Better's CEO takes a break, a power hire at Instacart leaves, and the rise of black (and gray, and brown) diamonds

Friday! This week flew past, but not too fast for a catch-up with General Partner Andrew Chen of a16z, who is this week's StrictlyVC Download guest. We wrote up a bit of our interview earlier this week, but for a deeper dive with Chen about so-called cold starts and how Clubhouse, Substack and many other companies have gotten past their own (and how they intend to keep the momentum going), it's worth checking out. 

Giant thanks to Affinity for partnering with us on this episode. Sales groups at more than 1,600 investment firms across VC, investment banking, PE, and consulting use Affinity's business intelligence software to "open doors and close deals faster." Learn more here.

This morning, employees were notified via email by the Better board of directors that CEO Vishal Garg will be taking time off effective immediately after the “very regrettable events over the last week," including the publication of a letter from April of this year in which Garg addressed one of his investors as an "old private equity Neanderthal," who should be taken to the "shitter" of his "rocket ship" -- then sent the missive to the investor and roughly 70 other people on Better's cap table in an effort to humiliate him.  (We know a lot of you saw this letter yesterday. We still can't get over the unintentional hilarity of this one.) 

According to TechCrunch, the new email to employees stated that during the interim period, CFO Kevin Ryan will be assuming the responsibilities of CEO. The company's board also disclosed it has engaged “an independent 3rd party firm to do a leadership and cultural assessment." 

We have our suspicions why Garg -- who once threatened, during a deposition -- to "staple" a former business partner "against a f*cking wall and burn him alive" --  hasn't already been canned, but if you're on the board or an exec on the team and want to talk, we're all 👂👂.

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* Exai Bio, a four-month-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based liquid biopsy company focused on cancer detection, has raised $67.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Section 32 and Casdin Capital, with participation from Two Sigma Ventures. More here.

* Flink, a 1.5-year-old, Berlin, Germany-based instant grocery delivery startup, raised $750 million in Series B funding led by strategic investor DoorDash, with participation from Mubadala Capital and other earlier investors (which were not specifically broken out by the company). TechCrunch has more here.

* PetDx, a two-year-old, San Diego, Ca.-based maker of canine cancer detection tests that it is selling to pet clinics across the U.S., has raised $62 million in Series B funding led by Longview Asset Management. Crunchbase News has more here.

* SellerX, a year-old, Berlin, Germany-based e-commerce aggregator, has raised $500 million in equity and debt funding. Sofina led the round, joined by BlackRock, Victory Park Capital and ADIA. Other investors participating in the financing included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and previous backers, taking SellerX’s total fund-raising so far to $750 million. Alongside the fresh cash, SellerX also said it had acquired KW-Commerce, a Berlin-based company that sells private label brands on Amazon and has more than $100 million in annual revenues. Bloomberg has more here.

* Celigo, a 10-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that says it allows IT and line of business teams alike to automate both common and custom business processes, has raised $48 million in Series C funding. OMERS Growth Equity led the round, joined by NewSpring Capital. More here.

* Dray Alliance, a three-year-old, Long Beach, Ca.-based venture-backed startup headquartered in near the Port of Long Beach that's building a container trucking platform to deliver shipping containers from ports to warehouses more efficiently, has raised $40 million in Series B round led by Headline. More here.

* Edge Impulse, a two-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based development platform for embedded machine learning, has raised $34 million in Series B funding led by Coatue. Earlier backers also joined the round, including Canaan, Acrew Capital, Fika Ventures, Momenta Ventures, and Knollwood Investment Advisory. ZDNet has more here.

*Ikigai, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based developer of human-assisted automated workflows, has raised $13 million in seed funding from Foundation Capital, 8VC and Underscore VC and individual investors. TechCrunch has more here. 

* Paradigm, a firm that provides liquidity to crypto derivatives traders (and is unrelated to the investment firm Paradigm Capital), has raised $35 million in Series A funding co-led by Jump Capital and Alameda Ventures. Coindesk has more here.

* Posh Technologies, a 4.5-year-old, Boston-based conversational AI platform for financial services, has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding. Canapi Ventures led the round, joined by Curql Collective, Human Capital, CMFG Ventures, JAM FINTOP and Piedmont Capital. More here. 

* Redesign Science, a four-year-old, New York-based startup that says it's combining physics, computer science and biotechnology to advance new small molecule therapeutics, has raised $15 million in seed funding over two previously undisclosed rounds. Backers in the two financings include Collaborative Fund, 5Y Capital, Notation Capital, Third Kind Venture Capital, Preface Ventures, Refactor Capital, Acequia Capital, Hawktail, Kaitai Capital and ZhenFund. More here.

* Resolve, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based buy-now-pay-later outfit focused on for B2B transactions (it originally spun out of Affirm), has raised $25 million in equity funding led by Insight Partners. Earlier backers also joined the round, including Initialized Capital, KSD Capital, Haystack, Commerce Ventures and Clocktower Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

* Robust Intelligence, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based AI startup that helps businesses stress test their AI models and prevent them from failing, has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from earlier backers Sequoia Capital, Harpoon VC and Engineering Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

* Deed, a five-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based workplace giving platform, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Earlybird, with participation from PruVen Capital, Y Combinator, WndrCo, Paua Ventures and some individual investors, including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. TechCrunch has more here. 

* Pair Team, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that offers tech-enabled care teams and digital assistants that serve as an extension of clinical staff, has raised $7.3 million in funding from NTTVC, Newark Venture Partners and 8VC. The outfit has now raised nearly $10 million altogether. More here.

* Tractiv, a nine-month old, Chicago-based maker of data tracking software, has raised $2.25 million in seed funding led by Nyca Partners. More here.

* Yolda, a 1.5-year-old, Istanbul, Turkey-based freight and logistics B2B marketplace, has raised $5 million from earlier backer Speedinvest and Collective Spark. More here.

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Whitecap Venture Partners, a 28-year-old, Toronto-based, Canada-focused early-stage venture firm, has closed its fifth fund with C$140 million in capital commitments, it announced today. Returning investors include Kensington Capital Partners, BMO Capital Partners, Inuvialuit Investment Corporation, and several other institutional investors and high-net-worth family offices. Newer LPs include the Ontario Capital Growth Corporation. More here.

* According to The Information, Carolyn Everson is departing as president of Instacart under pressure from CEO Fidji Simo because Simo had different expectations over how Everson should manage Instacart’s relationship with its grocery retailers. Earlier today, Everson announced she was leaving the role, just three months after jumping ship from Facebook to take it. More here.

* Andy Will has been promoted to principal at Zeal Capital Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based seed stage firm that we profiled back in July. Will joined Zeal early last year; he was previously an investor with Listen Ventures in Chicago. More here.

* Racists and Taliban supporters are flocking to Twitter’s new audio service, Spaces, after executives ignored warnings from employees about the platform's lack of moderation. Meanwhile, those employees say they've been sidelined.

* Visitors to Facebook's metaverse are also getting harassed owing to a not-fully-baked strategy. 

* The strange, unfinished saga of "Cyberpunk 2077."

* "And just like that," Samantha is gone.

* Romanticizing winter in the Midwest.

"Ugly" diamonds are having a moment.

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