Byju’s is back in the market, hat in hand

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Good morning! We have a killer newsletter for you this morning: There are new venture funds on the market, vector databases are on fire, India’s best-known unicorn is struggling, Apple is tweaking music economics for its own benefit, and much more. Enjoy!

– Alex

Are you ready for an AI-assisted future?

Pural wants to bet €400M on Europe: Still busy making investments from its first fund (a €250 million vehicle), Plural has put together a much larger fund to back European startups. Investment in European startups has shown some resilience in recent quarters, but more capital is always welcome.
Byju’s is looking for capital at $2B valuation: For many startups, a $2 billion price tag would be a massive win. For the Indian edtech giant, once worth $22 billion, this is a sad admission of its struggles. Byju’s has had a bunch of problems in recent years with the rapid decline of interest in edtech, board turnovers, criticism over its strategy, missed revenue targets and so much more.
It’s not all bad news for Africa: The global venture investment slowdown is taking the wind from the sails of many startup markets. Africa is one such region, and saw venture investment decline by around a third last year. There’s good news in the data as well, though: Francophone countries saw more investment, and investors spread their money across more sectors.

Image Credits: Plural

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There’s big money in relating unstructured data: I won’t pretend to actually understand vector databases, even if Weviate CEO Bob van Luijt once tried to teach me. But investors seem to get the technology — or at least how useful it is for generative AI — because they just put $28 million into Qdrant. The large Series A comes after Zilliz, Pinecone, Weviate and other vector database companies raised big rounds themselves.

AC Ventures raises $210M: The Jakarta, Indonesia–based venture firm just closed its fifth fund, bringing its total assets under management to more than $500 million. This is welcome news for Southeast Asian startups because investments in the region have dried up quickly. And, any time a new venture fund gets to work, a number of startups are going to raise new capital and keep building.

TravelPerk raises $104M, SoftBank leads: Travel-focused startups are starting off 2024 strong. On the heels of South Korea’s Myrealtrip raising a good $56 million last week, TravelPerk, a business travel management platform targeted at SMEs, has raised a nine-figure round. This looks to me like a trend is forming. This funding round also brings SoftBank’s Vision 2 into the 2024 fundraising mix, meaning that we should expect some huge rounds to come.

Apple wants more spatial audio from artists: Artists that offer spatial audio versions of their music may receive 10% more revenue from Apple Music as the service seeks to get more of the music world to support virtual surround sound. Larger per-stream royalties are welcome in the music industry due to the massive share of the market that streaming has captured in recent years.

China says ‘just kidding’ on new gaming rules: After the market responded badly to Beijing’s proposed gaming regulations and tanked the value of Chinese gaming companies, the country’s taking a few steps back. Now, it seems the government has quietly pulled the proposed curbs on the industry from its official website. The country has been trying to regulate business while keeping economic activity strong, but it seems that its efforts contradict one another at times.

And even more: The startup investment cycle seems to be running at full tilt. Since I started writing this newsletter for you this morning, a number of new transactions have dropped: Bluewhite raised $39 million for its agtech robot business; Albedo has raised $35 million to build near-Earth orbit satellites; and Bulk Exchange has raised $4.5 million to help construction companies buy and sell materials in bulk. It’s getting busy out there!

Image Credits: Qdrant -- Qdrant founders

Before you go

Mr. Beast makes $263,000 from posting his video on X, kinda: After Elon Musk asked YouTuber Mr. Beast to put one of his videos on Twitter, the video maker initially demurred. Then he went ahead and uploaded a clip to the social service as a test. It did better than he expected, I think that it is fair to say, but the traction may also be due to some internal astroturfing by Musk and team. Call it a wash.