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No time to package together a podcast this week, but things will surely slow down, right? 🆘
Hope you have a terrific weekend.:) Stay cool.
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The information of nearly 7 million 23andMe users was offered for sale on a cybercriminal forum this week. The information included origin estimation, phenotype, health information, photos, identification data and more. Recorded Future News has more here.
Amazon's first satellites blasted into orbit today, moving the e-commerce company closer to a satellite-internet business that could compete with SpaceX and other rivals.
Foreigners are thinking twice about business trips to the country after Beijing has barred some executives from leaving.
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Are you asking the right questions of your fund administrator? More than just delivering a list of financial reports, the right fund administrator creates enterprise-building value at the intersection of your finance and investor relations teams, leveraging innovative technology to strengthen partnerships between you and your LPs. Juniper Square’s latest guide includes the four things you need to consider to ensure you find the right administrator from the start, as well as probing questions to ask during the vetting process. Download it here now.
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| Y Combinator Beefs Up with a String of New Lieutenants |
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Y Combinator continues to change shape under CEO Garry Tan, a founder-turned-investor and online influencer. While Tan and his colleagues have attracted media attention lately for quarrelsome social media posts that take on
rivals and San Francisco city officials, Tan has more quietly been turning the dials inside the popular accelerator program since taking it over in January. Some of the moves saw Tan close down Y Combinator’s late-stage Continuity Fund. He also shed staff, including laying off a small admissions team in summer.
Now, Tan is bringing aboard some new lieutenants to help him run the sprawling organization. Earlier this week, Luther Lowe, a Washington, D.C.-based, 15-year veteran of Yelp who spent his last five years with the company focused on public policy, announced on the platform X that he has just joined Y Combinator in a newly created, similar policy role. Now, Y Combinator is gearing up to announce three other recruits, all of them YC alums: Tyler Bosmeny, Nate Smith and Pete Koomen. Bosmeny and Smith — whose respective startups, Clever and Lever,
passed through the program in 2012 and were later acquired — just signed on as so-called Visiting Group Partners. That means they’ll be advising YC startups on a batch-by-batch basis. Koomen, who co-founded the optimization platform Optimizely (it was part of YC’s winter 2010 batch and sold in 2020), is meanwhile becoming a permanent Group Partner after his own tour as a Visiting Group Partner.
To get a better understanding of what the roles mean, and how Y Combinator looks these days in terms of its evolving structure, we talked a bit with Koomen earlier this week. We also wound up talking about some of his now-prominent batchmates and what he makes of the knock against modern Y Combinator — that aggressively scaling under its previous leadership hurt its brand. Our chat has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
How big was your batch in 2010, and who were some of the founders who went through the program with you?
Pete Koomen: I think we were 30 companies or maybe just a hair under 30 companies. It’s kind of funny, because at the time, everybody was talking about how YC had gotten too big. So that’s been a common refrain over the years. But, yeah, we had a bunch of founders that have gone on to play big roles. Aaron Epstein, who founded Creative Market, is now a Group Partner at YC. We also had several founders who went on to found large companies: Eric Wu, who founded Opendoor; Daniel Gross, who [sold his startup, Cue, to Apple], was at YC for a while
and has done a lot since then. Howie Liu, who started Airtable, was in that batch. Airtable was after YC. Howie was doing a company called Etacts during YC. But yeah, it was an amazing batch and obviously changed the course of my life.
And how does your new role work at YC?
More here.
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Cardata, a 24-year-old Toronto company that provides tax-compliant mileage reimbursement software, raised a $100 million round led by Wavecrest Growth Partners, with MassMutual Ventures also kicking in. BetaKit has more here.
Habyt, a six-year-old Berlin startup that operates an Airbnb-style platform aimed at longer stays and "flexible living," raised a $42.3 million Series C round co-led by Korelya Capital and Deutsche Invest, with Exor Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst as well as previous investors P101, ITALIA500-Azimut, HV Capital, Vorwerk Ventures, Norwest, Kinnevik, Burda Principal Investments, and Inveready also participating. TechCrunch has more
here.
Investree, an eight-year-old Jakarta startup whose P2P lending platform connects small and medium-size enterprises with investors, raised a $232.8 million Series D round led by JTA International Holding and including previous investor SBI Holding. Forbes has more here.
