Snap's cuts, shared Spotify accounts, and the WSJ dives deeper into Elon Musk's drug use

Snap is laying off approximately 500 employees or 10% of its headcount in an effort to "reduce hierarchy." The company did a 20% RIF in 2022 and a 3% reduction last year. TechCrunch has more here.

From scaling a $680 million fund to improving collaboration across their global offices and managing an extensive network of portcos, LPs, entrepreneurs, and industry experts, Sozo Ventures is using technology to get more done. And at the heart of that tech stack is Affinity. Learn more about the transformational change that the Affinity CRM has made possible in this case study.

At our recent StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, we sat down with Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman, two longtime VCs whose paths first crossed as children in Frankfurt, Germany, and who were brought in to reboot the storied venture firm Kleiner Perkins roughly six years ago.

They’ve seemingly accomplished their mission to burnish the brand. Among Kleiner’s bets in recent years: Rippling, the workforce management company founded by serial entrepreneur Parker Conrad, which was valued at more than $11 billion last year; Loom, a video messaging outfit recently acquired by Atlassian for just under a billion dollars; and Figma, the design tool company that came this close to being acquired by Adobe for $20 billion — and that Fushman and Hamid argue is now happily charting a course as an independent company.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, team Kleiner is also leaning heavily into AI investments, and it’s these about which we spent the most time talking. You can find video of that chat at page bottom; meanwhile, excerpts from our conversation, edited lightly for length and clarity, follow.

The last time we sat down together in person was four years ago, at an earlier StrictlyVC event. At the time, SoftBank dominated the conversation. It has since retrenched; what do you think its impact was on the industry?

IF: We’re coming off of three to four years of just incredible amounts of capital going into venture, and that’s not just SoftBank — that’s a lot of folks who’ve had growth funds, crossover funds. And that flooding of capital has done a few things. One, it created a lot of big companies. Two, some of those companies [became] overfunded and some of them now have to rationalize what happens to them. Our contrarian approach when we were here four years ago was to go back to basics and focus on early stage [startups] primarily, where we said, “Hey, we’re just gonna have a venture fund and a very small team.” We’ve always thought this is much more a boutique business than some of these larger players.

Your firm appears bigger than when we last sat down. You now have investors and specialists and advisers from the old guard [at KP], including Bing Gordon and John Doerr.

MH: I think we might actually be smaller than when we last met. I think our total headcount in the firm is in the low 50s.

Does “everything AI” change anything? Can you do more with less, or do you actually need more people chasing after all these AI researchers who keep leaving Google to start companies?

More here.

Starship Technologies, a 10-year-old Estonian company that operates a network of delivery robots in Europe and the U.S., raised a $90 million round co-led by Plural and Iconical. The company has raised a total of $230 million. Tech.eu has more here. 

Züm, a nine-year-old startup based in Redwood City, Ca., that operates an EV bus service for schools that allows parents to track their kids' location via an app, raised a $140 million Series E round led by GIC, with Climate Investment, Sequoia, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 also taking part. Fortune has more here.

Jua, a two-year-old Swiss startup that uses AI to formulate weather forecasts, raised a $16 million seed round co-led by 468 Capital and the Green Generation Fund, with additional participation from Promus Ventures, Kadmos Capital, Flix Mobility founders, Session.vc, Virtus Resources Partners, Notion.vc, and InnoSuisse. TechCrunch has more here.

Nibiru Chain, a two-year-old Dallas startup that offers tools for developers to create and deploy decentralized applications and financial products, raised a $12 million round. Investors included Kraken Ventures, ArkStream, NGC, Master Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Banter Capital. CoinDesk has more here.

Oobit, a five-year-old Lithuanian startup whose service lets people pay for things using cryptocurrency directly from their phones at stores that accept contactless payments, raised a $25 million Series A round led by Tether, with CMCC Global, 468 Capital, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also pitching in. CTech has more here.

