Startup Monday: Latest tech trends & news happening in the global startup ecosystem (Issue 144- November 2)
Narine Emdjian, MBA
Federal Funding Expert Helping Startups & Nonprofits To Raise Non-Dilutive Capital
Welcome to Startup Monday, my weekly newsletter that recaps the week in the global startup ecosystem. To have this newsletter emailed to you, you can sign up here.
Top startup news to follow this week:
1. OpenAI chair's AI startup Sierra gets $4.5 bln valuation in latest funding round
Oct 28 (Reuters) - Sierra, a software startup co-founded by former Salesforce (CRM.N), opens new tab co-CEO Bret Taylor, has raised $175 million in a new funding round led by Greenoaks Capital that gave it a $4.5 billion valuation, the company said on Monday.
The funding round comes less than a year after the public launch of the young AI startup by Taylor, one of the most closely watched entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
The company previously raised $110 million from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark at a nearly $1 billion valuation.
Thrive Capital and Iconiq also participated in the round.
The funding has established Sierra as one of the most highly valued AI startups, despite growing concerns around AI bubbles. The company has crossed $20 million in annualized revenue, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
A huge valuation at an early-stage startup is usually based on the company's growth potential and investor's interest in the category and founding team.
The major jump in valuation signals appetite to pay high multiples to back AI companies by established founders. The Information earlier reported on the funding talks.
One-year-old Sierra focuses on selling artificial intelligence-powered customer service chatbots to enterprises. It serves clients such as WeightWatchers (WW.O), opens new tab and Sirius XM (SIRI.O), opens new tab .
Since OpenAI's ChatGPT burst on to the scene, investors' interest in funding the technology has gradually shifted from funding expensive foundational models into applications selling to enterprises that generate steady revenue.
Founded by Taylor and longtime Google executive Clay Bavor, Sierra AI enters a crowded space of AI-powered customer service solutions, which includes giants like Salesforce and startups like Forethought.
Sierra says it differentiated itself by reducing "hallucinations", a common issue in which large language models generate false information, so brands can trust the AI agent to interact with customers.
2. Here’s the full list of 39 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024
For some, AI fatigue is real — but clearly venture investors haven’t grown tired of the category.
AI deals continued to dominate venture funding during the third quarter. According to Crunchbase data, AI companies raised $18.9 billion in Q3, representing 28% of all venture funding.
The third quarter also saw the close of the largest venture deal of all time: OpenAI raised a behemoth $6.6 billion round. OpenAI’s deal was one of six AI funding rounds over $1 billion in 2024.
Here are the U.S.-based AI companies that raised $100 million or more so far in 2024:
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
3. MealMe, the startup integrating food ordering tech into apps, picks up $8M
MealMe , a unified API that embeds food and retail ordering into consumer apps and websites,?announced on Thursday that it secured $8 million in Series A funding . The newly raised capital brings the total amount raised to $16 million.?
Since its launch in 2019, MealMe has undergone several changes. Initially, it was a consumer app designed to help people find the best deals on delivery from restaurants and grocery stores. It then evolved to allow consumers to order food directly through the MealMe app.
The company has now completely transitioned to a B2B model, offering its API for other businesses to integrate ordering technology into their applications and websites. When a company integrates MealMe’s API, it gets access to real-time product pricing and availability, and it enables customers to order their products from local stores.
MealMe says that its API provides inventory data on more than 1 billion products from more than 1.2 million grocery stores, restaurants, and retailers across the U.S. and Canada. It currently serves more than 100 customers, including Fantuan Delivery, Favor Delivery, Tripadvisor, and others.
4. Hummingbirds, a platform that connects local creators with brand campaigns in their area, raises $5.4M
Hummingbirds is a female-founded startup that connects hyperlocal content creators with brands that reward them for sharing products with their small and highly engaged communities via social media to juice their marketing.??
