AI Juggernaut

OpenAI Rakes in $300 Million, Sound Ventures Raises $240 Million for AI Startups, and Venmoā€™s COO Starts New Early Stage VC.

Author

Adam from VC Brags
May 01, 2023

Welcome Shareholders,

In this daily edition of the Brags Newsletter, weā€™ll cover how top VCs are uniting to get a slice of OpenAIā€™s success. Also, Ashton Kutcherā€™s VC Closes its AI Fund, and Vera Equity Targets Fintech Startups With its Inaugural Raise.

So sit back, grab a snack, and enjoy!

Startup of the Day

  • OpenAI, the startup behind conversational AI-focused ChatGPT has just raised $300 million from prominent VCs at a valuation of $27 billion-$29 billion.

VC firms such as Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, Founders Fund, and K2 Global collectively invested nearly $300 million in the company, valuing it at $27-$29 billion (this is separate from the $10 billion investment from Microsoft in January).

OpenAI's technical teams work on various projects, with GPT, their family of large language models accessed via APIs, drawing significant attention recently. In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a generative AI service which has attracted over 1 billion visitors to its website in February. Besides ChatGPT, OpenAI also develops an AI-driven image-generation tool called Dall.E 2 and has built a speech recognition model called Whisper AI.

Whoā€™s Raising?

  • Los Angeles, California-based Sound Ventures has just raised $240 million for its first AI fund.

The fund aims to invest in foundational, category-defining AI businesses, with its current portfolio featuring the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and StabilityAI. Sound Ventures AI Fund will collaborate with Sound's early-stage funds for investments.

Sound Ventures highlights its team's proficiency in technology and entertainment, two industries that are vital to generative AI, emphasizing its strong position to invest in top AI startups. Managing over $1 billion in assets, Sound's previous investments include prominent companies such as Airbnb, Uber, Flexport, Brex, GitLab, Airtable, Affirm, Forethought, and You.com.

  • Vera Equity, a venture capital firm established by former Venmo COO Michael Vaughan and True Search executives, has secured $20 million for its inaugural fund.

Vaughan co-founded the firm with True Search's Co-Head of Financial Services, Jonathan Pomeranz, and co-CEOs Joe Riggione and Brad Stadler.

The fund will make investments of around $500,000 in pre-seed to seed-stage fintech startups and has already backed 20 businesses, such as StellarFi and Tandym, with about half the fund remaining for deployment. True Search, an executive talent firm, currently serves as the fund's anchor investor.

Fresh Finds

  • Canvas 2.0 connects to 150+ SaaS apps without code, including popular services like Stripe, Segment, Hubspot, Intercom, Quickbooks, Shopify, and Zendesk, as well as any database or warehouse.

  • The platform offers 50+ expert-made templates for common startup use cases, such as ARR/MRR, quick ratio, revenue retention, LTV, user retention, customer cohorts, runway, ad spend, and marketing attribution.

  • Users can create and customize dashboards and reports with various visualization options, global filters for easy exploration, and color themes to enhance chart appearance.

Memes and Other Things

The Headlines

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