ProducePay, a 10-year-old Los Angeles company that offers financial and trading services for the fresh produce industry, raised a $38 million Series D round led by Syngenta Group Ventures, with Commonfund, Highgate Private Equity, G2 Venture Partners, Anterra Capital, Astanor Ventures, Endeavor8, Avenue Venture Opportunities, Avenue Sustainable Solutions, and Red Bear Angels also participating. The company has raised a total of $136 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Harbor, a Dallas startup that whose offering includes a baby monitor and a subscription service connecting parents with experienced pediatric nurses and infant care experts for advice via text on sleep, feeding, and postpartum challenges, raised a $3.7 million seed round led by Trust Ventures, with Morrison Segar and Capital Factory also contributing. More here.

Peripass, an eight-year-old startup based in Ghent, Belgium, whose platform helps companies to manage and automate their activities in the yards of warehouses and factories, raised an $8.1 million round. Welvaartfonds was the deal lead. Tech.eu has more here.

Truewind, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that is focused on using AI to streamline accounting and financial analysis tasks, raised a $1 million seed extension from Thomson Reuters Ventures. The company has raised a total of $4 million. More here. 

Velar, a one-year-old Dubai startup that is creating a decentralized exchange for perpetual swaps, raised a $3.5 million round. Investors included Black Edge Capital, CMS Holdings, Bitcoin Startup Lab, GBV, Cypher Capital, Trust Machines SPV, Samara Asset Group, Maple Block, and Cogitent Ventures. CoinDesk has more here.

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L.A.-based pre-seed venture firm Wonder Ventures has garnered $102 million in fresh capital commitments. TechCrunch has more here.

Early-stage European venture capital firm Episode 1, based in London, has closed its third fund at £76 million ($95 million). TechCrunch has more on the 11-year-old business here.

While Züm was celebrating a new round (see "Massive Fundings") the student rideshare startup HopSkipDrive was today confirming a data breach involving the personal data of more than 155,000 drivers. Los Angeles-based HopSkipDrive offers an Uber-style rideshare service for children and teenagers. The startup, which has raised at least $90 million since it was founded in 2014, partners with school districts to transport students who live outside traditional bus routes or need extra help getting to school. TechCrunch has the scoop here.

Weaveworks, a San Francisco startup that built a platform for building and operating applications, particularly focusing on the use of containers and Kubernetes, is closing up shop. The company raised over $60 million from Amazon Web Services, Ericsson, Orange Ventures, Google Ventures, and Accel, among others. TechCrunch has more here. 

Everbridge, a critical event management (CEM) software company, is going private in a $1.5 billion all-cash deal that will see it taken over by private equity giant Thoma Bravo. Founded in 2002 initially as 3N Global, Everbridge helps governments and enterprises from across the industrial spectrum respond to emergency situations and went public on the Nasdaq in 2016 before its fortunes later turned. TechCrunch has more here.

Reddit hasn't released its public IPO filing yet, but Bloomberg is reporting that the social networking site did $800 million in revenue last year, a 20% jump over 2022. 

The WSJ delves further into drug use by Elon Musk and the network of board members that has enabled him. 

AI apparently helped a mining startup backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates unearth a huge copper deposit in Zambia. 

VC Aydin Senkut on how AI startups attract talent in a market where big companies are offering them huge salaries: "One of the things I learned by working at Google with [Google's chief scientist] Jeff Dean, is that the world's best and smartest people want to work with the world's other best and smartest people. So if you start with an A or A+ team [it matters]. There are only so many people who are really well-respected in the industry, and everybody does their research, the same way they do their research on us."

Good news for Elon Musk's Neuralink: a new poll from YouGov finds that 8% of Americans (which seems like a lot!) would consider having a chip implanted into their brain.

An underground website claims to be using neural networks to produce very believable fake IDs.

Microsoft is paying Semafor to use an AI chatbot to generate stories for a breaking news newsfeed.

First-gen social media users have nowhere to go.

Shared Spotify accounts are wreaking havoc among couples and families.

Why is the moon shrinking?

"Our digital media platform will revolutionize news and is also shutting down."

Dartmouth's men's basketball team is unionizing.

Ski Alaska in style.

Be like Bieber in this giant Marni jacket.

Rolls-Royce is not disclosing the prices of its limited "Year of the Dragon" line, and when you take just one look at these automobiles, you'll know why.

The perfect New Zealand spread for the aspiring tech billionaire.