Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-07-09
Tech industry funding trends, gaming growth, robot overlords, and unique VC firm connections.
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Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-07-09
Off the cuff analysis in a rapid fire format.
Let’s dig in…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Techmeme: A group of investors led by Vista Equity Partners has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Nasuni, valuing the hybrid cloud storage provider at ~$1.2B (Bloomberg)
From Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + ☁️ Granted, data storage might not seem that sexy but the amount of data being generated has been growing exponentially for a while and A.I. is hungry for data.
Techmeme: NFT and metaverse content creation startup Infinite Reality raised $350M at a $5.1B valuation and acquires Roblox game developer Landvault for $450M in stock (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
By Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 👾 Just because I was awful at most arcade games (okay, all arcade games) and my modest crypto assets are underwater doesn’t mean that a $300B+ gaming industry won’t keep growing like a weed.
Techmeme: Skild AI, which is developing a foundational model for robotics, raised a $300M Series A at a $1.5B valuation led by Lightspeed, SoftBank, Coatue, Jeff Bezos (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
By Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes. View the full context on Techmeme.
🦾 + 🤖 I for one welcome our soon to be vastly more skilled dexterous robot overlords.
Techmeme: Captions, which uses AI to let people create and edit videos, raised $60M led by Index Ventures at a $500M valuation, taking its total funding to $100M (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)
By Rachel Metz / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
📺 + 🤖 How many VC firms can claim to have an outsized portion of their LP that are also founding members of ‘30 Seconds to Mars’ in addition to participation in both the MCU and DCCU?
Techmeme: New York-based Hebbia, which uses AI to help companies sift through documents, raised $130M led by a16z, a source says at a ~$700M post-money valuation (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)
By Rachel Metz / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
🗄️ + 🤖 Yes, I totally read your memo…
[ furiously taps away at A.I. assistant which finds the memo that was most definitely not read and summarizes it with ELI5 TLDR model played back on the microLED display tucked away in my prescription AR glasses ]
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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