In 2022, venture funding for the retail sector totaled $415B, down 35% from 2021's tally of $621B, per CB Insights' 2022 report. Within the sector, retail technology funding saw the largest withdrawal, dropping 52% globally. More: - In the U.S., retail sector funding dropped 37% YoY in 2022; however, it was up 31% compared to 2020's sum.
- Exits via the IPO declined by 31% in 2022.
- One of the sector's largest investors, Lerer Hippeau, expects investors to remain conservative with fund deployment over the next 12 to 24 months.
- "The idea of raising not as much money, getting to profitability, and kind of controlling your own destiny is definitely what we're telling our companies at this point," added partner Andrea Hippeau.
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OpenAI rival Cohere is in talks with investors to raise "hundreds of millions of dollars" at an over $6B valuation. The Canadian firm, established by former Google researchers, gives developers and organizations access to natural language processing (NLP models) that would resemble ChatGPT. More: - The firm counts Index Ventures, Tiger Global, and Radical Ventures as its backers, who have helped Cohere raise nearly $170M to date.
- Cohere's AI model initially leveraged Alphabet's TPU computing power, later adding support for Amazon's SageMaker last month.
- Instead of seeking strategic investments with exclusive rights, the company intends to keep the platform on multiple cloud services.
- One of the products in its portfolio is Hypewrite, which leverages AI to generate articles.
Zoom out: - Anthropic, another generative AI peer, was seeking $300M from investors at a $5B valuation last week.
- OpenAI received a $10B commitment from Microsoft.
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Australian startup Recharge Industries emerged as the preferred bidder to acquire Britishvolt's business and assets. Britishvolt filed for bankruptcy last month, thwarting its plans to build a $4.7B EV battery plant in Northern England. Recharge intends to pursue the construction of the plant and has already secured commitment letters from investors. More: - Recharge, a subsidiary of medical technology and AI firm Scale Facilitation Partners, is also building its own battery factory near Melbourne, Australia.
- Britishvolt roped in accounting and audit firm EY as administrator to oversee the sale of the firm after it failed to raise fresh funds from investors and entered insolvency.
- It had previously raised $2.4B in equity and debt funding from Glencore, Bank of America, Citibank, and others.
- EY received two bids for Britishvolt, including one from a consortium of former investors.
- The acquisition is expected to be closed within the next seven days.
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VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) voted against Uniswap's plan to deploy Wormhole as the designated crypto bridge platform. Instead, a16z hoped that Uniswap would pick up its portfolio company LayerZero's offerings. A16z used 15 million UNI tokens, an Ethereum token that powers Uniswap and also gives voting powers to holders, in the vote. More: - Uniswap's version 3 platform is gearing up for its debut on Binance's BNB Chain.
- The company asked its token holders to vote on which bridging platform it should use.
- Uniswap V3 deployment received 28 million votes in favor of using the Wormhole bridge, with LayerBridge's solution coming in second at 17 million.
- A16z, FTX, and Sequoia Capital led a $135M funding last year into LayerZero at a $1B valuation.
- A16z owns 64 million UNI tokens; however, most of them have been delegated to other representatives, including the University of Michigan.
Zoom out: - The Wormhole protocol-based bridge previously lost $325M in an exploit at the beginning of last year and later rebranded to Portal.
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San Francisco-based blockchain infrastructure company Figure Technologies is looking to raise $100M in fresh funding. The round is one-third the size of its previous planned $300M funding round, which was scrapped as crypto markets crashed. Talks with investors are yet to begin; however, the firm is prepared to postpone the funding rather than raise a down round. More: - A $200M Series D round led by 10T Holdings and Morgan Creek Digital in May 2021 brought its total funding raised to date to $1.6B.
- Figure was valued at $3.2B at the last fundraiser.
- Notable investors in the firm include Mithril Capital, Digital Currency Group,
- CEO Mike Cagney previously led personal financing and online banking company SoFi.
- Recently, the firm witnessed a spate of high-profile departures as its president, CFO, CMO, and VP of communication quietly stepped down from their respective roles.
- It also scrapped its reverse SPAC merger, which was poised to bring in $250M for the firm.
- After posting profits in Q3 2022, the firm lost $1M in the following quarter.
- The firm is considering spinning off some product lines.
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BetterPlace acquired a majority stake in the Indonesian online job portal MyRobin for an undisclosed sum to venture into Southeast Asia. The Indian frontline worker management platform aims to invest $50M over the next three years in a bid to gain market share in countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, and others. More: - Jungle Ventures managing partner Sandeep Uberoi joined BetterPlace as president to help with the expansion strategy.
- Jungle Ventures is an existing backer of the firm, having led their $40M Series C round.
- To date, it has raised over $80M in venture funding from VC firms such as Macquarie Capital, Unitus Ventures, British International Investment, and others.
- The acquisition is BetterPlace's sixth to date, after acquiring OkayGo, ezeDox, OLX People, Oust Labs, and Fabulys.
- MyRobin provides workforce management services such as onboarding, training, background verification, digitization, and skill development.
- MyRobin's venture backers include SOSV and Antler.
Zoom out: - According to BetterPlace, the frontline workforce management market in Southeast Asia has a market size of $280B.
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- Life sciences-focused venture firm Hatteras Venture Partners secured $140M in capital commitments for two new funds against a target of $375M.
- Costco Wholesale joined as an anchor investor with a $5M commitment to Nex Cubed's Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Founders Fund. The $40M fund will invest in startups where at least one founder is an HBCU student or alum.
- French VC firm Ovni Capital held the first close of its debut fund at $54M (€50M). The firm aims to back early-stage deep-tech startups.
- EIC Fund announced that it invested over €331M ($354M) in 42 early-stage deep tech startups since last November.
- Joey Krug has stepped down from his role as a co-chief investment officer at venture capital firm Pantera Capital.
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 |  | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot. | | | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 and 1972 Fords. | |
Segment is an API-first analytics solution that empowers 15,000+ startups to scale their data infrastructure. | |
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