounder on Sacks here. (That's your humble servant opposite him; we were talking at the time about his brief stint as the CEO of Zenefits.) Sacks moderated the discussion between Elon Musk and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday. A longtime friend of Musk dating back to their days together at PayPal, Sacks also invested in Twitter when Musk took it over.

Matrix Partners India has extended the target size for its current fund to $525 million, from the $450 million it disclosed earlier, joining a roster of venture capital funds that plan to deploy more than half a billion dollars into new investment initiatives in the South Asian market. TechCrunch has more here.

Private equity firms Francisco Partners and TPG have ended talks to acquire New Relic after they failed to secure enough debt financing and could not meet the business software company's valuation expectations, Reuters reports. More here.

Applied Intuition, a Sunnyvale, Ca.-based simulation and software provider for autonomous vehicle development, is buying the San Francisco-based electric truck maker Embark Trucks for around $71 million in an all-cash transaction. Applied Intuition has raised $350 million in VC funding; meanwhile, while Embark went public via a blank-check company in 2021 at a $4.25 billion valuation but subsequently struggled to develop and commercialize its tech. As a privately held company, Embark, founded in 2016, had raised $117 million in funding from investors that included Sequoia Capital and DCVC. When it went public in November 2021, cofounder and CEO Alex Rodrigues was the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company. TechCrunch has more here.

Electric truck maker Nikola at risk of being delisted from Nasdaq. 

Lisa Sun is joining BlackRock as a managing director and co-head of its secondaries and liquidity solutions group. She joined from Coller Capital, where she spent more than 11 years working on deals instigated by both investors in funds and fund managers. The WSJ has the story here.

Over the past several months Elon Musk has cut the Twitter Spaces team, which once numbered as many as 100 employees, down to roughly three people, reports The Platformer.

Tesla's Model Y crossover SUV was the best-selling vehicle in the world during the first quarter of 2023, according to Motor1.com. This doesn’t just mark the first time that a Tesla has earned that distinction; it’s the first time any pure electric car has topped the global sales rankings period, notes Robb Report.

In other Tesla news, a Tesla whistleblower has leaked 100GB of data to the German outlet Handelsblatt containing thousands of customer complaints that raise serious concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving features. The complaints, which were reported across the US, Europe, and Asia, span from 2015 to March 2022. During this period, Handelsblatt says Tesla customers reported over 2,400 self-acceleration issues and 1,500 braking problems, including 139 reports of “unintentional emergency braking” and 383 reports of “phantom stops” from false collision warnings. The Verge has more here.

Gemini Trust has requested a dismissal of an SEC lawsuit against it for allegedly selling unregistered securities in the form of Gemini Earn. The SEC claims that the program allowed Gemini and Genesis to raise billions of dollars of crypto assets without the necessary disclosure requirements. Gemini -- run by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss -- says that the loan agreements were not sold or traded and did not transfer title to assets, thus not qualifying as securities. Reuters has the story.

How "killer apps" could make Apple's headset a winner.

In "Succession," the problems of the hyper-wealthy inevitably become ours, too.

Ditching a phone case is the latest symbol of stealth wealth.

Dua Lipa, "Dance the Night."

A Topanga treehouse on Airbnb.

Want to buy a Texas ghost town? Now's your chance.

VCs must be dual-focused during market downturns. They need to ensure that their big fish investments are supported and managed properly through choppy economic waters, while also having an ear to the ground for good investments with strong upside potential. Affinity's CEO, Ray Zhou, shares his advice for portfolio management in an evolving economic landscape.