Regent, a nearly three-year-old electric sea glider startup that's based in Rhode Island, says it has raised $60 million in Series A funding co-led by 8090 Industries and Founders Fund. Point72, Caffeinated Capital, Mark Cuban, UAE’s Strategic Development Fund, Future Planet Capital, Japan Airlines Innovation Fund, Yamato Holdings (the largest logistics company in Japan) and Lockheed Martin also joined the round. The company has now raised $90 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Reliance Retail, the Indian retail chain, is selling a 0.59% stake in its business to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for $597 million (so at a whopping $100 billion valuation). The investment follows KKR and Qatar Investment Authority together investing $1.7 billion in the Indian firm, which is part of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. Reliance Industries, which owns the majority of Reliance Retail Ventures and is the largest company by market cap in India, has aggressively expanded into a wide range of sectors over the past decade as it diversifies from its reliance on oil. TechCrunch has more here.
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| Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings |
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Cobre, a three-year-old Bogotá startup that has developed a corporate treasury platform to centralize, digitize, and automate their payment processes, raised a $13 million round led by Kaszek, with previous investors QED, Atlantico, and Canary also anteing up. The company has raised a total of $31.2 million. TechCrunch has more here.
Diana Health, a four-year-old New York startup that partners with hospitals and health systems to offer in-person and virtual OB-GYN and women's health services, raised a $34 million Series B round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with .406 Ventures, LRVHealth, and AlleyCorp also contributing. The company has raised a total of $46 million. MobiHealthNews has more here.
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Class Companion, a San Francisco startup whose platform uses generative AI to provide high-quality feedback to students, raised a $4 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with OpenAI Startup Fund also chiming in. Forbes has more here.
FlexSea, a three-year-old London startup that is developing a seaweed-derived bioplastic that breaks down in sea, soil, or home composting, raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Indico Capital Partners, with RedRice Ventures, Btomorrow Ventures, Food Foundry, Vala Capital, ICON Capital, and Pente Capital also opting in. Tech.eu has more here.
Konnect.ai, a two-year-old Houston startup that offers an AI-powered CRM platform tailored for the automotive retail sector, raised a $5.5 million seed round from Silverton Partners. More here.
SpecCheck, a Los Angeles startup that provides optical billing and customer management tools, raised a $3.7 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with Y Combinator also pitching in. Axios has more here.
Treetoscope, a three-year-old Israeli startup that helps growers manage irrigation via tree and plant sensors, raised a $7 million seed round led by Champel Capital, with additional participation from SeedIL, YYM-Ventures, and Agrovision. The company has raised a total of $9.2 million. More here.
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Meet one of the fastest growing AI-powered fintechs. Cleo is the first AI assistant dedicated to helping you live beyond the next paycheck. She understands your unique financial situation to provide personalized advice and tools that a bank never could. Recently named a Forbes 2023 Next Billion-Dollar startup with 100% YoY growth and $72m ARR, discover why Cleo is the future of finance.
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Microsoft is planning on closing its $67 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard next week, according to The Verge.
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Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of hedge fund Alameda Research and on-and-off girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, is likely to be the next witness to testify on behalf of the government in its trial against the former crypto mogul, following former FTX executive Gary Wang.
Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla says the company is ready to move on after the SEC decided not to pursue legal action, including against Bolt founder Ryan Breslow.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is set to be called by Epic Games to testify in an antitrust trial that begins November 6 over Google Play policies that could threaten billions of dollars in revenue generated by the app marketplace.
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Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that raised $450 million last year at a $4 billion valuation, is laying off staff.
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Pace Capital, a four-old, early-stage venture outfit in New York, says it's looking to hire an associate.
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The unemployment rate in information technology rose to 4.3% last month, well above the overall jobless rate of 3.8%, an indication that growth in traditional IT careers and entry-level roles could be slowing amid an AI boom.
Service disruptions from a cyberattack on MGM Resorts detected last month will cost the company more than $100 million in the third quarter, MGM said in a regulatory filing yesterday. The outfit refused to pay the hackers' ransom demand, in line with guidance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which doesn’t support paying ransom.
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Automating restaurants isn't a no-brainer. As it turns out, "Making custom burritos is actually 'very, very difficult for a robot.'"
The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash.
DeepMind has created a new AI system for training robots that "suggests that a model trained on a diverse set of examples outperforms specialist models in most tasks."
AI simply can't keep up with the very human desire to break rules.
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Hope you didn't buy that glitzy $17,000 Apple Watch back in 2015 (for a variety of reasons, but most immediately, because it's now obsolete).
We're all lurkers now.
Martin Scorsese deciphers slang.
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