The company announced Wednesday a $5.4 million seed round , bringing the total amount raised to $10 million. The new capital will support the platform’s expansion into 20 more cities by 2025, including Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Denver, Colorado.?
Launched last year, the platform bets on localized and word-of-mouth marketing, where brands aim to build trust with local customers. Businesses, large and small, often struggle with local marketing, whether due to ineffective traditional advertising, limited budgets, or competition from other brands. Hummingbirds believes the solution lies in leveraging nearby creators such as the “PTA moms” (i.e., parents who are actively involved in school activities like fundraising) and other locals to help promote products.
“When [brands] think about driving in-store behavior to these retailers, they need a new marketing tool, and that’s where Hummingbirds has really found that we can help those brands move quickly and build that brand awareness, build a loyal following, actually bring them customers who go back to the store and buy their product over and over,” co-founder Charise Flynn told TechCrunch.?
Hummingbirds enables brands to launch targeted marketing campaigns aimed at local residents, encouraging them to share products on social media with their followers. There are currently over 300 brand partners, from well-known brands like ChopLocal, Cutwater, Goodles, and Olipop to smaller businesses and local chains, such as AE Dairy and Fareway Grocery .
To incentivize participation, businesses offer rewards such as gift cards that range from $50 to $250, as well as complimentary experiences (such as a massage at a spa), free merchandise, and other perks.?
Although Hummingbirds takes 0% commission from creators, brands are required to pay a fee to launch campaigns on the platform.?
5. Archon emerges from stealth with $20M and ‘antibody cages’ to power up drug development
Archon Biosciences , a biotech startup putting AI to work designing novel biomolecules, has just emerged from stealth with an impressive $20 million in seed funding . The company aims to supercharge antibody treatments using specially designed protein “cages” that multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities in drug development.
领英推荐
The company was spun out of Baker Lab, the University of Washington research outfit overseen by pioneering computational biologist and recent Nobel Prize winner David Baker. His team’s work on generative protein design using AI and other means has been foundational in the fast-evolving industry, and Archon is taking a specific aspect of it to market.
One shortcoming of antibody treatments (and research into effective treatments) is that, like all molecular biology, the process depends a bit on chance. It’s difficult to control how much an antibody or protein actually binds to its target on a cell or other surface.
What Archon’s antibody cages, or AbCs, do (as documented in this paper published in Science ) is offer a scaffold for modifying and multiplying their effectiveness. A free-floating antibody may have only a small chance of binding to a target protein, but if you were to stick a dozen of them together in a big dodecahedron, that significantly and perhaps profoundly improves that chance.
This may be the difference between being able to tell if a medication works or not.
“There are many high-profile cases where we understand not only a target’s biology but also why past attempts to drug the target have failed in the clinic. These key disease levers are at our fingertips, but we lack the tools to safely and effectively engage them,” explained James Lazarovits, co-founder and CEO of Archon, in a press release. “We have developed a proprietary protein design platform coupled with rapid in-house manufacturing and testing to revolutionize how biologics are developed.”
The startup’s protein design platform uses the generative protein creation and simulation tools created at and licensed from Baker Lab, and the resulting AbCs could have a variety of effects. And they don’t need any exotic manufacturing methods — if you can produce proteins and antibodies at scale, you can probably make AbCs too.
6. Montenegro startup Buddy.ai closes €10.2 million for its AI tutor for children under 12
Montenegro-based Buddy.ai , a conversational AI tutor for kids, announced it has closed a €10.2 million seed funding round , bringing the total venture funding raised since launch to €12M. The round was led by BITKRAFT Ventures, a leading global investment platform focused on gaming and interactive media, along with Educapital, the largest European education technology fund. Other investors in this funding round include One Way Ventures, J Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Goodwater Capital. Additionally, a group of incredible angel investors contributed, including the co-founder of Oculus, former executives at Riot Games, and Hollywood executive producers from iconic series like The Simpsons.
