seed

On the internet, most news gets forgotten very quickly. Anything that sticks around for more than a few days does so with good reason, usually because it’s so incredibly weird. In the world of movies, an example of that is the rumored Avatar sequel titles that were first reported way back in 2018.Zillow Says You’ll Buy Your Next House With… AI? | AI UnlockedThat’s when the BBC reported to know the titles of James Cameron’s four sequels. First was part two, The Way of Water, which as we all know ended up being accurate.…

In 2014, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel infamously posed the distinction between companies that deal in “atoms” versus those that deal in “bits.” In its crudest terms, the former category includes businesses focused on things like hardware and manufacturing; the latter, software and financial services. Just shy of 10 years on, the distinction now strikes as quaint, if not downright irrelevant. Over the past five or so years, a new cohort of startups have emerged. In some ways, they resemble Silicon Valley of…

The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) on Monday announced the launch of a seed fund scheme for start-ups operating in the area of urban development and disaster management by using space technology. As part of the scheme, selected start-ups will receive seed funding for transforming an original idea into a prototype using space technology, ISRO facility support including Earth Observation (EO) data for validation of the concept, mentorship support, and access to data algorithm as transfer…

AI is everywhere, and predictably, sales teams are among the early adopters. So I wasn’t surprised to see Scalestack raise $1 million to help make sales teams’ lives easier. So, as we’ve done every week for the past 18 months or so (I can’t believe this is going to be the 75th pitch deck teardown!), we’re going to put the deck Scalestack used to raise its round under the proverbial microscope and see what it got right and where it could have done better. Let’s go! We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear…

University of Cambridge researchers have demonstrated how comets could deliver life’s molecular building blocks to planets in the galaxy, particularly in ‘peas in a pod’ systems where planets orbit closely together.Cambridge researchers propose that comets could transport life’s building blocks to other planets, especially in ‘peas in a pod’ systems. Their findings suggest that these molecules can survive on planets with closely orbiting neighbors, offering new insights into the search for extraterrestrial life.How did…

The startup investment climate has been somewhat grim of late. And despite ever-mounting evidence of approaching catastrophe, financing of climate tech has also suffered, with venture funding down 40% in H1 2023. However, there are some rays of hope shimmering on the horizon.  With less money available, it is perhaps understandable that investors (even the Earth-conscious kind) want to back founders with a proven track record. One such is Eamon Jubbawy.  Having co-founded successful AI-powered…

Driving financial inclusion through digital payment methods is among the top priorities for the governments of Africa’s biggest tech ecosystems where cash is still king. Several initiatives launched by these governments have increased the number of banked citizens in their respective countries. In Egypt, for instance, platforms like Fawry and InstaPay — tapped into the apex bank’s policies to reduce cash dependencies — are responsible for the spread of e-wallets and cards in the North African country where 64% of…

Venture funding has been declining since the first quarter of 2022. But that trend has largely spared the seed stage until now. Or has it? Apparently, Q2 was quite rough for seed deals, according to new data from PitchBook. Startups in the U.S. closed 766 seed deals in Q2, which was 26% less than the 1,044 deals they had in Q1. And that dip means the second quarter had the lowest number of seed deals we’ve seen since Q3 2016. If things don’t change, 2023 could be the slowest year for seed…

Gone are the days when you needed a developer to build an app for a relatively easy task. No-code and low-code development let you dramatically increase the speed of building and bringing simple (and, sometimes, not-so-simple) apps to market. I swear, half my life is being run by Zapier at the moment: Book a meeting with me, and all sorts of things happen automatically in the background to ensure that our meeting is on the right calendars, is transcribed and the video of the call is stored away and tagged with your…

While the world is fixated on the big launch of the Instagram-powered Threads platform, one of its rivals Bluesky has quietly had a big day as well. It announced its seed round funding. The Jack Dorsey-backed platform shared that it has raised a total of $8 million over the summer. Additionally, the company also announced its first paid service where it will offer custom domains to those who want a unique domain as their username on the platform.Making the announcement in a blog post, Bluesky stated, “We raised $8M in a…