The presence of investors from varied verticals like AI, education, gaming, and entertainment is a reflection of Buddy.ai ’s uniquely designed app, which has pioneered a multimodal AI tutoring approach through Buddy. A fully-interactive, animated robot, Buddy converses with students in real-time, teaching children under 12 how to speak English.
Research has shown the use of an interactive, conversational persona improves learning outcomes for young children, thus Buddy’s game-based, story-driven lessons are ideal for early learners whose primary mechanism for learning is through play.?
The mission of Buddy.ai is to ensure children around the world have access to one-on-one tutoring using AI. Based on UNESCO data, 69 million teachers are needed worldwide in order to reach universal basic education. In the face of a massive global teacher shortage, AI tutoring is the best and only way to fill these gaps quickly and affordably. Though Buddy’s tutoring roots are in English language learning, they’ve recently launched an Early Learning Course, and more subjects are in store for the future.?
Reflecting on the company’s mission, Ivan Crewkov, Buddy.ai ’s CEO and Co-founder, said, “Buddy.ai was inspired by watching my daughter’s struggles as an immigrant learning a new language in a new country. The Buddy.ai team believes that personalized education is a right and not a privilege, and every child deserves a personal tutor, so when we look towards the future of the platform, we see every child in the world as a potential student.”?
To achieve Buddy’s exceptional voice-based interaction, Buddy.ai began developing their proprietary Speech Recognition technology four years prior to the AI boom brought on by ChatGPT. Whereas most AI technology is trained on adult voices and not aligned with regulations specific to children, Buddy’s Speech Recognition (BSR) capabilities are COPPA-compliant and fine-tuned to understand children’s voices. With over 25,000 hours of children’s speech in their dataset, BSR outperforms Google and other off-the-shelf speech recognition systems.
Having just surpassed 50 million downloads, Buddy reaches over 20 million students annually. In 2023 alone, the platform saw 22M downloads worldwide, 92% YOY growth in monthly active users, and 93% YOY growth in monthly recurring revenue. Buddy fans can be found across the globe – nearly half the user base is in Latin America, and many are in English-speaking countries. Last year, Buddy.ai launched an Early Learning Course aimed at English-speaking children aged 4-7 in the US market and saw 350% YOY growth.?
Children aren’t the only ones who are impressed with Buddy. The Buddy.ai app was included in Time Magazine’s World’s Top EdTech Rising Stars of 2024 . Buddy.ai has also been recognized as the Global Edtech Startup Award (GESA) Innovation Winner, the Education winner at South Summit, and the Best Technology Solution for Learning and Training at the EnlightED Awards, among others.?
“The traditional 1-on-1 teacher-to-child education model is unaffordable for many families and not scalable for teachers. Buddy.ai is uniquely positioned with a threefold combination of technical depth, expertise in Early Learning, and a knack for positively engaging content. Kids have a higher learning efficacy when their personal learning journey is met with dynamically adjusting difficulty levels and amplified when engaged with a fun IP. It gets even better when you can democratize access to great learning experiences for an underserved global population,” commented Jasper Brand, Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures.
7.Stockholm-based Flower raises €45 million to revolutionise European energy flexibility
The Swedish energy tech firm Flower has closed its Series A funding with an additional €20 million, bringing the round total to €45 million as it aims to redefine the post-transition energy system. The round was led by Northzone, with additional investment from Giant Ventures, 82an Invest, Sony Innovation Fund, and angel investors Thomas von Koch and Sebastian Knutsson, founder of game developer King.
Flower is enabling and managing tomorrow’s clean energy system by fostering flexibility, stability, and predictability in global energy grids, while also providing renewable power asset owners with enhanced revenue streams. This is achieved through Flower’s AI-driven platform and supporting hardware infrastructure.
The company will use this capital to support its ambitious pan-European expansion and to continue developing its Battery Energy Storage Systems. Currently active in Sweden and Denmark, Flower plans to extend operations to the DACH region, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium by 2025 and 2026.
John Diklev, Founder and CEO of Flower, commented: “2024 has already been a pivotal year in Flower’s growth, marked by our acquisition of Sweden’s largest battery park and the announcement of significant new partnerships. Completing our Series A round and bringing on board leading Swedish and European investors is a major milestone, not only for Flower’s journey but also in building the energy systems of tomorrow.”
P?r-Jorgen P?rson, General Partner at Northzone and a new member of Flower’s board, added “We’re very excited by the team’s pioneering approach to renewable energy challenges, combining cutting-edge AI-driven optimization and grid-level battery systems to transform Europe’s energy grid. We’ve never seen such a fast-moving company.”
Co-founder and Managing Partner at Giant Ventures?Cameron McLain said:? “Energy flexibility is essential to building a resilient energy grid. Flower has achieved impressive growth with its bold vertically-integrated approach, and we’re excited for what’s next.”
8. Tallinn-based Modash raises €11 million to help consumer brands scale creator partnerships
Modash , a creator partnerships platform that helps brands partner with content creators, has closed a €11 million Series A funding round . The round was led by henQ VC alongside returning investors from Modash’s pre-seed and seed rounds. The funds will be directed towards engineering and product improvements across the platform, including their global influencer payment solution and AI-enabled creator search. This round comes on the back of Modash’s success in partnering with the influencer marketing teams of top-tier brands like Birkenstock, Dbrand, Victoria’s Secret, and Farfetch.
The creator economy is currently worth $250 billion worldwide and on track to be a $480 billion industry by 2027—an enormous leap from its market valuation at $2 billion in 2016. Despite this, the available tools and services that connect brands with creators are often unnecessarily cumbersome, and fail to provide data detailed enough to actually drive partnership decisions. These platforms typically maintain comprehensive entries only on creators who regularly update their individual profiles, which makes for incomplete results at best.?
Modash takes a different approach. Its search engine, called Discovery, acts as a comprehensive overview of the creator economy. Marketing teams use it to search through 250 million content creators and influencers, no matter how niche, and view individual creators’ audience and content performance metrics. Brands aren’t required to onboard creators individually. Once a partnership begins, Modash provides features that manage outreach and communication, collect and store live influencer content, and measure creator performance and recommend similar creators. Their in-platform payments solution solves vendor management concerns like cross-border compliance, while ensuring creators get paid faster, easier and without surprise fees.?
Avery Schrader, Founder & CEO of Modash, said: “Modash has spent the last five years figuring out how to empower brands to scale their partnerships with creators. Nearly 2,000 consumer companies worldwide are growing their partnerships function using Modash. Those companies love us because we understand where the friction in the creator partnership process comes from, and our solutions just work. We’re excited to keep investing in new technologies that will permanently change how brands discover new partners, how deals are done and paid for, and how performance is measured. This round is also bringing us closer than ever to our North American customers, with a second office located just ten minutes away from Shopify HQ in Ottawa and a short flight from NYC, Boston, and major cities across the East Coast.”
Jan Andriessen, Partner at henQ, added: “Modash breaks the mold in terms of Series A investments. Its product is already market-leading globally, with a robust, data-backed search engine capable of mapping the global creator landscape and an end-to-end platform to unify the entire experience of doing creator partnerships, including a payment system. Its client base is already growing fast across all continents, and the creator economy shows no signs of slowing down. The founders were deeply involved in the creator economy for a long time, putting them ahead of the curve and allowing them to recognize its enormous potential. And so far with Modash, they’ve shown they have the energy, resilience and vision to realize that potential.”
Funds raised as part of this Series A will support multiple aspects of product development, especially the influencer payment solution and to further Modash’s AI-driven creator discovery. Additional funds will go towards building a customer-facing team in North America to better support users in those time zones. Goldman Sachs predicts that influencer-marketing spend in the U.S. alone will hit $5.89 billion this year , and with more than 500 customers in the U.S. already, it is an essential market for Modash.
More product developments are on the way, with a particular emphasis on serving B2C brands looking to make creator partnerships part of their brand DNA. Helping creators make a living and get paid for their work is as central to Modash’s mission as ever. Now, by providing the most comprehensive platform for managing social partnerships, helping consumer brands struggling to get their influencer marketing off the ground is too.
9. Seattle startup Read AI raises $50M to fuel ‘copilot everywhere’ vision for enterprise software
The Seattle startup, which sells enterprise productivity software tools fueled by generative AI, is adding 100,000 new accounts each week and has 75% of the Fortune 500 using its products. And it hasn’t spent a single dime on marketing.
The 3-year-old company announced a $50 million Series B round to accelerate growth — just six months after announcing a separate $21 million round.
“We’re growing faster than we ever thought we would,” said CEO David Shim .
New York-based Smash Capital , a new investor, led the round. Previous backers Goodwater and Madrona also invested.
Read launched in 2021 and initially positioned itself as a software tool to measure engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings, riding pandemic-driven adoption of tools such as Zoom. It later added meeting summarization tools.
But the company’s vision goes beyond just meetings. Read can now analyze emails and messaging threads, in addition to video calls — and suggests action items based on its analysis of information shared across communication channels.
The focus is on building a “copilot everywhere” that works across various platforms, said Shim.
For example, Read can take a meeting summary from a sales call on Zoom and push it into a CRM service such as HubSpot.
Or, it can add context to a Gmail or Outlook thread by surfacing related conversations from Slack or Microsoft Teams, and create drafts based on previous email threads or video meetings with a particular recipient.
Shim sees a path toward being able to offer customers predictive analytics based on the data it is analyzing, and automate how information is shared within an organization.
“We’re focusing on the ability to integrate with as many services as possible,” he said.
Shim said part of his company’s growth comes from individual users who try the product for free, find value in it, and then get their colleagues on board.
Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona, said Read’s traction reminds him of another enterprise software company that his venture capital firm backed.
“They are similar to Smartsheet in the early years as they acquired essentially all of these customers without having a sales rep and they are seeing strong evidence of ‘land and expand’ patterns with customers,” McIlwain said.
10. African ‘gender equal’ VC Janngo Capital closes second fund at $78M
African venture capital firm Janngo Capital has closed its second fund at €73 million (about $78 million), 20% more than its initial target of €60 million (about $63 million) .
The firm marked the first close of the fund at €34 million in 2022, roping in limited partners such as the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) and European Investment Bank (EIB).?
Both anchor investors also participated in the fund’s second close, Janngo Capital’s founder Fatoumata Ba told TechCrunch. They were joined by other institutional investors, three of which have an African mandate: the Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund, Tunisian fund of funds ANAVA, and the endowment fund of Ghana-based university Ashesi University. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) also invested.
Development finance institutions like the DFC and IFC have been instrumental in bolstering Africa’s startup ecosystem by investing in local funds that in turn support early- and growth-stage startups. Yet, local institutional investors remain reticent, so efforts by firms like Janngo to bring in local capital helps signal confidence to foreign investors.
“Africa represents 17% of the global population, yet attracts only 1%-2% of global VC funding, a share that has remained stagnant despite growth from $150 million raised a decade ago to around $4 billion-$5 billion today,” Ba said. “If we believe tech is critical to economic development in Africa, we should have proportional access to VC. That’s why our goal wasn’t just about hitting the target or achieving oversubscription — I wanted to attract private LPs, especially African LPs.”?
The firm stylizes itself as a “gender equal” investor and has so far lived up to its name. Startups founded or led by women — like Nigerian B2B e-commerce platform Sabi , which has a female CEO — make up 56% of Janngo Capital’s portfolio across both funds.
“Our thesis hasn’t changed. We’ve proven it with exits like Expensya , where we were the first VC on their cap table. Also, as a female-founded, female-led, and predominantly female-owned fund, we place high importance on investing in female entrepreneurs,” said Ba.